Aurealis #150

By Michael Pryor (Editor)

Aurealis #150 is jampacked with top F/SF, including ‘The Thrill’ by Joseph Townsend, ‘Remembrances in Skin’ by Alastair Brown and 'The Wormtail Invasion' by Karl El-Koura. In our engrossing non-fiction Lynne Green explores the works of Anne McCaffrey, Gillian Polack continues her series on early examples of worldbuilding in ‘The Last Lemurian: A Westralian Romance’ and Kris Aston delves into the brilliance of ‘Midnight Mass’. Naturally, we also have our probing and enthusiastic Reviews section and our always stunning internal art. Aurealis: we embrace the universe.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Chimaera Publications
• Release date: May 7, 2022
• ISBN: 9781922471161

Book preview

AUREALIS #150

Edited by Michael Pryor

Published by Chimaera Publications at Smashwords

Copyright of this compilation Chimaera Publications 2022

Copyright on each story remains with the contributor

EPUB version ISBN 978-1-922471-16-1

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—Michael Pryor

The Thrill—JP Townsend

Remembrance in Skin—Alastair Brown

The Wormtail Invasion—Karl El-Koura

Anne McCaffrey: Prolific World-Builder—Lynne Lumsden Green

The World of The Last Lemurian: A Westralian Romance, by G Firth Scott—Gillian Polack

The Slow-Burn Brilliance of Midnight Mass—Kris Ashton

Reviews

Next Issue

Submissions to Aurealis

Credits

From the Cloud

Michael Pryor

Over the years, there have been many attempts by writers and publishers to avoid their books and stories being tagged as science fiction. For a long time, we’ve seen a decided reluctance to be seen to be in the SF camp, no matter how wonderful and welcoming it is. ‘Speculative fiction’ is one of those labels that writers and publishers have used to put distance between their stuff and the riffraff that is SF, and these days it even has a more lofty cousin joining the ranks: ‘literary speculative fiction’, a cousin twice removed from SF, the cousin who doesn’t come to the family reunions.

Lately, we have a newcomer. ‘Dystopian fiction’ as a label has been around for a while but it’s throwing its weight around with renewed vigour to describe all sorts of books with a futuristic setting, often with an overbearing governmental presence. Are these books describing a dystopia? Undoubtedly. Are they fiction? I hope so. Are they science fiction? You’ll find no mention of the genre on covers or in any publicity material. It’s almost as if the publishers are scared of the SF label, of having the book put in a basket labelled ‘low brow, trashy, of no importance, not respectable’.

Cli-fi? Ditto. Slipstream? As above.

Let’s face it, publishers love a label, and they love to carve out a new niche and not have to battle with established work. That’s all well and good. What irks us is the contortions that are gone through to avoid the science fiction label, as if any sniff of SFness about a work is the kiss of death.

Margaret Atwood shuddered at her work being considered part of a genre that was all ‘rockets, chemicals and talking squids in outer space’, even though she has since backed away from that stance. Ian McEwan insisted that his novel Machines Like Me wasn’t science fiction even though it was about artificial intelligence in an alternative reality. Apparently, it was far too respectable to be considered SF.

We pose the question—what about these novels and stories disbars them from being science fiction? Look at any book labelled dystopian fiction, cli-fi, or speculative fiction and ask what disqualifies them from being part of the wonderful wide world of science fiction. If the answer is something along the lines of ‘They can’t be science fiction. They’re good!’ then genre snobbery could be at the root of this backpedalling and reluctance. And the basis of genre snobbery tends to be a complete misunderstanding of, or a lack of knowledge of, the genre in question.

All the best from the cloud!

Michael Pryor

Editor: Michael Pryor

Michael Pryor has published more than 35 novels and 50 plus short stories. He has been shortlisted for the Aurealis Award nine times, and eight of his books have

been CBCA Notable books. His website is www.michaelpryor.com.au.

