NZ Speculative Fiction Blogging Week: SpecFic from Another Time

This week I'm looking forward to seeing posts from and about current New Zealand SpecFic authors, published and unpublished. But ever wonder about the early days? Fortunately not much wondering is needed, thanks to the New Zealand Electronic Text Centre. The NZETC is a "free online archive of New Zealand and Pacific Islands texts and heritage materials, offering an ever expanding, fully searchable, set of images and full-text books, manuscripts and journals". With a little digging, you can find some fascinating examples of 19th Century NZ Speculative Fiction, all available for free online. Here are some examples:

Anno Domini 2000 – A Woman's Destiny
Widely considered to be the first New Zealand Science Fiction novel, Anno Domini 2000 imagines a future where women's suffrage has been achieved, and women hold many positions of authority. The Sir Julius Vogel Awards are named after the author.

Hedged with Divinities
Hedged with Divinities is the story of a man who awakes after a spiritual experience to find all other men in the world have been killed by a mysterious plague. He sets about making this society of women into an ordered and smooth running commonwealth, only engages in polygamy for the good of society (he'd prefer monogamy, no, really he would), and populates the world with males once again. However, reading this biographical essay, I think we can at least say that writing science fiction was probably a much better fit for Tregear's... talents and ideas than any intellectual study.

Erewhon
Erewhon is a satirical novel, sometimes compared to Gulliver's Travels. The early chapters are based on based on the author's experiences as a sheep farmer in New Zealand (one of the country's largest stations is now named Erewhon in his honour). Particularly interesting is the section entitled 'The Book of the Machines', which started out as a series of articles in the Christchurch based newspaper 'The Press', and made him the first to consider the possibility that machines could gain consciousness through natural selection.

I'd recommend taking a look round the NZETC, because I've only scratched the surface here. One of the features I really like is that for many books you can both have the benefit of reading in a variety of formats, but also see some scans of pages from the original book.

(This post is part of NZ Speculative Fiction Blogging Week. Go here for more.)