Aurealis #109

By Stephen Higgins (Editor)

Issue #109 of Aurealis has new fiction from Terrance Macmanus, Gus Moreno and Lynette Aspey as well as reviews and two new compelling articles. It has enough to keep you entertained and up to date until, well until issue #110 comes along next month.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Chimaera Publications
• Release date: Apr 10, 2018
• ISBN: 9781922031662

Book preview

AUREALIS #109

Australian Fantasy & Science Fiction

Edited by Stephen Higgins

Published by Chimaera Publications at Smashwords

Copyright of this compilation Chimaera Publications 2018

Copyright on each story remains with the contributor

EPUB version ISBN 978-1-922031-66-2

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—Stephen Higgins

The Marred Queen—Terence MacManus

Painted Ocean—Lynette Aspey

The Great Filter—Gus Moreno

As Good as Poe. No, Better—Colonial Gothic in the Hands of Marcus Clarke—Gillian Polack

Science Fiction and the Economics of Utopia— Nicholas Sheppard

Reviews

Next Issue

Credits

From the Cloud

Stephen Higgins

I have a confession to make. I’ve only ever read two novels originally published in a language other than English. I missed out on reading Jules Verne when I was young and the closest I got to ‘foreign’ writing was… well it just didn’t happen. I read a lot of Australian, British, and American authors but that was about it. I didn’t even read much that was set anywhere that didn’t have a western cultural background. My loss. The only two I have now read (in translation) are The Maps of Time by Felix Palma, and The Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu.

Felix Palma is a Spanish writer of some renown. It may be that he is a fantastic stylist and a writer of great prose in the original Spanish but I was really disappointed in The Maps of Time when I read it. I don’t want to perform a hatchet job on the novel. I should point out that it garnered a lot of praise and still gets good reviews. At the time I was trying to write a novel myself and I kept it propped up by my desktop as encouragement. You know… ’If this can get published then there’s hope for me’ type of thinking. Maybe it reads really well in the original Spanish? Is it the translator at fault? Is it both? I don’t think the problem was a cultural one for me as a reader, as Palma’s novel is set in London in the late 1800s and deals with subjects and topics with which I am familiar. So I ‘got’ the point of the novel. I just didn’t like it.

Cixin Liu’s novel is a different matter. I know next to nothing about Chinese culture, history and social mores. I know the stereotypes, a smattering of probably inaccurate history and some food. And I really liked the novel. There are wildly differing reviews of the novel all over the internet, but I found it engaging, interesting and entertaining. If you’ve read my recent editorials you’ll know I’ve been looking for new authors and maybe I’ve found hundreds of them writing in other languages. Part of the interest for me is that Cixin is writing about aliens. And when he’s writing about Chinese cultural beliefs that is alien to me. When he begins to write from an alien point of view, well that just throws a whole new level of alienation at me. I actually found these passages slightly odd. Alien if you like! Which just added to whole experience. I liked it all and found it to be a bit different from everything I’ve been reading for ages. The translator of The Three Body Problem states that, ‘The best translations into English do not, in fact, read as if they were written originally in English. The English words are arranged in such a way that the reader sees a glimpse of another culture’s patterns of thinking…’ and this is apparent when you read The Three Body Problem or rather, it was apparent to me when I read it, given that the reading experience is a particularly individual experience. And even that thought highlights the notion of reading as being a bridge between cultures, thoughts and people.

As many here know I’m a secondary teacher. I have a new student in Year 7 who told me he doesn’t read. He can read, he just doesn’t. God, I feel sorry for him and I’m doing all I can to change his world.

All the best from the cloud.

Stephen Higgins

Back to Contents

The Marred Queen

Terrence MacManus

Leo could always tell a spy by their smell.

The child walking beside him looked the part of the browbeaten lower-city waif, sure enough. He was small, ragged, and dirty, his face and hair streaked with soot and mud. His too-loose shirt and too-short pants were grimy with the ground-in filth of weeks spent sleeping outdoors and carried all the scents Leo would have expected from a gutter-rat: the tang of woodfire smoke, the deep onion-like character of ingrained sweat and night soil runoff and, of course, the overriding odour of dried blood. Those scents had filled the room where Leo first met the boy, and wafted over to him even as they prowled through the darkened streets of the industrial.

Yes, very convincing, Leo thought with an internal sigh. He fooled the leaders of that cell with ease. But then, if they had any real experience with subterfuge, I wouldn’t need to go on these inspections.

The spy hadn’t got past Leo, though. Or rather, he hadn’t got past the tiny glowing sigil hidden on Leo’s septum—inscribed by Cassandra’s own hand—which had caught, beneath the layers of carefully crafted stink, the unmistakable hint of perfumed soap that still lingered on the boy.

The kid might as well be wearing a hat with ‘citizen’ printed on it.

Leo had taken the child, hoping he’d simply come into contact with the fragrance while foraging through someone’s garbage, but when they walked straight by a pair of patrolling Forcers a few minutes after leaving the safe house, Leo’s fears were confirmed. No resident of the lower city, who had learned to hate and fear the tattooed guardsmen from birth, would have walked straight by without noticing them. This child had.

No, he wasn’t some orphan seeking vengeance on the Academy. They had sent him as a spy. Or an assassin. The very thought of it sickened Leo—the bishops had never used anyone this young before.

By the Mark, Leo prayed, Let him just be a spy.

‘Where are we going?’ the boy whispered in the dark. ‘Are we heading to the main base? Is it around here somewhere?’

Leo rolled his eyes in the darkness. It was one of the clumsiest attempts to get information he’d ever heard. And being as most of Cassandra’s rebels started out as labourers and minor tradesmen, he knew a lot of inexperienced spies.

‘We’re going to see her,’ he replied.

‘Her! The Marred Queen? Then…’ the boy sucked in a sharp intake of breath. ‘You are him, aren’t you? Leo Lovelorn? Of the first six?’

‘Aren’t six of us anymore.’

‘So it’s true? Those executions the other day—’

‘Were my friends,’ Leo interrupted.

In truth, he’d never known the baker or milliner the Academy had dragged through the streets and hung to drain against the campus walls. But by failing to contradict the bishops’ claim they had been ringleaders of his movement, Leo