K.J. Charles's Reviews > Terra Nullius

Striking SF fable set in Australia. We read about the grotesque cruelties inflicted on the indigenous population by colonisers who don't even see them as people, and it takes several chapters for it to emerge that (view spoiler)[ these colonisers are actual aliens, and the despised race is the whole human one.

It's a clever concept--it's quite disorienting realising that you were reading the point of view of invading aliens, rather than the English nuns and administrators who were, er, invading aliens. (hide spoiler)]Basically it's playing the whole rotten story out again on a larger scale--the genocide, the self-righteousness of the colonisers, the glimmers of realisation when a few of them start to understand what they've destroyed, the slightly creepy sincerity and wanting to belong of the the invader who switches sides. I'm not sure if I felt like that entirely worked on every level, in that (view spoiler)[the destruction of indigenous Australian culture and people becomes subsumed in the destruction of humanity in general. (hide spoiler)] But this is a book about having your world wiped out by contemptuous invaders, and maybe that should be generalised, if only so people can then re-apply that to the specific.

Vividly written and packs a powerful punch, though the dialogue is almost painfully spare.