In his much-awarded 2023 story collection Firelight, John Morrissey, a Melbourne writer of Kalkadoon descent, used the tropes of speculative fiction to examine colonial Australia. He returns to similar terrain in his debut novel, Bird Deity, a bleak science-fiction tale of extraction, settlement, loss and sacrifice.
David is a “scout” on a foreign planet. He’s been here for 10 years, searching for valuable artefacts and making his fortune. But his work has a brutal catch – the objects he’s seeking are worn by a native humanoid species, “parasapes”, who inhabit the wild and mysterious plateau above the colonial town. Collecting them requires tearing them off the reluctant bodies of the wearers, harming or killing them in the process.
Fortunately for David’s conscience, the parasapes “don’t even realise that they’re alive” – or so he believes. As he tells a visiting anthropologist, “They don’t even have a language. They don’t make plans for the future. Nothing.”
And yet, the parasapes’ highly advanced artefacts have great value to the colonists – indeed, they seem to be the reason for the settlement’s existence.
The colony is a desolate environment of logging trucks, piles of disintegrating garbage and “hovels built of plastic and wood”; it’s not unlike real-life mining sites and plantation landscapes. The town centres on a government compound of military barracks and offices, surrounded by a fence at which people “stranded in the colony” gather daily, hoping to be granted passage back to their home world.
There is a darkly satirical edge to Bird Deity that recalls writers like Magnus Mills. People do and say awful things with little self-reflection, and even fewer repercussions. Violence and brutality are described with an ominous bureaucratic coolness. Although the colonisers see the parasapes as being without culture, language or materials, it’s clear that they themselves live in a state of profound lack.
Workers arrive in the colony on five-year contracts, but many stay longer, tied to the dream of riches. Few of them make lives for themselves. This is temporary, not their real life. Violence is work, not who they really are. Or so they seem to believe.
But Tom and Eliza, a couple, are different. They want a family. Tom is a scout, too – David’s mentor, he’s been doing this work for 20 years. Eliza, a botanist, has a child. But is it Tom’s, or David’s?
When anthropologist Sarah arrives on-world, she brings a new energy and direction to David’s life. She’s been sent on a mission by a trillionaire sponsor to study the parasapes, and have them declared as a “protected non-human species”. David is enlisted as her guide.
As David and Sarah journey up to the plateau, their interactions with the parasapes become increasingly profound. When David encounters a strange entity, his understanding of both the parasapes and his own life are transformed. The structures that have shaped his life lose their coherence; the violence he has normalised becomes simultaneously meaningless and all-consuming. Morrissey is at his best in his exploration of a psychic and sacred reality that resists comprehension.
Part of the novel’s project is to show the total alienation that colonisation produces, not only of people from land, but also of people from each other. David’s lover Eliza is “fey and untouchable”, her bed “cold and empty, even when they were both lying in it”. Even the child that he believes is his appears alien to him – “like a pupa”. He struggles to remember her name.
There’s a question here: what are these riches for? None of the men in the colony have families, connections or even friends. Their lives are ruled by violence and a never-ending quest for wealth. Eliza longs to escape the settlement. She wants to bring her child home to safety. As men fight over riches and relics, women become symbols of new life.
With these details, Morrissey successfully paints a picture of a fragmented society. Yet this commitment to alienation is so sustained that it is sometimes difficult to sink deeply into David’s world.
I wanted to love this book. Bird Deity joins a long tradition of science fiction as political commentary, using the cosmic distance of another world to illuminate our own. Morrissey makes good use of genre tropes – an intergalactic empire, an anthropologist here to study aliens, problems of interspecies communication. But his characters lack psychological depth. In particular, Eliza’s story feels underdeveloped, her inner life too often making way for symbolic function. As a result, the relationships between the novel’s central characters sometimes feel frustratingly shallow.
Still, Bird Deity is an original novel that rewards close reading. Its exploration of an immense and incomprehensible force that is simultaneously life-giving and life-destroying is particularly compelling. And within his grim portrait of the colonial project, which destroys even its own people, Morrissey offers glimpses of hope that somewhere in the universe, there might still be room for personal and social transformation.
Bird Deity by John Morrissey is out through Text ($34.99)
