Aurealis #74

By Dirk Strasser (Editor)

Aurealis #74 features Imogen Cassidy’s ‘Soul Partner’, an urban fantasy gumshoe pastiche with some original touches, and Leife Shallcross’ creepy and engrossing ‘Music for an Ivory Violin’. Chris Large brings some thoughtful silliness to the issue with his ‘When a Jedi Should Think Twice About Bringing a Knife to a Gunfight’, Stephen Higgins continues SF’s Sacred Cows by looking at Asimov’s Foundation, and our reviewers cast judgement on a number of works.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Chimaera Publications
• Release date: Sep 2, 2014
• ISBN: 9781922031303

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 #74

Australian Fantasy & Science Fiction

Edited by Dirk Strasser

Published by Chimaera Publications at Smashwords

Copyright of this compilation Chimaera Publications 2014

Copyright on each story remains with the contributor.

EPUB version ISBN 978-1-922031-30-3

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

Soul Partner—Imogen Cassidy

Music for an Ivory Violin—Leife Shallcross

From the Archives: SF's Sacred Cows—Stephen Higgins

When a Jedi Should Think Twice About Bringing a Knife to a Gunfight—Chris Large

Reviews

Next Issue

Credits

From the Cloud

Dirk Strasser

What makes a work of fiction good? It’s a simple question that doesn’t have a simple answer.

During my years as co-editor and co-publisher of Aurealis—Australian Fantasy & Science Fiction magazine, I've been involved in countless decisions on whether or not a short story was good enough to be published by us. In recent editorials in the magazine, Michael Pryor has outlined some of the things we’ve learned over nearly twenty-five years of selecting stories for publication. In Aurealis #71 he listed things we don't want to see. The first three points were:

• If you don’t read in the genre, you’re unlikely to create an original, refreshing genre story.

• One idea is rarely enough to sustain a story.

• Many stories would be far better off if they were a third shorter.

These are things that you can grasp hold of and do something about. It’s clear what to do: read extensively in the genre, get at least a second idea into your story, and cut your story by a third.

In the Aurealis #72 editorial Michael shared some of the positive things we look for, the aspects of fantasy and science fiction writing that charm us and are likely to get the nod for inclusion in Aurealis. The start of the 10-point list is:

Good writing. By this, we mean more than a simple facility with written English. Even though this is important, it should be a given, a basic expectation of any submission. Rather, we enjoy apposite language, sentences with flexibility and rhythm, dialogue that is alive with character and intonation, complexity of construction and stark simplicity used in the right times and places.

Michael’s done a good job here, but it’s obviously much easier to be concrete about what you don’t want than it is about what you do want. How exactly do you get rhythm into your sentences? How do you get your dialogue to come to life? When precisely is the right time and place for stark simplicity? These are not easy questions to answer.

A while ago Hugh Howey, best-selling author of Wool, said this as a part of an article analysing author earnings:

Consider the three rough possibilities for an unpublished work of genre fiction:

The first possibility is that the work isn’t good. The author cannot know this with any certainty, and neither can an editor, agent, or spouse. Only the readers as a great collective truly know…

The second possibility for a manuscript is that it’s merely average. An average manuscript might get lucky and find an agent. It might get lucky a second time and fall into the lap of the right editor at the right publishing house. But probably not. Most average manuscripts don’t get published at all. Those that do sit spine-out on dwindling bookstore shelves for a few months and are then returned to the publisher and go out of print…

The third and final possibility is that the manuscript in question is great. A home run. The kind of story that goes viral… when recognised by publishing experts (which is far from a guarantee), these manuscripts are snapped up by agents and go to auction with publishers. They command six- and seven-figure advances. The works are heavily promoted, and if the author is one in a million, they make a career out of their craft and go on to publish a dozen or more bestselling novels in their lifetime.

Hugh Howey is actually making a number of points about self-publishing in this lengthy article (and that’s a fascinating discussion for another day), but what struck me was how easily he categorised works of fiction into ‘not good’, ‘average’ and ‘great’ as if these were easily verifiable categories. His assumption was that no individual on their own (regardless of how well-read