Aurealis #124

By Dirk Strasser (Editor)

Aurealis #124 opens with an Editorial on the difference between writing a novel and a screenplay and announces a major movie release based on an Aurealis short story. The opening story in this issue, Maddison Stoff’s Leisure Culture’ presents a jarring look at a possible future where the line between reality and simulation is blurred via avatars and extreme biotechnology. E H Mann’s ‘Nie among the Tree People’ is a surprising fantasy with a difference, while James Rowland’s ‘Inheritance’ is a classy tale entwining reality and magic, history and conjecture, retrospection and insight. Gillian Polack looks for the lost land of Lemuria while K C Grifant explores the horror genre. We review Graveyard Shift in Ghost Town by Michael Pryor, Quichotte by Salman Rushdie, DataTrigger by J P Carver, War of the Worlds: Battleground Australia edited by Steve Proposch, Christopher Sequeira and Bryce Stevens, Deeper, Darker Things and Other Oddities by Steve Dillon, Metamorphosis by Claire Fitzpatrick, and a host of other works of speculative fiction.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Chimaera Publications
• Release date: Sep 9, 2019
• ISBN: 9781922031884

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 #124

Edited by Dirk Strasser

Published by Chimaera Publications at Smashwords

Copyright of this compilation Chimaera Publications 2019

Copyright on each story remains with the contributor

EPUB version ISBN 978-1-922031-88-4

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

Leisure Culture—Maddison Stoff

Nie Among the Tree People—E H Mann

Inheritance—James Rowland

Naggah, naggah, oom-moo-hah – G Firth Scott and Lemuria—Gillian Polack

Blood and Guts, Murder and Monsters: A Renaissance of Horror—K C Grifant

Reviews

Next Issue

Credits

From the Cloud

Dirk Strasser

Have you ever wondered how different screenwriting is to writing novels or short stories? After concurrently writing a screenplay and novel version of my conquistador fantasy short story ‘Conquist’ (Dreaming Again, Ed. Jack Dann, HarperVoyager), I’ve got a pretty good idea.

The two are very different.

Obviously, there are similarities. The plot, the characters and the dialogue are important to both. But it’s the differences that strike you when you switch from one to the other. In my experience, the two writing styles often interfere with each other.

Let’s start at a basic level. The action in screenplays is always in the present tense, while the most common tense used in novel narratives is the simple past tense. This alone can drive you a little nuts when switching between novels and screenplays. Whatever tense you’re currently writing in becomes habitual; it feels natural and intuitive. You do it without thinking. And worse, unless you deliberately read for tense, you simply won’t catch all the times when you’ve incorrectly got past tense in the screenplay action or present tense in the novel narrative. And, strangely, when you make the change, at first it feels wrong somehow.

The number of words you have to play with in a screenplay is far less than what you have at your disposal in a novel. My screenplay for Conquist is around 22,000 words while my novel version is 86,000 words. In fact, the movie industry doesn’t even talk about the number of words. It talks about pages. The average movie screenplay is around 110 pages, which are formatted in such a way that a page represents around one minute of screen time. So, the 110 pages represent just under two hours, which is somewhere near the average length of a movie. You need to be aware, though, that this restriction on the number of pages only really applies to spec scripts—that is, the ones that are written on-spec without a contract. If you’re Tarantino, you can go for broke.

The word limits in a screenplay affect all aspects of the writing. To come in at 110 pages, you need to have extreme focus from a plot point of view and write with a maniacal tightness. While novel writers obviously also need to make choices about what to include and what to cut, screenwriting forces you to dial this process up to warp drive. There’s nowhere to hide. Going over 120 pages, for example, can often mean you’re dismissed as an amateur before you even get to first base.

And if you think manuscript requirements for novels or short stories are over-prescriptive, you ain’t seen nothing yet. The formatting requirements of screenplays appear overwhelming at first. I don’t know how they managed it in the Golden Age of Hollywood, but I wouldn’t even think of writing a screenplay without a software package like Final Draft.

