Big announcement: Aurealis is relaunching as a monthly e-magazine.

Dirk Strasser says, “For over 20 years Aurealis has been trapped inside the physical world of hard copy. Up until issue #44, the magazine has been confined by paper pages and the three dimensions of the book format. Now we've escaped. And there's no going back.”

"Aurealis is the Australian magazine of fantasy, science fiction and horror. It has been publishing continuously since 1990, but this issue is its first e-publication. Aurealis #45 features the return of the legendary bunyipslayer in a brilliant story by Lachlan Huddy, a harrowing fairy tale from Aimee Smith, and an interview with Glenda Larke, as well as reviews, news and more."

Click on the magazine cover above to download Aurealis #45 for FREE.

Recent Tweets Roundup - Sept/Oct

From http://twitter.com/aurealisXpress

New episode of Coode St Podcast with guest Ursula Le Guin http://bit.ly/nK3IQp

Five questions for Jo Anderton, author of Debris « by Patty Jansen bit.ly/oUZP8G

Check out Deborah Biancotti’s "On Burnout" series of posts with a bunch of Oz & Int authors & editors bit.ly/nTxeSR

Off the Shelf: Emily Rodda - RN Book Show - 12 October 2011 bit.ly/mXdyAs

Alan Baxter: “I’ll be here on Saturday. If you're in Brisbane and a writer, come along!” bit.ly/qW2ETs

Book List: Graphic Novels and YA/Classic graphic novel adaptations for teens j.mp/r2HEOJ

Cat Sparx received an Australia Council Emerging Writer's Grant. bit.ly/qNbiDo

A life cut short - The West Australian on Sara Douglass yhoo.it/qjIwvw

Australian fantasy writer Sara Douglass dies of ovarian cancer | The Australian bit.ly/rdcLqN

Booked! Greg Egan, Author, ‘The Clockwork Rocket’ bit.ly/mRVW8m

Take Five with Keri Arthur, Author, ‘Darkness Unbound’ ow.ly/1xH1SE

Tehani Wessely: I posted the first episode of The Book Nut! Wherein Alex Pierce & I discuss books we teach & those we'd love to teach: bit.ly/oC6Kci

Alison Goodman invited by the The Wheeler Centre to take part in "Two Sides of the Story" on Tues 22 Nov 7-8pm. Free Event. http://wheelercentre.com/calendar/event/fantasy/

On indie press: Paul Collins | A conversational life bit.ly/nfhX4L

Final Draft Podcast | Peter Docker, author of The Waterboys bit.ly/rsjsLT

Mourning Goats Author Interviews: #23 Max Barry bit.ly/qX8EwQ

Michael Pryor launches George Ivanoff's GAMERS' CHALLENGE - YouTube bit.ly/o3zQx9

Book Review: The Golden Door by Emily Rodda

Scholastic
Review by Carissa Thorp

Rye seeks to leave Weld, the isolated walled city he calls home, in search of his brothers who left years ago to find and stop the evil source of the Skimmers, flying creatures that enter the city every night and kill anyone they can. He’s joined by Sonia, a young girl orphaned by the Skimmers, and they emerge on the other side of The Golden Door, they don’t know where, in a land that is unlike anything they were brought up to expect of the Barbarian lands. Adventures ensue and new friends are made.
I’ve never read a book by Emily Rodda before, in spite of knowing her name and popularity. Having seen the television series based on her Deltora Quest series, though, I can see similarities between the two tales; quests, young leads, magical objects, puzzles, etc. Thankfully, fans of her previous work should enjoy this series without worrying too much about “sameness”, and as a new reader, I found The Golden Door immediately appealing. Rodda’s skill as a writer is very much in evidence. It’s lovely to start a book and feel drawn in, effortlessly, to a tale of likeable characters in interesting situations. I particularly liked the way the consequences of Rye’s early life in an enclosed city (never seeing or experiencing hills, for example) are explored. A good place to start reading Rodda if you or the young people in your life never have before.

