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    Aurealis #110
    Aurealis #110
    Aurealis #110
    Ebook134 pages1 hour

    Aurealis #110

    By Chimaera Publications

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    About this ebook

    Ready for a helping of vampires, bush weirdness, existential futurism, hallucinogenic horror and calculated prognostication? Aurealis #110 features some of today’s brightest fiction from Kathryn Hore, B A Varghese, Dirk Strasser and Philip Dean, plus engrossing non-fiction from Claire Fitzpatrick and Lachlan Walter. Don’t forget our comprehensive reviews section and our stunning artwork. Aurealis – first choice speculative fiction.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherChimaera Publications
    Release dateMay 13, 2018
    ISBN9781922031679
    Aurealis #110
    Author

    Chimaera Publications

    Chimaera Publications, the owner of Aurealis magazine, the Aurealis book imprint and the Aurealis Awards, has been publishing fantasy, science fiction and horror since 1990.

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      Book preview

      Aurealis #110 - Chimaera Publications

      AUREALIS #110

      Australian Fantasy & Science Fiction

      Edited by Michael Pryor

      Published by Chimaera Publications at Smashwords

      Copyright of this compilation Chimaera Publications 2018

      Copyright on each story remains with the contributor

      EPUB version ISBN 978-1-922031-67-9

      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—Michael Pryor

      DSMV 295-90—Kathryn Hore

      Car on Fire Near Alice Springs—P R Dean

      Storage—B A Varghese

      2084—Dirk Strasser

      Book to Screen: The Vampire Chronicles and the Future of Novel Adaptation—Claire Fitzpatrick

      Metafictional Science Fiction: A Short History—Lachlan Walter

      Reviews

      Next Issue

      Credits

      From the Cloud

      Michael Pryor

      TIME TRAVEL IS ESSENTIAL TO OUR WAY OF LIFE

      Occasionally one hears pundits and savants opine that time travel is dangerous. Moreover, the same gurus even go on to aver that the very idea of time travel is fraught with peril.

      Nothing could be further from the truth, which is that time travel is essential to our way of life.

      As is our wont, we went looking for a pithy quote to launch this searing exploration of temporal matters.

      We considered Stephen Hawking. No. We thought about Einstein. No. We wanted the best, the most thoughtful, the most penetrating intellect on my side. So we chose the esteemed writer and philosopher Mr William Shatner.

      He declared: ‘I find the whole time travel question very unsettling if you take it to its logical extension. I think it might eventually be possible, but then what happens?’

      And if the words of the man who played the immortal TJ Hooker aren’t enough for you, we have a case of our own to prosecute.

      Books, movies, TV—can you think of a time when time travel has ever turned out well? To writers, time travel can safely be put in the basket of items to insert when you need to have everything go horribly wrong. Time travel is a mess. Time travel is dangerous. Time travel is a disaster.

      This might sound like a strange way to assert that time travel is something that should be undertaken as often as possible, but bear with us. Our argument is subtle, it is complex, it is multi-faceted, but then again, we’re sure you can keep up. We have nothing but the highest regard for our readers.

      Why everyone should undertake time travel is because without it, writers everywhere would be driven to despair. Think about it, it’s such a rich and fertile area for plot thickeners. Take time travel out of Wells’ The Time Machine and you pretty much have a story about a man who doesn’t go anywhere. Take time travel out of The Edge of Tomorrow and Tom Cruise would miss out on his only good role in the last 10 years. Take time travel out of the Star Trek: Enterprise TV series and you have a program that would be pretty empty and probably not worth making.

      Scratch that last example. Dammit.

      We’re asking you to think of the writers. Those poor, misunderstood, exploited—did we mention poor?—souls who do their best to bring a little happiness into your lives. Do you really want to deprive them of a tiny morsel that could brighten their blighted lives? Do you want them to do without something that could make their twisted, deprived and possibly soulless existences a little easier?

      We thought not.

