Aurealis #86

By Dirk Strasser (Editor)

In the last Aurealis issue for 2015, Australia’s premier fantasy and science fiction magazine goes out with a bang. Looking for some holiday period reading? Check out the Aurealis 2015 speculative fiction recommended reading list. Aurealis #86 features Janet Haigh’s moody and atmospheric “Potkin” and Lachlan Huddy’s comic seafaring science-fantasy “Adrift on the Smoky Sea”. Dirk Strasser talks time travel, the Eye of Sauron and the Dow Jones index. Daniel Thompson explores Automation Hacking and Virtual Imprisonment in “Five Future Types of Crime”. Chris Large interviews Hugo, Nebula and Arthur C Clarke Award-winning author Ann Leckie. And another unsung hero from the Secret History of Australia is uncovered by the painstaking research of Stephen Higgins. To top it all off, the intrepid Aurealis reviews team looks at the recent publications by S L Grey, Jim Butcher, Anna Tambour, C S Sealey and Keri Arthur.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Chimaera Publications
• Release date: Nov 13, 2015
• ISBN: 9781922031426

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 #86

Australian Fantasy & Science Fiction

Edited by Dirk Strasser

Published by Chimaera Publications at Smashwords

Copyright of this compilation Chimaera Publications 2015

Copyright on each story remains with the contributor.

EPUB version ISBN 978-1-922031-42-6

ISSN 2200-307X (electronic)

CHIMAERA PUBLICATIONS

Smashwords Edition License Notes

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Hard copy back issues of Aurealis can be obtained from the Aurealis website: www.aurealis.com.au

Contents

From the Cloud—Dirk Strasser

Potkin—Janet Haigh

Adrift on the Smoky Sea—Lachlan Huddy

An Interview with Ann Leckie—Chris Large

Secret History of Australia—Hughie McBain—Researched by Stephen Higgins

Five Future Types of Crime—Daniel Thompson

Reviews

Aurealis Recommended Reading 2015—Aurealis Reviewers

Next Issue

Credits

From the Cloud

Dirk Strasser

A few years ago, one of the major banks in Australia ran a series of advertisements that featured time travel. It involved a number of people meeting their future selves and being congratulated by them for wise investment decisions they had made. These advertisements annoyed me intensely. It took me a while to work out why I was reacting so strongly. I finally came to the conclusion that they irritated me so much because I felt that the speculative fiction genre was being sullied by being used by large corporations to manipulate people for commercial gain. Time travel is one of my favourite sub-genres and to see its emotional impact and resonance being used to increase bank profits was offensive.

I’ve since come across speculative fiction tropes and references everywhere in the general media. I’ve seen articles in the financial pages of major newspapers referring to ‘my precious’ in relation to market motivations and ‘winter is coming’ in terms of a slide in economic indices. Really? Is that what the power of fantasy and science fiction should be used for? To comment on the Dow Jones index?

I guess we should be flattered. The Eye of Sauron is now everywhere. Speculative fiction was once seen as a ghetto—a glorious golden ghetto, but a ghetto nonetheless. A place where outcasts eked out an existence. A dark corner for the literary impoverished, the room under the stairs for the writers and readers who couldn’t breathe in the mainstream.

That has all changed. Speculative fiction has transformed into humanity’s overarching narrative. Our genre has not just become the mainstream, it is now the prism through which the world is seen.

In a Time magazine article earlier this year, Lev Grossman wrote:

Something odd happened to popular culture somewhere around the turn of the millennium… somewhere around 2000 a shifting of the tectonic plates occurred. The great eye of Sauron swivelled, and we began to pay attention to other things. What we paid attention to was magic… Fantasy wasn’t a fringe phenomenon anymore. It had become one of the great pillars of popular culture and, increasingly, the way we tell stories now.

Maybe we should be cheering that we’ve won, that we’ve cast our spell over the muggles and they now all see what we’ve always seen. And yet, somehow I feel if we’re not careful we’re in danger of being subsumed by corporate wraiths who want to use the magical power for their own evil ends. To make all of us do things we wouldn’t otherwise choose to do. To cast a spell to sell their products. To make us believe things that aren’t true.

Let’s be vigilant and call out when speculative fiction is being used to manipulate. The genie might be out of the bottle, but hopefully we can find the right words for the spell to shove it back.

All the best from the cloud.

Dirk Strasser

www.dirkstrasser.com

Back to Contents

Potkin

Janet Haigh

Thick, black soil wedged under her nails like cake. Shards of dinnerware, weathered glass and terracotta littered the dirt between weedy carrots and slug-laced silverbeet.

Close up, against the high brick wall, the last arc of the sun was warm but the evening chill was already in Milla’s digging fingers and in any trace of shadow. The sleeves of her woollen jumper were damp and the smell of wood-smoke was settling over the street.

She kept her ears alert for the whisper of a door. Behind her, the house yawned large—peopled with slouching, un-magical brothers grown too tall for comfort—while her mother hovered at the kitchen window, dark eyebrows pinched together, pretending to fill saucepans.

Milla clenched her jaw.

Her mother worked by feel, a tug of emotion guiding her hands to the next piece, the fracture that needed healing, the sinew to be knitted. When you worked with living flesh,