This review first appeared in the Aurealis Magazine subscriber newsletter.

Book Review | Ember and Ash by Pamela Freeman

Orbit

Review by Stuart Mayne

I am a fan of Pamela Freeman. The Castings trilogy is a fine series that strays away from the formulaic fantasy trilogy, with a deftness and lightness of touch that had me scrabbling for each as they came out. Now we can once again enjoy the mysteries of the Eleven Domains.

Ember watches helplessly as her future and happiness vanish in a scorching burst of flames with the murder of her husband. Determined to bring revenge upon the perpetrators she enlists the help of Ash, the son of a seer, and together they pit themselves against the terrible elements in a last desperate bid to end the conflict once and for all.

Ember and Ash continues Freeman’s journey as a writer of something different in the fantasy genre. Through the pain and suffering of her characters we touch on the human; the singular pain of the individual. She makes fantasy understandable to me. She writes with a light touch. Her novels feel like a watercolour compared to the usual impasto style. While more baroque than the Castings trilogy, Ember and Ash is a deftly portrayed study of evil and vengence.

 

This review first appeared in the Aurealis Magazine subscriber newsletter.

DVD Review | The Lost Thing

Madman

Review by Carissa Thorp

The Lost Thing is a short film based on Shaun Tan's picture book of the same name. Shaun joined a small team, doing the production design, art direction and storyboarding, as well as co-directing, to make this lovely animated incarnation of his work, bringing to life a vividly drear and retro world, reminiscent of Melbourne in which an unnamed young man (narrated by Tim Minchin) adopts a potbellied crab-like, bell-tongued creature he discovers on the beach. With the creature "obviously" lost and out of place in the young man's world, the two temporary companions must find a solution to their problem.

Blessed with glowing animation, storybook transitions, gentle humor and a dreamlike logic, The Lost Thing is a real gem; whimsical, universal, and yet somehow very Australian (could just be the accent, but I think it’s the light). It may only be 15 minutes long, but it's a very special 15 minutes, recommended for young and old. I hope some day we get to see a feature-length film from the marvelous mind of Shaun Tan.

 

This review first appeared in the Aurealis Magazine subscriber newsletter.

Book Review | The Dervish House by Ian McDonald

Hachette
Review by Christine Tursky Gordon

Turkey in 2027 is a member of the EU, the meeting point of West and East, and of Christianity and Islam, a place of nanotech sweatshops, power struggles, hidden and open religious history, and the driving pulse of business amongst the heat and the smell of spices. Cosmopolitan, crowded, dynamic Istanbul seeps through on every page; McDonald captures the culture, the voice, and the atmosphere of the city just as evocatively as he did for readers in Brasyl.
In The Dervish House McDonald pulls together disparate characters whose stories dovetail in a seven-day-long ticking clock buildup of tension. A boy with a damaged heart sees a terrorist explosion on a tram through the remote camera on his BitBot and realises that someone else also has a hidden robot watching those who flee the aftermath. Necdet runs from the tram, amazed to be alive, but soon starts seeing djinns and spirits interwoven with the scenes of his daily life. Leyla misses the explosion, misses her job interview but finds work in a relative’s nanoware startup and must negotiate with both family and local criminal groups to secure funding. Adnan snorts nanoware brain enhancers just like his commodity trader colleagues, but he plans a massive fraud involving radioactive Iranian gas while his antique trader wife Ayse is offered an outrageous sum to quietly find a mythical artefact. Greek-out-of-water Georgios is a retired economics professor with a poisoned past of radical activism who is suddenly, incongruously invited to join a government think tank.
The implications of the terrorist attack trickle slowly into the open as the characters follow their own paths, looming larger and darker than anything the government could have expected. McDonald has created a rich, vivid thriller that is beautifully written.

This review first appeared in the Aurealis Magazine subscriber newsletter.