Associate Editor: Scott Vandervalk

Scott Vandervalk has been a freelance editor for over 10 years, with projects ranging across the globe, from educational textbooks to novels, short stories, roleplaying games and boardgames, amongst other types of text. Scott has previously worked in science and education support, both of which have led to editing projects related to those fields. When not editing, Scott can also be found dabbling in gardening, cooking, writing or designing and playing games. Scott currently serves on the committee of the Bendigo Writers’ Council. Website: scottvandervalk.com.

Back to Contents

The Thrill

JP Townsend

1

After the mushrooms killed Dover, X took point. They left what remained of Dover’s body and walked back through the tunnels.

The three of them made as little noise as possible. X couldn’t hear the song—Heart and Tork exhibited no symptoms. Dover had heard the song.

The tunnels were lined with fluorescent lights that had been burning for years. Passages thin in some places, huge in others, the walls rising up like monoliths. Remnants of the old world were here and there—furniture and trash.

They walked. They wore light body armour, gloves and steel cap boots. They had sonar equipment but most seasoned infiltrators didn’t use it—they could feel it when the mushrooms were there. The trick was to listen: it was the nature of the mushrooms to make their song sound like other things, like the droning whirr of the overhead fans or water dripping from a pipe.

A day into their return, they reached the dead city of Chicago. They came in through concreted-over farmland. The houses stood in fields of grey—the colours of their clapboard and roofs in stark contrast to the cement. Some were in disrepair, some were pristine. X’s knowledge of pre-history was spotty, but they knew that the residents of the dead cities had fled in a hurry after the tunnels hadn’t worked, instead entombing them. In the aftermath there’d been looting and in-fighting among the remnants and they’d burned some things and left others untouched.

In the dead city proper, even the roads had been concreted over and the skyscrapers had been cut to one set level to edge up against the bottom of the ceiling. X knew how big Chicago had been—they’d seen photos of it in the prehistory applications—but down there it seemed so small. X felt sometimes that they’d like to live in the old city—role-play, go to the store to get cheese and meat and sit in their apartment in the halved skyscraper, look out their window into the pitch black nothing.

They bivouacked inside a one-storey building. X didn’t know what the building had been in its time—there were posters here and there depicting people holding weapons but smiling, standing in front of ancient equipment like helicopters and trucks. In old-world advertising, everyone always looked happy.

The squad put out their bedrolls, took turns sleeping fully dressed, one of them always taking watch. Time crawled in that place when they weren’t working.

On X’s watch they thought they saw movement out in the unnatural dark—they thought they heard the song. The mushrooms’ music sounded different to everyone—research suggested it was personalised for each human, or perhaps an extension of the creature’s individuality, their ‘voice’. Tork snored softly. Heart stirred in her sleep, mumbled—lyrics?—rolled over and was gone again.

X took off their earmuffs. No song. They hefted their weapon and walked through the doorless arch of the building and into the street. The tall lamps in front of the buildings cast circles of light here and there, but past their luminance X could see nothing. They heard Heart again, from the building, talking, and went back inside, knelt down beside her.

Heart was sweating. X shook her awake. She looked scared but didn’t make a noise. X smiled and mouthed, ‘You did good.’ Heart nodded. X gave them the rifle, took their place on the roll next to Tork as Heart took watch. The roll was damp.

They left after 10 hours of traded rest. They walked through the razed south section of the dead city, cutting west. The vast cavern the city lay in thinned as they walked until they were back in the tunnels proper. They passed remnants of their walk in—dead mushrooms propped against walls: strange white bodies, bullet holes and knife gouges in their rubbery skin like indentations in plastic.

Past two of them X held up. Heart and Tork stopped, turned to see. Two mushrooms—X’s kills—both headshots. The corpses were stacked against the wall. In front of them was a pile of grass, vibrant green. X knelt by it and from a pocket on their vest took out a glassine bag and tongs.