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    Aurealis #102
    Aurealis #102
    Aurealis #102
    Ebook90 pages1 hour

    Aurealis #102

    By Dirk Strasser (Editor)

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    About this ebook

    Award-winning author Marlee Jane Ward opens the latest issue of Aurealis with ‘The Great House Thrippet, Season 246, Episode 12’, a tightly written story with a long title that explores exploitation and marketing in a chilling reality show of the future. In ‘The Planck Harvest’, James Rowland gives us a beautiful story of subtle stillness featuring a magical farm with just a tinge of science fiction to it. ‘Pretty Little Ones’ by Leigh Harlen is a powerful and disturbing tale of alienation that somehow manages to be both sad and terrifying.

    In ‘The Case of the Trashy, Tripey Novel with a Marxist Slant’, Gillian Polack looks at the two Australian female writers of the 1940s who wrote as M Barnard Eldershaw and their classic science fiction novel, ‘Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow’. Claire Fitzpatrick’s ‘When Too Much Pleasure is Never Enough’ offers an exploration of hedonism and horror. And as usual we feature book reviews of latest releases and the quirky, hard to categorise ‘Secret History of Australia’.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherChimaera Publications
    Release dateJul 2, 2017
    ISBN9781922031594
    Aurealis #102
    Author

    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.

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      Book preview

      Aurealis #102 - Dirk Strasser (Editor)

      AUREALIS #102

      Edited by Dirk Strasser

      Published by Chimaera Publications at Smashwords

      Copyright of this compilation Chimaera Publications 2017

      Copyright on each story remains with the contributor.

      EPUB version ISBN 978-1-922031-59-4

      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—Dirk Strasser

      The Great House Thrippet, Season 246, Episode 12—Marlee Jane Ward

      The Planck Harvest—James Rowland

      Pretty Little Ones—Leigh Harlen

      The Case of the Trashy, Tripey Novel with a Marxist Slant: M Barnard Eldershaw and Science Fiction—Gillian Polack

      When Too Much Pleasure is Never Enough: An Exploration of Hedonism—Claire Fitzpatrick

      Secret History of Australia—Philo Pargetter—Researched by Michael Pryor

      Reviews

      Next Issue

      Credits

      From the Cloud

      Dirk Strasser

      At a recent convention, I went to a panel on secondary worlds in weird fiction and how they differ from the secondary worlds in dark and epic fantasy. It made me think about the weird fiction I had read and I’ve been grappling with a question ever since. I don’t think it’s possible to criticise a humorous novel for being be too funny. The funnier it is, the better. Similarly, I don’t think it’s possible for an SF novel to have too much of a sense of wonder or even for a horror novel to be too scary. However, is it possible for a weird novel to be too weird?

      Weirdness tolerance levels vary enormously, and I would say although I like weird fiction, I have my limits. I’ve certainly stopped reading some novels or watching particular films because I thought they were too weird. It got me thinking about one of my all-time favourite books, China Miéville’s The Scar. Those of you who have read it will know how weird it is. It’s set in the bizarre world of Bas-Lag, featuring the pirate city of Armada, a huge flotilla of captured ships bound together which constantly expands by capturing vessels and people.

      Bas-Lag contains humans, but it is also clustered with grotesquerie. The rulers of Armada are a couple called The Lovers whose intimacy consists of cutting symmetrical patterns into each other’s faces. The Scabmettlers are gray-skinned humanoids whose blood congeals immediately into armour when they are injured. The Remades are bio-engineered criminals who have been punished by the surgical grafting of new organic or mechanical appendages such as caterpillar treads, giant necks or skeins of spasming arms. There are giant plant people called Cactacae who have sap for blood and whose young grow out of the ground but are nursed like mammals, and half-human half-lobster ocean dwellers called Crays.

      Probably the most memorably weird creation in The Scar was the Anophelii, a race whose females are mosquito-women who bloat as they suck all the fluids right out of a body, and who only attain rationality and peace from their hunger for a short time after feeding. In a key scene in the novel, a mosquito-woman is killed while trying to speak to one of the men who had come to their island:

      She was full. They’re… they’re intelligent. It’s not that they’re mindless. It’s the hunger, he told me. It takes a long, long time for them to starve. They can spend a year without feeding. Screaming ravenous for all those weeks. It’s all they can think about. But when they’re fed, when they’re full—really sated—there’s a day or two, maybe a week, when the hunger abates. And that’s the time they try to talk.

      The weirdness in The Scar is often conceptually on a different plane. One of the characters, Uther Doul, wields a deadly weapon called the Possible Sword, a blade that instantaneously makes every possible cut he could have made. The ‘scar’ in the title, desperately sought by The Lovers as the source of unimaginable power, is a wound in the world where reality disintegrates and possibility breaks down.

      So, if The Scar wasn’t too weird for me, where are my weird limits? I’m afraid I reached them with another China Miéville novel called Embassytown. In it the enigmatic alien Ariekei have two mouths and speak a language that requires two words to be spoken at the one time. (Too weird?) They can only speak of things that actually happened, so they need to stage similes in order to talk about new experiences. (Got it?) One of the characters, Avice, realises at one point that she is a simile. (How are you going with that?) I simply couldn’t get my head around the alternative space-time reality in the novel, called the immer, so I can’t describe it now.

      I hope I haven’t weirded you out.

      All the best from the cloud.

      Dirk Strasser

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