Two of Australia’s leading fantasy writers, Isobelle Carmody and Garth Nix have made Canberra the location in their latest books, writes COLIN STEELE.

Isobelle Carmody is the internationally bestselling and award-winning author of the Obernewtyn Chronicles, while Garth Nix, whose books have sold more than seven million copies worldwide, has also won many awards including for his Old Kingdom fantasy series.

Carmody’s Comes the Night (Allan and Unwin, $24.99) is marketed as a young adult novel, but there is much in the narrative that will appeal to an older readership.

Carmody, who knows Canberra well from her daughter’s time at the ANU, and also when she was the 2017 ACT writer in residence at Gorman House, references numerous Canberra landmarks such as West Block, the War Memorial and the National Gallery in the novel.

Set in a future Australia, Canberra is a domed city, like many others in the world, in order to protect the populace from extreme climate change including destructive storms and solar radiation. Life is carefully controlled by the authorities through surveillance drones and CCTV, and the control of information. Pregnant women are encouraged to take the XD serum to enhance children’s intelligence and thus education paths.

Carmody’s main character, 16-year-old Will, lives with his father in Fyshwick, which has been “rezoned as residential when refugees from the drowning coastal cities began to move inland”. His high-profile mother, living in Sydney and separated from his father, wants to lure him to Sydney, for a predetermined career path. Will is reluctant, grieving the death of a mentoring uncle, who, we learn, was much more than he seemed.

Will has the ability to “dream walk”, which takes him into a mysterious alternate dimension, but what he finds there are the Despoilers, who “seek control of the dreamscape because it enables control of the working world”. Will’s best friend Ender has a brilliant but unstable, high-level XD, twin sister Magda, whom the Despoilers are desperately keen to capture to synchronise with an XD machine and increase their power in both worlds.

In the end, it is Will’s determination to save his friends that will prevail over the despoilers and government authoritarianism. As Carmody has said: “I think what leads Will, and all of us, outside of our comfort zone is not for our own selves. It’s out of love, love for other people” .

GARTH Nix takes the reader back in time to an alternate version of Canberra in 1975 in his new middle-grade children’s book We Do Not Welcome Our Ten-year-Old Overlord (Allen and Unwin, $17.99). Nix draws heavily on his own childhood experience in playing Dungeons & Dragons. Maps and notes from Garth’s Dungeons & Dragons games are included at the back of the book.

In the novel, Kim, who loves playing Dungeons & Dragons, resents living in the shadow of his allegedly smarter younger sister Eila. When Eila finds a mysterious orb object in the lake, a.k.a. Burley Griffin, who is named Aster, and begins to commune with it, Kim is even more worried because of Aster’s increasing power, which it also imparting telepathically to Eila, who show signs of becoming a 10-year-old overlord!

Aster, now disguised as a basketball begins extending its power, experimenting on controlling the weather, killing ants, guinea pigs, and a kangaroo, while humans in the family circle, who resist, receive electric shocks. Eila eventually realises that Aster’s power needs to be curbed but can she, Kim and their two young friends be able to stop what is now clearly an alien threat to the world. 

Nix’s characterisation of the children is excellent as well his reflection of tropes of the time. Nix cleverly mixes humour, danger and a strong sense of 1970s Canberra nostalgia, before an ending that has echoes of a famous 1960’s Star Trek episode.