As might have been expected, the sesquicentennial year yielded an exceptionally large crop of novels, the largest ever. Twenty-two novels were entered in the fiction section of the New Zealand Book Awards, and at least three other 'serious' novels should be considered in this survey. Again, as might have been expected, the novels are bewilderingly diverse, acting out the fragmentation of the society from which they sprang and which most of them depict. Neither the single country created by the puritan monoculture of the Provincial period and now rejected, nor the diverse but unified and harmonious bicultural society which has sometimes flickered as a Post-provincial dream, many 'countries' exist, rather, within that conceptual fiction, 'the New Zealand consciousness'. Present in that consciousness are other countries, geographical and cultural, especially those of Asia and the Pacific, with whom we interact politically and economically; other countries of the past (and, in one case, of the future); other countries within the here and now of sexual orientation, social class, race and culture, no longer invisible behind a Pakeha, male, heterosexual, middle-class norm; and, finally, the country of middle-class Pakeha society itself, uncertain, uncomfortably aware of all the others. My survey moves from those countries furthest out in space and time, through the psychologically and socially 'outside' countries to the the confused centre: from the planet Juniper of Wulfsyarn through the territories of fundamentalism and homosexuality of The Country of Salvation to the 'normal' Saxton of The Burning Boy. The Country of the Future: Wulfsyarn
