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George Turner
Died on Sunday 8 June 1997, of a stroke, aged 80 |
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George Turner
Died on Sunday 8 June 1997, of a stroke, aged 80 |
by Judith Raphael Buckrich
George Turner was born in Melbourne in 1916, but spent the first six years of his life in the gold mining city of Kalgoorlie in Western Austrealia at the height of its boom. He had a strange and complex life, and from the 1960s was possibly the greatest influence on Australian science fiction as a critic, essayist and writer. The great love of his life was science fiction. Like all great loves it was full of contradictions and marked by periods of neglect, partial attention and total passion.
His love of science fiction began when his father read and re-read Alice in Wonderland to him at the age of three. Some cousins remember him as being able to recite whole passages of it of by heart. When he was eight or nine, he started visiting one of his aunt’s houses and there found the works of HG Wells and Jules Verne. After that there was no stopping young George who started to buy copies of Amazing Stories as soon as they arrived from the US at the newsagent's opposite St. Paul’s Cathedral in Swanston Street, where he was a not so angelic choir boy. He was addicted to these, and would often take the risk of stealing money from wealthier relatives to buy them.
Although he was already writing from the time he was ten - or perhaps even younger - he did not send anything away to a publisher till he was over 40. This was a novel called Young Man of Talent and it was immediately accepted by Cassell in London and published in 1959. It was a sort of war novel.
He wrote six mainstream novels between 1959 and 1968. For one of these, The Cupboard Under the Stairs, he received a joint Miles Franklin Prize. His last mainstream novel was the much under-rated Transit of Cassidy which he finished in 1968 or 1969, but which was not published till 1978, just after his first science fiction novel, Beloved Son.
In 1967 George Turner had met John Bangsund who was publishing Australian Science Fiction Review. Turner began to write for it immediately. Among his first contributions was an article called "The Double Standard" in the June 1967 edition of Australian Science Fiction Review. And with little experience at criticism he confidently took the reviewers of science fiction who wrote for the fanzines to task about the quality of their reviewing.
Beloved Son was a success. It was doubly delightful that Transit of Cassidy was finally published, by Nelson, at almost the same time. Cassidy had come second as an entry for the Alan Marshall Award in 1977, and Thomas Nelson who financed the award decided not to publish the winner, but rather to publish Transit of Cassidy.
The next book, Vaneglory, was set mostly in Glasgow. It was about a group of beings who looked exactly like humans, but who were in fact genetically able to live forever. It was set in an apocalyptic world in the near future (as are many of Turner’s works), which was slowly dying from destruction of the biosphere and from radio-active dusting being used as a weapon of war.
The third of this loose trilogy, Yesterday’s Men (Faber and Faber, London 1983) is a strange book set in the future in Niugini. I say strange, because in some ways it harks back to his first novel A Young Man of Talent, and not only because the two books share the setting of the jungles of that extraordinary country, but because both novels are also about soldiers and war. Turner has often said to me that war is really the place where men grow up, that he believes that war, for men, is to some degree like childbirth for women. Vaneglory (Faber and Faber 1981) and Yesterday’s Men (Faber and Faber 1993) were building in the detail of the fictional world that Turner more or less stuck to from Beloved Son onwards.
His next book was the autobiographical In the Heart or in the Head (Norstrilia Press 1984). It combined a parallel life of George Turner and life of science fiction, and is a gem as an overview of the latter, but hides more than it reveals about Turner himself.
Then The Sea and Summer came out in 1987. It won the Arthur C Clarke Prize and the Commonwealth Literary Prize for the South East Asian Region. The book tackles so many issues that it’s hard to write a summary. Here are just some of them — overpopulation, the greenhouse effect, political corruption and poverty. It is set in the far future with a few sharply different characters looking back at a near future in Melbourne. It is this near future that really takes up the bulk of the book. The story is about a family in crisis, except that the crisis is permanent and a symptom of the crisis the world is having. Turner’s vision of Melbourne is gripping, especially to readers familiar with the geographical areas he is describing, and this strange picture of the familiar altered only slightly is more startling than any alien world full of strange creatures, and much more disturbing.
Each of his books in turn seemed to be more exciting and more human. And Turner himself was throughout this time involved not only in the science fiction scene, as a critic, and very often as the father figure who young writers would send their manuscripts to, but now gave lectures on science and the future to conferences and groups outside science fiction circles, indeed outside writing circles.
Brainchild (AvoNova, New York, 1991), The Destiny Makers (AvoNova, New York, 1993) and Genetic Soldier (AvoNova, New York, 1994) were Turner’s most recent books and all contributed greatly to the science fiction of ideas and ethics which continues to play such an important role in literature and cultural debate.
Turner contributed greatly to Australian literature. His point of view
was totally individual; he wrote with a purpose. He wrotes because he cared.
His big picture was always the world we were creating, and the small one
the struggle of the individual to deal with it, and his or her ultimate
loneliness in this struggle, despite, or often because of those who share
it. And to us, his readers, he gave the gift of the future or really the
gift of the present. It is a simple truth that none of us can ever know
the future, but understanding the present might help us to a better world.
Bibliography
Young Man of Talent: Cassell, London, 1959; Simon and Schuster,
New York (as Scobie, 1959)
A Stranger and Afraid: Cassell, London 1961
The Cupboard under the Stairs: Cassell, London 1962
A Waste of Shame: Cassell, Aust, 1965
The Lame Dog Man: Cassell, Aust, 1967
Transit of Cassidy: Nelson Aust, 1978
Beloved Son: Faber and Faber, London, 1978
Vaneglory: Faber and Faber, London, 1981
Yesterday’s Men: Faber and Faber, London, 1983
In the Heart or in the Head: Norstrilia Press, Melbourne, 1984
The Sea and Summer: Faber and Faber, London, 1987
Brainchild: AvoNova, New York, 1991
The Destiny Makers: AvoNova, New York, 1993
Genetic Soldier: AvoNova, New York, 1994
© Copyright 1997 Judith Buckrich. Our guest of honour George Turner
died on 8 June 1997. He will be greatly missed.
Transworld Publishers (Sydney) have recently instituted the George Turner Prize, to be awarded to the best unpublished Australian science/fiction fantasy novel each year. For 1998, they have narrowed the contenders down to the following shortlist:
George was also well known for his fanzine appearances, with many critical articles to his credit. Not surprisingly, his work appeared often in SF Commentary, a fanzine produced by our Guest of Honour, Bruce Gillespie.
Judith Buckrich has kindly provided additional material, extracted from an article she produced on George Turner.
There is a page on George Turner, produced by Aussiecon Three treasurer Perry Middlemiss, at http://ncc1701.apana.org.au/~larrikin/lit/authors/turnerg.html. There is also a web page commemorating his life and work, maintained by Melbourne fans.
The following website also has more information about George Turner and his work: