The Valley of Unlikely Acquaintances by Terri Te Tau
The Valley of Unlikely Acquaintances is an inventive and deeply grounded debut novel from Terri Te Tau that brings speculative fiction into conversation with whakapapa, ecological restoration and the long memory of land. Set in a future Wairarapa, the novel follows Tīria, a scientist at the whānau-led Kōpuaranga Research Centre, whose controversial work has transformed the valley’s reforestation efforts. Genetically edited cats in the ngahere are only one of the ideas unsettling those around her.
When human remains are found in a nearby cave, speculation spreads through the community, drawing Tīria and her best friend Lydia into histories that reach back to the nineteenth century and forward into questions of science, belonging and responsibility.
The pleasure of the novel lies partly in its refusal to treat science fiction as an imported form. Te Tau’s future is not a chrome-plated elsewhere, but a continuation of this whenua, carrying its wounds, obligations and possibilities. De-extinction, artificial intelligence, data sovereignty and genetic intervention sit alongside whakapapa books, oral histories, whānau politics and the memory of forests cleared into farmland. The result is a novel in which technology does not supersede ancestral knowledge. Different systems of knowledge meet, test and illuminate one another.
This is particularly evident in Te Tau’s treatment of time. A conventional description might call the book time travel, but that term feels too narrow for the conceptual work being done. The novel draws on a circular understanding of time, where past, present and future are not sealed compartments but related presences. Te Tau uses this structure to ask what responsibilities the future owes the past, and what the past might recognise, mourn or challenge in the descendants who come after.
Tīria is a fascinatingly unruly protagonist: brilliant, impulsive, funny and not always wise. Her confidence gives the book energy, while her mistakes prevent the novel’s ecological and scientific vision from becoming too clean. Lydia, left to manage the social and emotional consequences of Tīria’s experiments, brings a steadier counterweight. Their friendship gives the novel its human scale, grounding large ideas in affection, irritation, loyalty and the ordinary labour of holding a hapori together.
Te Tau’s prose has wit and bite, moving easily between intellectual play, political tension and moments of lyrical attention to the natural world. The book is ambitious, and occasionally that ambition makes the early movement dense. Readers may need time to settle into its terms, timelines and scientific provocations. Yet the density is rarely empty. It reflects a novel full of thinking, one that trusts readers to make connections across ecology, colonisation, kinship and futurity.
What makes The Valley of Unlikely Acquaintances so compelling is the bicultural and kaupapa Māori foundation beneath its imagination. The novel does not throw in Māori content to speculative fiction to tick a box. It reshapes the genre’s assumptions about progress, intelligence and survival. Restoration here is not nostalgia. It is scientific, political, relational and spiritual work.
This is a bold and original debut, alive with humour, urgency and intellectual force. Te Tau has written a novel about forests and futures, but also about how communities decide what must be protected, what can be risked and whose knowledge is allowed to lead.
Reviewer: Chris Reed
Spoor
