John Morrissey’s debut collection of short stories is a beguiling, evocative delight. In it, he presents a series of visions that meld the absurd and mundane: a mysterious commonwealth celebrating their colonisation of the moon, the fraught efforts of a veterinary team trying to reconstruct a thylacine, and the gothic tale of a First Nations warrior seeking revenge on the white colonial explorer who murdered him.

Many of the tales seem to exist in a world both rigorously contained by and freely abstracted from realist conceptions of time and nature. Images of ancient spirituality and figures like the green man are untraditionally positioned right next to contexts of space travel and genetic modification, with startlingly effective results. Morrissey, who is of Kalkadoon descent, may be familiar to some readers, having been previously published in the Australian First Nations speculative fiction anthology This All Come Back Now early last year. While not all the stories in this new collection can be clearly classified as sci-fi, he has clear control over the genre’s motifs, and the imaginative and destabilising qualities of his individual take on them are shaping up to become a formidable trademark of his style.

Indeed, I would be happy to recommend this collection to any curious reader – regardless of their usual position as a speculative fiction lover or hater. There’s something about his confident, conversational writing style that allows Morrissey to encase very abnormal events in everyday settings in a way that feels completely believable – and to tackle some themes that might not be as far from reality as you think.