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    Aurealis #116
    Aurealis #116
    Aurealis #116
    Ebook143 pages1 hour

    Aurealis #116

    By Dirk Strasser (Editor)

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    About this ebook

    Join Aurealis #116, our final issue for the year, as we travel deep into the realms of both inner and outer space. Don’t miss the Aurealis Recommended Reading list for 2018 where our reviewers give their views on the best of the best in this year’s speculative fiction. Dirk Strasser searches for some real data on how popular Science Fiction & Fantasy is compared to other genres – with some surprising results. In Mike Adamson’s ‘Walking on Titan’, the immersion of a human persona in an AI generates a unique consciousness. Hester J Rook’s ‘To Drown in Silver’ explores what happens when a liminal creature yearns equally for two states of being, while ‘Apple Black’ by Barry Charman is the story of a man haunted by the folly of technological irresponsibility. Claire Fitzpatrick discusses the importance of telling scary stories and Matthew Harrison explores the value of talking swords... and talking toasters. Plus we review The Melded Child by Jane Routley, Catching Teller Crow by Ambelin and Ezekiel Kwaymullina, The Old Knowledge by Rosalie Parker, Death of a Clone by Alex Thomson, The Rift by Rachale Craw, This Present Past by Traci Harding, Wintering by Krissy Kneen, The Anomaly by Michael Rutger, And The Ocean Was Our Sky by Patrick Ness, and Space Opera by Catherynne Valente.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherChimaera Publications
    Release dateOct 29, 2018
    ISBN9781922031730
    Aurealis #116
    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 #116 - Dirk Strasser (Editor)

      AUREALIS #116

      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 978-1-922031-73-0

      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

      Walking on Titan—Mike Adamson

      To Drown in Silver—Hester J Rook

      Apple Black—Barry Charman

      The Importance of Telling Scary Stories—Claire Fitzpatrick

      Talking Swords Are Okay—Matthew Harrison

      Aurealis Recommended Reading 2018

      Reviews

      Next Issue

      Credits

      From the Cloud

      Dirk Strasser

      How popular is fantasy & science fiction compared to other fiction genres? Is its popularity trending up or down? These are obvious questions for a magazine like Aurealis to ask. My hunch based on my experiences in the industry would have been it was in the top two (or maybe three) most popular genres—but then I could be biased in my thinking because I write speculative fiction, read more speculative fiction than any other genre, and co-edit a speculative fiction magazine. I’m in contact with like-minded people daily. It’s easy to over-emphasise how widespread something is under those circumstances. Hunches are all well and good, but I decided to hunt up some recent statistics.

      It proved quite tricky to do.

      A survey of US readers by Statista last year asked people which genres they read regularly. These were the results. As you can see, people could nominate more than one genre.

      Crime & Thriller 59%

      Adventure 47%

      Classics 44%

      Fantasy 43%

      Historic 42%

      Romance 42%

      Science Fiction 42%

      Literature 40%

      Horror 26%

      Erotica 12%

      Other 8%

      Don’t know 1%

      I don’t have access to the methodology or raw data behind this, but what struck me was that the top genre ‘Crime & Thriller’ was the only ‘double-barrelled’ category in the survey. I suppose it’s a natural association to combine the crime genre with the thriller genre, even though not every crime novel is a thriller, and not every thriller is a crime novel. However, wouldn’t the combining of fantasy & science fiction into one category for the purposes of this survey have been at least as natural?

      You’re reading a magazine that clearly made the decision almost 30 years ago that fantasy & science fiction belong together. Most of the bookstores I’ve been to over the years also pair the two. It’s been argued by some that fantasy & science fiction are both part of the continuum of speculative genre fiction. Others have maintained that genres should be defined by the primary emotion they intend to evoke, and that both fantasy & science fiction are part of what should be called the Wonder Genre. There’s even a line of argument that science fiction is actually a subset of fantasy. Whatever, the case, the two are clearly closely linked.

      So what would the result have been if they had been classed as the one ‘Fantasy & Science Fiction’ category within the survey. Clearly, since the respondents were allowed to give more than one answer, you can’t simply add the two percentages together, but there’s no doubt combining the two results would have changed the results considerably, most likely putting ‘Fantasy & Science Fiction’ at number two, possibly even number one. It all comes down to how many people in the survey said they read science fiction regularly but not fantasy and vice versa.

      A 2017 survey by the Australia Council for the Arts and Macquarie University gives us some insight into the relative popularity of a combined ‘Fantasy & Science Fiction’ category. In this survey, people were asked to nominate their number one favourite adult fiction genre (that is, they couldn’t list more than one, so we can’t compare it directly to the Statista survey).

      Their results were as follows:

      Crime/Mystery/Thrillers 32%

      Science Fiction & Fantasy 22%

      Contemporary/General Fiction 14%

      Romance 7%

      Historical 6%

      Classics 6%

      Literary 3%

      Graphic Novels, Manga & Comics 3%

      Horror 2%

      Erotica 2%

      This one has a triple-barrelled category as the most popular. Interestingly, it focused solely on adult fiction titles, so it deliberately excluded Young Adult/New Adult titles which are often also read by adults and which have a high proportion of fantasy & science fiction titles.

      It’s usually worth digging past the headlines of a statistical-based announcement. Statistics are incredible useful and a crucial part of modern life, but they can be misleading if they are naively interpreted. For example, industry statistics and publishing professionals have been reporting for years that since 2010 print sales for fantasy & science fiction have halved.

      This belief was debunked at the 2018 SFWA Nebula Conference in a presentation based on data collected by www.authorearnings.com. It provided evidence that when ebooks and audio books are taken into account, traditional publishers are currently selling more adult fantasy & science fiction than ever before. Furthermore, in 2017, 48% of fantasy & science fiction bought in the US were non-traditionally published books. So in reality, instead of fantasy & science fiction numbers halving since 2010, as is often claimed, they have in fact doubled.

      Just to add some local evidence that there’s a boom in fantasy & science fiction, thanks to all of our readers, in 2018 Aurealis has its most successful year since going digital.

      See you all in 2019!

      All the best from the cloud.

      Dirk Strasser

      www.dirkstrasser.com

      Back to Contents

      Candlebark

      Music to read Aurealis by…

      Some science-fictionish music, along with some rock and ambient and weird.

      Available from CD Baby, iTunes, Spotify and tons of other places.

      https://store.cdbaby.com/cd/stephenhiggins

      Back to Contents

      Walking on Titan

      Mike Adamson

      Titan is a dynamic world. Winds roll the sand and ice grains in the thick air under a sky of ruddy orange hydrocarbon smog. Waves stir on the surface of the methane lakes that dot the frigid deserts. The larger lakes are mostly around the poles, but lakes fed from aquifers flowing from the planet’s

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