Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Aurealis #113
    Aurealis #113
    Aurealis #113
    Ebook114 pages1 hour

    Aurealis #113

    By Dirk Strasser (Editor)

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    Aurealis #113 rolls out some red-hot fiction with the raw and confronting ‘Hair and Teeth’ from Deborah Sheldon, the future noir visions of Brad McNaughton in his ‘Wormholes and the Woman with the Fake Tan’, plus the cool brutality of Matt R O’Connor’s ‘Bits’. Our non-fiction hits the heights, too, with Claire Fitzpatrick’s ‘Universal Monsters and the New Age of Fear’ and the second part of Chris Large’s insightful interview with Fantasy legend, Raymond E Feist. And to top it off we have stunning artwork and a constellation of reviews of the latest speculative fiction. If you’re into science fiction, fantasy or horror, it doesn’t get much better than Aurealis.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherChimaera Publications
    Release dateAug 7, 2018
    ISBN9781922031709
    Aurealis #113
    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.

    Read more from Dirk Strasser (Editor)

    Related to Aurealis #113

    Related ebooks

    Science Fiction For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Full Speed Ahead

      Aug 29, 2023

      Full Speed Ahead
      6 min read

    • Article

      Frankenstein

      Feb 23, 2022

      Frankenstein
      1 min read

    • Article

      The Pinyon Puzzle

      Dec 19, 2022

      The Pinyon Puzzle
      3 min read

    • Article

      Helicopter parent

      Dec 20, 2021

      Helicopter parent
      11 min read

    • Article

      The Mystery of the Dark Asteroid That Scorched Russia

      Jun 24, 2020

      On a June morning in 1908, above a sleepy forest in the Siberian Taiga plush with larches, spruces, and black bears, something flashed so bright and hot in the sky that a hunter 10 miles away, near the Middle Tunguska River, tore his shirt off thinki

      6 min read

    • Article

      Monster

      Dec 1, 2022

      Monster
      7 min read

    • Article

      Remembering Steve Ditko: Forget Kirby Dots, Let's Talk Ditko Sparkles

      Jul 8, 2018

      The idiosyncratic co-creator of Spider-Man, Doctor Strange and many lesser-known comics characters died last week. His distinctive storytelling style shaped generations of comics readers.

      6 min read

    • Article

      Boba Fett Rules!

      Dec 16, 2021

      Boba Fett Rules!
      3 min read

    • Article

      Can Zack Snyder Bring The Zombie Flick Back From The Dead?

      May 25, 2021

      Not for the first time, the zombie movie is about to rise from the grave. In Zack Snyder’s Army of the Dead (the director’s new Netflix feature), pro-wrestler turned big screen strongman David Bautista leads a team of mercenaries in a smash-and-grab

      5 min read

    • Article

      Finally, A Girl To Die For

      Jul 30, 2021

      Finally, A Girl To Die For
      2 min read

    • Article

      Equinox

      May 18, 2022

      In this strange world, where identities change with the rising and setting of the sun, supernatural forces are at work – and they’re causing trouble… St Leonars prison was an appropriately imposing building. It rose out of the surrounding shacks and

      5 min read

    • Article

      The 10 Best Books Of 2019

      Dec 4, 2019

      The 10 Best Books Of 2019
      6 min read

    • Article

      Conspiracy Theory

      Oct 11, 2022

      Conspiracy Theory
      3 min read

    • Article

      Bill And The Tooth Fairy

      Mar 10, 2021

      Bill believed in the Tooth Fairy. Big deal, you’re thinking. Lots of kids believe in the Tooth Fairy. Well, Bill wasn’t a kid. He was twenty-eight years old. You don’t believe it. My girlfriend Mary Beth didn’t believe it, either. We were having dinn

      15 min read

    • Article

      Clown World

      Jan 5, 2022

      Clown World
      3 min read

    • Article

      Hot Right Now

      Nov 10, 2022

      Hot Right Now
      1 min read

    • Article

      FAREWELL my CONCUBINE

      Aug 31, 2021

      FAREWELL my CONCUBINE
      5 min read

    • Article

      Charles Stross

      Dec 29, 2021

      Charles Stross
      2 min read

    • Article

      New Albums

      Nov 9, 2023

      New Albums
      9 min read

    • Article

      Steve Earle

      Aug 9, 2022

      Steve Earle
      11 min read

    • Article

      Why Do We Fear Wolves?

      Dec 12, 2017

      Why Do We Fear Wolves?
      9 min read

    • Article

      LAURA JEAN McKAY

      Dec 1, 2021

      WHEN THE WINNER OF THIS YEAR’S Arthur C Clarke Award, The Animals In That Country, was announced, award director Tom Hunter heralded the book as a “first contact novel, only the multiple alien species that humanity encounters have been sharing the Ea

      3 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Aurealis #113

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      Aurealis #113 - Dirk Strasser (Editor)

      AUREALIS #113

      Edited by Dirk Strasser

      Published by Chimaera Publications at Smashwords

      Copyright of this compilation Chimaera Publications 2018

      Copyright on each story remains with the contributor

      EPUB version ISBN 978-1-922031-70-9

      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

      Hair and Teeth—Deborah Sheldon

      Wormholes and the Woman with the Fake Tan—Brad McNaughton

      Bits—Matt R O’Connor

      Universal Monsters and the New Age of Fear—Claire Fitzpatrick

      The Entertainer: An Interview with Raymond E Feist (Part 2)—Chris Large

      Reviews

      Next Issue

      Credits

      From the Cloud

      Dirks Strasser

      I was on a panel at Speculate, the Speculative Writers Festival, earlier this year ambitiously titled ‘Science Fiction: The Past, the Present, and What’s to Come’. I was charged with presenting a 10-minute introduction to the present trends in science fiction. It proved quite a challenge to wrestle the vast amorphous mass that is the science fiction currently being written into some recognisable pattern. The days have long gone when a single person could read even a sizeable percentage of all the science fiction produced in a calendar year. And making the task even more difficult was the fact that trends are usually only clear in retrospect.

