Aurealis #163

By Michael Pryor (Editor)

Aurealis #163 is chock-a-block full of spec fic quality. We present to you the compelling ‘The Most Powerful Witch in Witchville’ by Ephiny Gale, the subversive ‘Love is an Attack Missile Strike’ by Baden M Chant and the affecting ‘My Ancestor's Bones Lie in This Bay’ by Andrew Knighton.
Our stunning illustrations for these stories come from Leah Clementson, Peter Allert and Chris Catlin.
Our top non-fiction includes ‘Mad Max and the Uselessness of the Australian Lone Wolf Protagonist by Lachlan Walter, ‘Asimov: Faith and Foundation’ by David Ellrod and ‘Crimes of the Future’ by Ani White. And, of course, we have our absorbing Reviews section, worth the price of admittance on its own.
Aurealis, we see further with each and every issue.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Chimaera Publications
• Release date: Aug 6, 2023
• ISBN: 9781922471291

Book preview

AUREALIS #163

Edited by Michael Pryor

Published by Chimaera Publications at Smashwords

Copyright of this compilation Chimaera Publications 2023

Copyright on each story remains with the contributor

EPUB version ISBN 978-1-922471-29-1

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 Most Powerful Witch in Witchville—Ephiny Gale

Love is an Attack Missile Strike—Baden M Chant

My Ancestor’s Bones Lie in This Bay—Andrew Knighton

Mad Max and the Uselessness of the Australian Lone Wolf Protagonist—Lachlan Walter

Faith and Foundation—David F Ellrod Sr

Crimes of the Future: Biotech Nightmare and Purity Myth—Ani White

Reviews

Next Issue

Submissions to Aurealis

Credits

From the Cloud

Michael Pryor

Australian Science Fiction for Young Adults and Children is a fertile area today, but many titles published in the past are unjustly forgotten. Here are a few that deserve to be brought back to life.

1. Displaced Person (1981)—the late, lamented Lee Harding. What happens when you start to vanish along with everyone else? Identity, sense of self, sense of place. An Australian classic.

2. Deucalion (1995)—Brian Caswell. Colonialism, intolerance, understanding, in an SF scenario. Thought-provoking.

3. The Broken Wheel (1996)—Kerry Greenwood. Yes, that Kerry Greenwood. Post apocalyptic tribalism. Gritty.

4. Singing the Dogstar Blues (1998)—Alison Goodman. Time travel, aliens, and some funky harmonica playing. Cool.

5. Omega (2000)—Christine Harris. In space, which way does death lie? Wondrous.

6. Eye to Eye (1997)—Catherine Jinks. Machines can think. Can they feel? Challenging.

7. Galax-Arena (1995)—Gillian Rubinstein. Spaceships, aliens, captivity, what’s not to like?

8. Halfway Across the Galaxy and Turn Left (1985)—Robin Klein. Funny SF. There’s not enough of it.

9. Ziggurat (1997)—Ivan Southall. A mysterious disappearance and another mode of existence. Profound.

10. Parkland (1995)—Victor Kelleher. Enigmatic aliens, human zoos, outsiders.

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: Terry Wood

Terry Wood is a political consultant, writer and editor from Brisbane, and has been an Associate Editor and Non-fiction Coordinator for Aurealis since 2015. He has also been involved with Andromeda Spaceways Magazine.

Back to Contents

Back to Contents

The Most Powerful Witch in Witchville

Ephiny Gale

In the thickest part of the forest stretches a stone wall as tall as its tallest tree. Inside the wall is Witchville.

Witchville, which by current population is truly more like a large town than a village, is enchanted to look like any adjacent patch of forest from the air. Living things may pass through this enchanted barrier, but foreign man-made things may not, so on rare occasions naked outsiders have been known to drop into the town, preceded by the brief fireworks display of their clothing incinerating at the vertical town line.

Down inside the wall intricate buildings pack close together. Closest to the edge of town the structures are small and modest but grow in size and grandeur as one approaches the centre, with the tallest towers clustering around the central square. Almost all the architecture involves stone or dark wood in variants of black, grey, and purple, so that the town gives off the overwhelming impression of liquorice allsorts or of a gothic gingerbread village brought to life.

Presently, it is the evening, so a great many candles, floating lanterns and candelabras light the streets and windows of Witchville. In the middle of the central square, a twelve-year-old girl with ruby red hair gets a copper-coloured ‘5th’ ribbon pinned to her chest. Standing to either side of her, the other nine recipients of ribbons are all tired-looking adults.

But perhaps we are a little early. Let’s skip ahead five years, to the next competition, and then about another five years after that. The ruby red-haired girl is 22, and about to compete for the second time to be the most powerful witch in Witchville.

* * *

Saturday

The girl’s name is Nicolette Elliesdaugh, but it has been shortened to Coal for much of the girl’s life, which was her idea, after all. It is Saturday morning, two days before the competition. Her early morning routine is always the same.

It starts with shooting electricity from her palms into a heavily-singed boxing bag, then hissing another spell to soothe those electrical burns, and slathering on some extra salve for good measure.

She breathes life into the slack body of a wax sparrow and sends it to swoop through the town while she jogs on a treadmill, seeing the town waking up directly through its eyes.

She serves herself up another problem that the town has or could have and crafts as many plans to solve it as she can manage in a second 15 minutes.

By this time her palms have healed completely, and she performs a series of tricks on her modified floating broom in the relative confines of her basement bedroom. Her broom has a bike seat and bike handles screwed into the wood. Many residents in Witchville travel on floating pushbikes, but Coal prefers the smaller footprint and easier manoeuvrability of her modified broom.

Finally, she spends five minutes mentally scanning her whole body for imperfections or sickness, magically reduces some swelling that has flared in her left elbow, and then takes the best version of herself upstairs for breakfast.

Near the top of their house, which is tall and thin with a room per floor, both her parents are pottering in the kitchen. They’d initially connected through a shared love of wax magic, and the kitchen table is still full of wax masks and wax bumblebees, plus Genevieve’s marshmallow toast and an open novel dotted with a single breadcrumb. Genevieve, whose default uniform is a suit with silver arrow cufflinks, uses the wax masks to transform herself in her acting career.

Saika stirs something sweet and meaty on the burner. Her dresses are all floaty hedge-witch, layers weighted down with sewn gemstones and jewels. She specialises in wax insects. When she whispers phrases to the wax bumblebees on the table, they’ll fly off to land in the ears of townspeople and slip the phrase into their heads, and the only indication it didn’t start there might be a wax smear on the floor or extra wax on their ear.

After she’s eaten her fill of Saika’s honey-dipped jackalope, Coal heads off to tutor some of the younger girls in town in the basics of magic. If they have the capacity for magic, even the slowest ones manage to perform some rudimentary magic within a couple of months.

In the evening she flies up to Porsha’s mansion on the hill, one of the few houses in Witchville that still