Aurealis #56 Award Winners

By Dirk Strasser (Editor)

Aurealis #56 is the second special Award Winners issue. Thoraiya Dyer's The ‘Fruit of the Pipal Tree’ won Best Fantasy Short Story. 'The Past is a Bridge Best Left Burnt', a raw autobiographical story, was joint winner in the Best Horror Short Story category. The author, Paul Haines, died in March this year after a battle with cancer, and didn't live to receive the Aurealis Award.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Chimaera Publications
• Release date: Oct 29, 2012
• ISBN: 9781922031105

Dirk Strasser (Editor)

Dirk Strasser has written over 30 books for major publishers in Australia and has been editing magazines and anthologies since 1990. He won a Ditmar for Best Professional Achievement and has been short-listed for the Aurealis and Ditmar Awards a number of times. His fantasy novels – including Zenith and Equinox – were originally published by Pan Macmillan in Australia and Heyne Verlag in Germany. His children’s horror/fantasy novel, Graffiti, was published by Scholastic. His short fiction has been translated into a number of languages, and his most recent publications are “The Jesus Particle” in Cosmos magazine, “Stories of the Sand” in Realms of Fantasy and “The Vigilant” in Fantasy magazine. He founded the Aurealis Awards and has co-published Aurealis magazine for over 20 years.

Book preview

AUREALIS #56

Australian Fantasy & Science Fiction

Edited by Dirk Strasser, Michael Pryor and Carissa Thorp

Published by Chimaera Publications at Smashwords

Copyright of this compilation Chimaera Publications 2012

Copyright on each story remains with the contributor.

EPUB version ISBN 978-1-922031-10-5

ISSN 2200-307X (electronic)

CHIMAERA PUBLICATIONS

Smashwords Edition License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of the authors, editors and artists.

Hard copy back issues of Aurealis can be obtained from the Aurealis website:

www.aurealis.com.au

Contents

From the Cloud – Dirk Strasser

Fruit of the Pipal Tree – Thoraiya Dyer

The Past is a Bridge Best Left Burnt – Paul Haines

Is this the Real Life? Is this Just Fantasy? – Crisetta MacLeod

Reviews

Carissa’s Weblog – Carissa Thorp

News

Next Issue

Credits

From the Cloud

Dirk Strasser

Welcome to the final Aurealis issue for 2012. We’ve made it. This was our first year of producing ten monthly issues, and we've done it. All on time. All with what we believe are high quality stories and illustrations. All with the most up-to-date reviews and news at the time of publication.

We've also managed to achieve one of our other aims, and that is faster turn-around times for evaluation of submitted stories. I know there have still been individual stories that took too long to evaluate—these were usually the ones that were close to being accepted but not quite close enough—but our average response time was under a month. Sometimes turnaround was a matter of days. In fact, we were so fast that we occasionally had comments from writers suggesting we hadn't read their stories. I can assure all those of you thinking of submitting to Aurealis in 2013 that all stories are read carefully by at least two Readers (and up to six Readers if you're close to being published). The reason we're so fast in evaluating stories is because of the large team of Readers we have in place and the systems used by our Submissions Manager. So if you've just finished that masterpiece short story, and you've checked that it meets our guidelines, then give us first go at looking at it. Given the number of stories sent to us, we obviously can't guarantee we're going to accept it, but chances are it won't sit with us languishing too long without a response. And if we are foolish enough to reject your story, at least you will quickly be able to send it on to another publication.

Note the Aurealis offices close in December and January and we don't accept submissions during this time. Please don't send us anything in these two months. The stories will disappear into the ether. So you have until the end of November to get your stories in to us.

This issue is our second special Award Winners issue. The ‘Fruit of the Pipal Tree’ by Thoraiya Dyer won the Best Fantasy Short Story this year. It was originally published in After the Rain (FableCroft Publishing), edited by Tehani Wessely. The second story in this issue was joint winner in Best Horror Short Story category, ‘The Past is a Bridge Best Left Burnt’ by Paul Haines, from The Last Days of Kali Yuga (Brimstone Press). The version in this issue is the one edited by Talie Helene and is the same as the one which appears in The Year's Best Australian Fantasy & Horror Volume 3. This is a special story in many ways. Paul Haines died in March this year after a battle with cancer, and he didn't live to receive the Aurealis Award. A sad loss to the Australian SF community. We reprint this raw autobiographical story with the consent of his wife, Jules.

On a lighter note, the big news for next year is that we are setting up a new subscription system, so you will once again be able to subscribe to Aurealis. You will now be able to purchase a 2013 subscription of 10 issues (Aurealis #57–#66) for $19.99. This is a 33% saving on the cost of buying each issue singly. How can you possibly resist subscribing?

We’ve also launched our campaign to be officially recognised as a professional market by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA). We’ve calculated that if we can get 1000 subscribers by the end of 2013, we will be able to increase our payment for short stories to a minimum of 5 cents a word. This will mean Aurealis has met all the conditions to be viewed as a professional market by the SFWA. If it can achieve this, Aurealis will be the only Australian fiction magazine with this status. See our website for more details.

Here's to exploring even more worlds in 2013.

All the best from the cloud.

Back to Contents

The Fruit of the Pipal Tree

Thoraiya Dyer

Illustration by John Banitsiotis

The Fruit of the Pipal Tree

Thoraiya Dyer

The end of the monsoon came quietly, with the absence of rain on the windows.

Sauman Kao, lulled by the squeal of the single ineffectual wiper, came out of her reverie. She sat up in her seat and looked around to see where they were.

There was time to register the snoring, bobbing heads of her Nepalese guide, Uddab, and the young Indian backpacker who was the only other passenger on the bus, right before the nonchalantly chewing shape of the cow loomed in the front windscreen.

It was bony like a white tent collapsed over its poles. Mud covered its legs. Both Uddab and the backpacker came awake instantly as the bus slammed into it. The bus swung onto the verge and came to a halt. Sauman glimpsed the trembling shape labouring for breath in the long grass, even as the driver ran towards it on spindly brown legs. Uddab strained forward in his seat, seemingly appalled by the sight of the dying beast. A police motorcycle crawled to a stop slightly ahead of the bus, and the officer made his way over to the distraught bus driver.

‘This is bad,’