Aurealis #153

By Michael Pryor (Editor)

Aurealis #153, our August issue, features the captivating and baroque ‘Grief Aside, I Hate it Here’ by Emma-Grace Clarke, the magical and affecting ‘The Boy with No Heart’ by Thoraiya Dyer and the nightmarish ‘Machinations’ by Ross Heard. Our engrossing non-fiction in this issue includes ‘Individualism in 20th Century Dystopian Fiction’ by Kris Ashton, ‘The Practicalities of an Alien Invasion’ by Todd Sullivan and an in-depth look at Snowpiercer by Claire Fitzpatrick. And if that’s not enough, we have our wide-ranging, thoughtful and detailed Reviews section plus our spellbinding internal art from Lynette Watters, Zuzanna Kwiecien and Emma Weakley.
Go to imagination’s edge with Aurealis!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Chimaera Publications
• Release date: Aug 8, 2022
• ISBN: 9781922471192

Book preview

AUREALIS #153

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 978-1-922471-19-2

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—Michael Pryor

Grief Aside, I Hate It Here—Emma-Grace Clarke

The Boy With No Heart—Thoraiya Dyer

Machinations—Ross Heard

Individualism in 20th-Century Dystopian Fiction—Kris Ashton

The Practicalities of an Alien Invasion—Todd Sullivan

Social Science Fiction: From The Time Machine to Snowpiercer—Claire Fitzpatrick

Reviews

Next Issue

Submissions to Aurealis

Credits

From the Cloud

Michael Pryor

If you’ve ever looked at our world with discontent, unhappiness or a feeling of ‘I could do better than that!’ then fantasy writing is for you. We all need assistance, though, from time to time and, so from our many, many years as self-appointed experts, we’re here to help you. Here are some of our most useful, most road-tested and—most importantly—easy to implement tips for creating a fantasy world.

Don’t place your Forest of Terror right next door to your Mountains of Doom alongside your Chasm of Eternal Fear. You can have too much of a good thing.

Remember: rivers flow from the mountains to the sea, not the other way around. Tempting though it may be to have water running uphill, the laws of hydrodynamics are fairly well understood and, if broken, will have unfortunate consequences for urban sewerage and wastewater disposal.

Weather happens.

The Web of Life is really tricky in a fantasy world. Dragons as your top-level predator play hell with the food chain.

Never put anything interesting in the middle of your fantasy world. If your map goes to two pages, you can lose really interesting things in the gutter…

Cities are where they are for three reasons: protection, trade routes and ‘lost in the mists of time’. Always handy.

‘Wasteland’: a very useful catch-all to have tucked away for narrative emergencies. See also ‘Wilderness’.

Don’t neglect minor geographical features. For every mountain range, gulf and vast canyon, why not slip in an islet, a blowhole, or a lavaka, which is type of erosional feature often found in Madagascar. It’s true. Look it up.

If we’re talking maps, remember that north at the top is just a convention. Be bold, have east at the top, or south! Then no-one could accuse you of being bland and conventional, you iconoclast!

Again with maps, nothing is classier than a burnt edge or two, if we remember our school days at all.

That’s enough to get you started. Soon you’ll have your own fully-fledged and totally convincing fantasy world. Onward then to writing your story to set it in!

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

Grief Aside, I Hate It Here

Emma-Grace Clarke

It had never reached out to her to brush the peripherals of her mind, but she understands that her house was among the few gifted with cognisance. Orders for oats and sesame oil always appeared on her shopping lists when she ran low, her clothes were always ironed, and the water for the bath was fragrant with thyme and Epsom. For weeks she poured herself into the reports from IPABR (International Panel for Awakened Buildings’ Rights) over her filter coffee, ignoring her jealousy towards Annie Highdale from Tennessee, who claimed her house communicated with her through toilet flushes styled after morse code. She could have learnt morse code easily, unlike Ms Highdale, who took months.

Despite the lack of evidence, real estate agents had come to her house at least once a week with lurid fliers, asking for the honour of selling her home on the unsubstantiated claims of house-consciousness. Of course, she had slammed the door in their faces (no shame, those leeches!), apologised with a whisper to the closest wall for her rough handling and rushed back into the kitchen to catch the last of fading snatches of the Stranger Than Fiction podcast. Leaning against the cool marble of the kitchen bench, she listened with rapt attention to the story of an ancient house in Montenegro that had demolished itself after its family was slain by their vengeful gardener. The host, Harold Harburgeren, asked in a static-garbled voice, ‘What is a person anymore?’ and ended the episode with a zinger: the house had not been able to scream; it did not have the morphological adaptations of a throat and lips.

Now, Mara watches as her house struggles similarly; its only sound of agony comes from the rasping of stone on stone as her home slips into the sea of Torquay. She’s glad that the residents of the Montenegro house were not alive to witness the death of their abode. She holds onto her pram with bloodless knuckles as the waves masticate upon her billiards room, taking each colourful ball into seaward drifts sown with microplastics. Her mind rises to the singular thought of her sourdough—still in the oven. The mother culture must be ruined. She watches the dust particles of the drywall dance upon the sea breeze in an air-eating silence, barely noticing that her coffee is saturating the grass beneath her feet and is splashed up her leg.

The giant eucalyptus (which is remiss of respirating anthro-tech and synthetic mycelial networks) remains teetering on the jagged remains of the cliff with half its roots exposed—hanging over the churning abyss. It will die soon, even with its blunt bulbs in half-bloom, nearly pink, nearly furry, nearly there.

So, she walks around her house’s town that’s crumbling under the weight of over-gentrified, under-regulated condo gods with their tentacular chrome frames spearing the clouds. She trudges for a long time, and her son in the pram doesn’t cry. Lululemon eyes and rubbernecks follow her distrait steps, and the wheeze of the trees fills her. The passing headlights become long tunnels of light. It’s night-time now. When did that happen?

She calls her home and contents insurer (Allied Australian Welfare, LLC.) while walking past Grossman Road’s closed cafes and hessian-filled grocery stores. Her insurance plan doesn’t cover the sea eating her home. She wails down the phone to the chipper man on the other side, who is sympathetic yet firm. His name is Craig, and he just lost his house as well—but that was first to the phanta-ponies and second to his broker son, who sold their remaining joint assets and now lives on World 4476 with a Sachs-Rothchild (What are the chances? he says. But he isn’t complainin’). The best he can do is send a crew to find the house-seed at the base of the cliffs, build a new domestic structure and chance an organic upload by sending a surge from the power station to the new domestic-mycelial network with the seed at its centre. No-one has had consistent success, as degermination of the house-seed after structural death was likely, and finding such a thing was difficult as it was typically entangled within the house’s dense mycelial