      Nevertheless I gave it a go.

      Because of the panel’s specific focus and the nature of the festival audience—and to try to make the task slightly more manageable—I concentrated specifically on what could be fairly unambiguously defined as science fiction as opposed to fantasy, on the written word rather than movies and television series, and on novels rather than short stories. Since the festival was aimed at writers of speculative fiction, I looked for patterns in what was big in the science fiction of today—what was hitting the bestsellers lists and what was winning awards.

      So what big trends did I uncover? There were four.

      The first was Climate Fiction, that is, fiction that deals with climate change, often in a post-apocalyptic or dystopian future. The interesting thing about cli-fi, to use the slightly dismissive abbreviation commonly used, is that it is taken seriously by the mainstream. The literary establishment has embraced it, and it gets reviewed in the mainstream press. People base their PhDs on it. It has status as ‘literature’ and isn’t dismissed the way a lot of science fiction still is.

      While the literary establishment has recently discovered cli-fi and bestowed a sense of worthiness on it, Climate Fiction has, of course, been around for some time as part of the science fiction landscape. Australian author George Turner wrote the quintessential cli-fi novel well before it was a recognised subgenre of science fiction. His The Sea and Summer (The Drowning Towers in the US) was set in a world where global warming had resulted in a Melbourne landscape that was largely underwater. It was published in 1987 and won the Arthur C Clarke Award and was nominated for a Nebula.

      Climate Fiction is making an impact in the major SF awards. Out of the six Hugo Finalists for Best Novel this year, two are clearly cli-fi: New York 2140, by Kim Stanley Robinson and The Stone Sky, by N K Jemisin (technically science fantasy). Other major Climate Fiction novels in recent years include Margaret Atwood’s Maddaddam and Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Water Knife. Three recent Aurealis Awards Finalists also fall into the category: Clade by James Bradley, Lotus Blue by Cat Sparks, and Daniel Findlay’s Year of the Orphan.

      The second trend was the New Space Opera. ‘Space opera’ was originally a somewhat disparaging name, deriving from a comparison with ‘soap operas’ and suggesting grand, melodramatic themes. It involved large-scale, fast-paced science fiction adventure featuring space warfare, alien races and intelligent machines. Often it had a military aspect to it, although the main character focus was on civilians. Brian Aldiss once said, ‘Science fiction is for real, space opera is for fun.’

      The New Space Opera is still fun on a grand scale, set in space, exciting, fast-paced, but it’s also usually more scientifically rigorous, more literary, has more emphasis on character development, and addresses social issues of race, gender, class and postcolonialism. The term was coined in the 2007 anthology The New Space Opera edited by Gardner Dozois and Australia’s Jonathan Strahan. Notable novels that fall into this subgenre are Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice winner of the 2014 Hugo Best Novel, Kameron Hurley’s The Stars Are Legion, Yoon Ha Lee’s The Raven Stratagem, a Best Novel Finalist in this year’s Hugo’s, and The Expanse series by James S A Corey. The New Space Opera has also been invading Young Adult books with such novels as Illuminae by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff, the 2015 Aurealis Award Best SF novel winner.

      The third trend I identified was Generation Ship Fiction which focuses on sub-lightspeed starships that take several human generations to arrive at their destination, where the original occupants grow old and die, leaving their descendants to continue travelling. Unlike works relying on faster-than-light (FTL) travel, this subgenre is based on the more rigorous extrapolation of current science where FTL speed is impossible. The closed environment of a generation ship has proven to be a particularly versatile story vehicle, allowing powerful explorations, ranging from sustainability-based dilemmas and breakdowns in social structures to murder mysteries. Recent examples include Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson, Neal Stephenson’s SevenEves, and Six Wakes by Mur Lafferty, a 2018 Hugo Best Novel Finalist.

      Gender-focused Science Fiction was the fourth trend I found. These works deal with gender identity and involve depictions of single gender or genderless societies. Like all the other trends, it’s not new, but it has become increasingly prominent in recent times. It’s a trend that is often combined with one of the other three trends. The obvious precursor is the multi-award winning The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K Le Guin, published in 1969. Two New Space Opera novels I’ve already mentioned clearly also fall into this subgenre: Kameron Hurley’s The Stars Are Legion and Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice. Recent Australian Gender-focused Science Fiction has included From the Wreck by Jane Rawson, which won the 2017 Aurealis Awards for Best SF Novel and An Uncertain Grace by Krissy Kneen, which was an Aurealis Awards Finalist in the same year.

      Of course, for writers, identifying trends isn’t much more than the first step. The crucial question is to what extent (if

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1