Whakataukī Among the Stars: Volume II

Whakataukī Among the Stars: Volume II

 Some stories begin with a bang.

Others begin with a murmur, a crack in the wall, a warning light nobody has quite got round to fixing, and a machine cheerfully insisting that everything remains well within acceptable parameters while smoke curls out of something expensive.

Today, I’m delighted to launch Volume II of Whakataukī Among the Stars.

Like every book in the series, it can be read as part of the numbered collection or enjoyed entirely on its own as a standalone volume. Each book belongs to the larger series, but each also opens its own door.

Which is only fair, really. The universe has never shown much interest in waiting until people are emotionally prepared.

This second collection brings together 16 science-fiction stories shaped by Māori whakataukī, each one presented with its translation and meaning. But these are not included as decoration, nor as a pleasant bit of embroidery pinned to the edge of the page where nobody has to think too hard about it. They are here to do what old wisdom has always done best: unsettle, illuminate, prod the conscience, and occasionally stand in the doorway of a story with folded arms as if to say, Really? That’s your plan, is it?

As it happens, that makes them perfectly suited to science fiction.

Because science fiction has always been wonderfully good at giving us futures full of marvels and terrors, magnificent machinery and deeply suspect decision-making. It gives us worlds remade, stars crossed, systems strained to breaking point, and people blundering forward with all the grace of a shopping trolley missing one wheel. It imagines what we might build, what we might break, and what we might become when the lights flicker and the old certainties fail.

But whakataukī ask something older, sterner, and far more personal.

They ask who we are when no one is keeping score properly.

They ask what our choices cost.

They ask what we owe one another.

They ask whether wisdom is something we carry, or merely something we admire from a distance while doing the exact opposite.

Which, in fairness, is a very human habit.

If Volume I was shaped by pressure — ash in the sky, failing stations, survival with its sleeves rolled up — then Volume II goes deeper into the bones of things. These stories are interested not only in whether people endure, but in what endurance leaves behind: the marks hardship makes, the tenderness that survives despite everything, the damage people pass on without meaning to, and the damage they pass on because, deep down, they have mistaken being hurt for being right.

Cheerful stuff, naturally. But true stuff too.

Across these stories, readers will find strange worlds and difficult weather, hard roads and failing systems, silences full of meaning, choices made too late, choices made just in time, and the long shadow cast by pride, love, fear, duty, grief, and hope. There are people trying to hold communities together with ingenuity, stubbornness, and whatever bits of wire or faith happen to be left to hand. There are minds under strain, hearts under pressure, and the occasional piece of technology behaving with the sort of confidence usually found in minor officials who have misplaced both the form and the point of the form.

As ever, the future is crowded with wonders.

It is also, regrettably, still full of procedures.

What I love most about this volume is that, for all its distant settings, hazards, machinery, and stars, it remains interested in the oldest things: mercy, responsibility, restraint, courage, the quiet decision to keep going, and the harder decision to stay kind. It is interested in the moment a person realises that survival without humanity is merely a tidier form of loss.

These stories are not about polished heroes striding nobly through catastrophe with dramatic lighting and an orchestral score trailing behind them like loyal geese. They are about people. Tired people. Hopeful people. Frightened people. Stubborn people. People who make mistakes, sometimes splendid ones. People who fail one another and try, awkwardly and imperfectly, to do better. People who discover that character is not forged in grand speeches, but in small moments — in whether a hand is offered, whether the truth is told, whether the cycle is broken, whether compassion is chosen when cruelty would be easier and, let’s be honest, occasionally more satisfying in the short term.

But only in the short term.

That is where the whakataukī do their quiet work.

They become more than a beginning. More than a frame. They become the deep current beneath each story, the old voice beneath the noise, the thing that reminds us that wisdom does not lose its edge simply because the setting has changed. A truth carried across oceans does not become less true in orbit. A lesson learned under one sky still matters under another. Human beings may wrap themselves in cleverness, cloak themselves in technology, and travel immense distances to avoid facing their own nature, but old wisdom has a way of arriving first and waiting patiently by the door.

Volume II holds all of that: danger, sorrow, wonder, absurdity, tenderness, and the peculiar comedy of people continuing to be people no matter how advanced the equipment becomes. There is humour here because there must be. Not to soften the stakes, but to tell the truth about them. People joke in the dark. They laugh in the middle of disaster. They say ridiculous things at the edge of the unbearable because sometimes that is how the soul keeps its footing. The grin, the wry remark, the badly timed observation, the muttered complaint about a machine with ideas above its station — these are not interruptions to seriousness.

They are part of survival.

So this second volume continues the journey: old wisdom carried into new worlds, not as relic, but as living fire. These stories are sharp, strange, humane, and deeply interested in consequence. They know the future will be messy. They know progress will continue to arrive hand in hand with error, ambition, vanity, and the occasional truly catastrophic misunderstanding. But they also know that kindness endures. That courage can be quiet. That humour can be holy in its way. And that even beneath alien stars, with the machinery rattling and the odds looking smug, people may still choose to be more than the worst thing pressing upon them.

Which is lucky.

Because the machinery, on the whole, cannot be trusted to manage that on our behalf.

— Rebecca