Genetic Drift

BACKGROUND This short story explores how fictional point of view may be used to show a sentry – and the civilisation he represents – through other eyes. The first-person plural is mapped onto non-human ocean. This research, in the field of creative writing at the intersection of speculative fiction and climate fiction, calls upon the cosmic horror tradition to suggest a sentient sea. CONTRIBUTION In recent award-winning speculative fiction Laura Jean McKay uses the idea of a zonotopic virus to represent non-human subjectivity in literature. She uses unique formatting (point size and font style) to communicate animal voices and radically disrupt the reading experience. Inspired by history’s inconsistent text conventions, I use spaced colons and line breaks to interrupt the sense of sentences. Recent writers project rising sea levels, from Briohny Doyle to Lucy Treloar; what if this event was not a coming catastrophe but a scene from history? Imagining this scenario as a past invasion provides writer and readers with an opportunity to re-imagine our relationship with country. Literacy is a power structure, granting the ocean subjectivity denies the supremacy of human experience. My research exposes and challenges ‘naturalised’ hierarchies. SIGNIFICANCE This project arose from field research at Fort Nepean, where the first shot of WWI was fired into the ocean, and a creative response to random chance in evolutionary biology. Accepted by Antipodes, journal of the American Association of Australasian Literary Studies (published luminaries as Chris Wallace-Crabb and Rachel Robertson), it was described by editor Professor Brenda Machosky as ‘a beautiful story that leaves the reader to consider the power of nature, of time, and of pronouns.’ The significance for contemporary fiction is the way in which it gives a voice to the more than (as well as merely) human. It is key in my extended exploration of the role random survival plays in the loss of variation in populations.