So how do you turn a novel or short story into a screenplay which actually becomes a movie? Well, clearly, one way is to first get your story published in Aurealis! We’re pleased to announce that the C S McMullen story ‘The Other-faced Lamb’ that appeared in Aurealis #82 is soon to be released as a major motion picture The Other Lamb.

All the best from the cloud.

Dirk Strasser

www.dirkstrasser.com

Vale Robert N Stephenson

The editors of Aurealis were saddened to hear of Robert’s passing. He was an important member of the exclusive club of Australian speculative-fiction magazine editors. We first met him when he started publishing Altair. That was only the start of his contribution to Australian SF. We published his fiction and non-fiction over many years and considered him a friend of Aurealis. He gave so much to Australian science fiction: writer, publisher, editor, agent, mentor… he supported, provoked, and gave us all his energy and his passion. He made a difference. We hope he is now at peace.

Dirk Strasser

Stephen Higgins

Michael Pryor

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Available through meerkatpress.com/books/claiming_t-mo

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Leisure Culture

Maddison Stoff

I see a crowd of avatars clustered around the news-spire and, honestly, my first response is rage. What have we fucked up today? Did the commies lose a generation ship? Has the ‘war for the free market’ finally gone nuclear? Or maybe it’s another country we’ve abandoned to the sea. But as I get closer to the avatars, I see it’s something else entirely. A few of the nearest ones turn around at my approach. They see the tag above my head that says Consumer Expert: Science Fiction and look at me enquiringly.

‘Don’t look at me,’ I reply. ‘I’ve always hated xenophobic alien invasion stories.’

An excited murmur ripples through the crowd. Shit, why did I say it? A couple of the other Science Fiction Experts turn around and look at me with venom in their eyes.

‘We don’t know for a fact that it’s an alien invasion,’ one of them says. ‘The last time there was a ship in orbit, it was friendly.’

But this ship has landed, I think and shrug.

‘As I said before, it’s not my expertise,’ I reply.

‘But you think it looks like it’s an alien invasion?’ an avatar with a Consumer Expert: Horror tag says.

I sigh.

‘I think an alien with good intentions wouldn’t land before they tried to contact us,’ I reply.

‘Didn’t the Dagnarc land before we learned to speak with them?’ another Sci-Fi expert says. ‘Sorry, but I’m mostly into stuff about AI.’

‘That’s a useless genre,’ a Consumer Expert: Mystery says.

‘You sound just like my ex-husband,’ the AI fiction expert says. ‘Just because they got it wrong, doesn’t mean it wasn’t useful.’

‘But they don’t make it anymore, do they?’ the Horror expert says.

‘Androids do,’ the AI fiction expert says. ‘But we just call it literature.’

‘The Dagnarc didn’t land,’ an avatar with a Consumer Expert: Drama tag says. ‘They hovered above the ocean and projected images.’

Everybody looks at her in shock.

‘What?’ she says. ‘I mostly view historical dramas, so it stands to reason I’d like history as well. People tend to remember that one wrong, but that’s the way it happened.’

A Science Fiction expert nods.

‘It’s used in certain types of sci-fi all the time,’ they say. ‘It’s based on an old conspiracy theory known as the Mandela Effect, which said that people could have memories from alternate realities. They even set up meeting groups for anyone who thought that they were having that experience. People thought that you could cross the timelines accidentally. It’s fascinating stuff.’

‘Isn’t anyone more worried this could be an alien invasion?’ the Horror Expert asks. ‘That’s it, I’m out. I don’t care about the money. I need to spend some time in the real world before the aliens destroy it.’

Their avatar disappears.

‘Horror experts,’ someone jokes. ‘They’ll be back.’

Everybody laughs.

I focus on the screens to drown out all the noise around me. A sober-faced reporter says the ship landed without any warning. Apparently, it managed to avoid our satellites and radar tracking, somehow even all the traffic in the solar system. It’s been blocking all our signals ever since. We can’t send a message from Earth to Mars, let alone contact the Dagnarc. It’s difficult to see