      If there is no time travel, all our lives—all our lives, we tell you—would be immeasurably poorer. We would have:

      • no Morlocks or Eloi

      • no special DeLoreans

      • no bootstrapped zombies

      • no dinosaurs stepping on butterflies leading to awful spelling mistakes

      • no excellent adventure for Bill and Ted

      • no happy ending at the end of Christopher Reeve’s Superman

      • no Doomsday Book, no Anubis Gates and no Time Traveller’s Wife

      • no Outlander, no Life on Mars, no Time Tunnel.

      A world without such creations would be a much lesser world indeed.

      To put it another way, we’re all time travellers—it’s just that we’re doing it very, very slowly. It takes us one day to travel one day into the future. And we will have no truck with anyone who wishes to assert the opposite and deny our very way of life.

      All the best from the cloud.

      Michael Pryor

      Back to Contents

      DSMV 295-90

      Kathryn Hore

      She’s fucking useless.

      Stupid bitch.

      Should never have survived the war.

      Better off dead.

      ‘I can hear you, you know!’

      They didn’t answer. They never did. Jade stared at the sky through trees, blue snatches amid tangled black wood. Leaves just beginning to return after whatever wildfire raced through this way a couple of seasons back. She awoke beneath the surviving canopy, fists clenched, body on full alert. A sure indicator she needed to get going. Find the next town and trawl the old supermarkets and abandoned pharmacies, anywhere that might once have stocked supplies. If there was anything left to find.

      She closed her eyes. There’d be something. There had to be. Things were going to get desperate otherwise.

      Scratch that. Things were desperate already. It was only going to get worse.

      She pushed to a crouch, listening to the whispers amid the trees. The wildfire that had cleared the place out hadn’t been particularly awful. Regrowth was kicking in, green amid black, though it meant the forest floor made for a harder bed than she would’ve liked, stripped of all organic matter. Still, the trees were thick enough to afford some security and she could hear if anybody approached. She could hear a lot of things when lying still like this. It was one reason she liked to keep moving.

      First, check whether she was really alone. Inside her pack was her second knife, the small one that fit snug in her palm. Her just-in-case weapon. Her first blade lived in a sheath attached to her belt, always close to hand and made obvious. A third was hidden behind the rotten leather of her strapped up boot. A fourth down her back on an easily snapped string. The world wasn’t a friendly place these days and she did like to be sure.

      She scouted rough ground around her campsite, breaking into a jog to force her body from its stupor. Checking behind every fallen log, into every half-hidden clutch of trees. Finding nothing except silence and wind. On the weight of probabilities, she was alone. It was still hard to shake the sensation of eyes ever on her.

      Useless. Fucking useless. Stupid bitch. Better off dead.

      Her legs pushed into a sprint. Such a world of things to outrun.

      Sweat soaked the grubby grey of her shirt as she dropped next to the remnants of last night’s campfire with a growl in her stomach. She should eat before moving on, but her food was down to the last dregs and her water dangerously low. It wasn’t only abandoned town pharmacies she needed to hunt through, she needed to find the next settlement and see what she could barter for fresh supplies, real food that wasn’t years-old cans. Fresh water. The landscape was dotted with little clutches of communities now, like the strips of green on burnt-out trees. Any patch of arable land or safe water sported returning life, rebuilding on the ruins of the old. There was a former regional centre just east of here and if this forest was anything to go by the land was fertile enough. Odds on there was a settlement rebuilding where the old country town used to be.

      Time to go interact with people. No avoiding it now.

      She shoved knife number two into her pack, beside the old gas cigarette lighter that still—unbelievably—had fuel left in it, almost as precious a find as actual cigarettes would’ve been and she’d not seen any of those for years. An irony that once amused her, if only because the processed tobacco she’d once filled her lungs with had long run out.

      Her fingers brushed something else in the pack, an old square of cardboard, a tiny white box. She didn’t take it out. It was fragile enough and she didn’t want to lose the names printed down its side: Risperidone, and alternatives listed in her own scratchy handwriting, Clozapine (nausea), Quetiapine (patchy), Ziprasidone

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