Win a Pamela Freeman omnibus edition of The Castings Trilogy in our February Subscriber Newsletter Competition

The good folks at Orbit have given us TWO copies of Pamela Freeman's omnibus edition of The Castings Trilogy, taking in the books Blood Ties, Deep Water and Full Circle. The success of this trilogy helped Pamela secure a worldwide contract with Orbit for another series of books. It is an excellent series indeed!

Subscribers to Aurealis Magazine should refer to this month's aurealisXpress newsletter for details on how to enter.

Book Review | Sunshine State by James Miller

Little, Brown
Review by Lachlan Huddy

It’s all looking rosy for Mark Burrows at the outset of this near-future fever dream. Sure, there's some unfortunate more-or-less-global devastation wrought by climate change, but Burrows's native Britain has escaped the worst of it and the retired spy is looking forward to fatherhood. Cue the One Last Job. Burrows is called back into service and shipped out to Florida—better known now as the Storm Zone care of, well, guess—in pursuit of his ex-comrade and brother-in-law, Charles Ashe. Ashe has become something of a messiah to the various minorities and extremist groups who, unwelcome in an America now run by iron-fisted evangelical Christians, call the Storm Zone home. So begins Burrows’s descent into, yes, the heart of darkness. Nothing wrong with ripping off an English classic so long as your head and heart’s in the right place, and Miller’s intentions are fittingly noble in seeking to highlight the dangerous political forces at war for America’s soul. Of course Sunshine State suffers in comparison to its forebears (Ashe’s sympathetic villain also owes much to Milton's Lucifer of Paradise Lost), but playing runner-up to the canon is no shameful thing. Some have complained of Miller’s overwrought prose, and to be sure the pages turn a little purple at times, but it isn’t wanton; the technique builds atmosphere and sucks the reader irrevocably into the mind of a maddening man and a mad, mad world.

This review first appeared in the Aurealis Magazine subscriber newsletter.

Book Review | Diamond Eyes by A.A. Bell

Harper Voyager

Review by Crisetta MacLeod

Into the life of a strange, demented, violent woman, cruelly constrained in an asylum, comes a new therapist with his own issues. Ben is the first person to get through to Mira. He begins to probe the dissociated world that she lives in; she is blind, but seems to see, and has extraordinary multi-faceted reflective eyes. As he begins to draw her out, he takes her back to visit the strange tree-home where she was raised. Meanwhile, two scientists are working on an infallible lie-detector using physiological and psychological input.

These two, in cahoots with Ben, begin to unravel just what it is that Mira ‘sees’. Then someone is murdered… Mira was not physically present, but she ‘saw’ what happened! Wild cross-country chases, layers of authority where the corrupt and the well-meaning are indistinguishable, and a lovable mischief-making asylum inmate whose deafness is a counterpoint to Mira’s blindness. What a rare and special tale! A. A. Bell has that much beloved faculty of good science fiction writers—she takes areas of science that are already understood, and squeezes them just a bit further so that the scientific basis of her story has a grounding in fact.

This review first appeared in the Aurealis Magazine subscriber newsletter.

Book Review: Cryoburn by Lois McMaster Bujold

Baen
Review by Carissa Thorp

Miles Vorkosigan, Imperial Auditor (ie Investigator) of Barrayar, travels to the planet Kibou-daini to look into the business of cryo-preservation, an industry which is an obsession on Kibou-daini and has shaped the planet’s culture and political structure for ill. Fate provides Miles with access to the real story behind the PR and gives him the opportunity to protect Barrayar’s interests as well as undo an injustice.
I'm a big fan of Bujold and have been really looking forward to another Vorkosigan novel. It was worth the wait, especially because of the promising complications birthed by this novel for future books. However, this isn't a book I'd recommend to someone who hasn't read any Vorkosigan books before. Thankfully, because of the generosity and forward thinking of Baen and Bujold, I can let readers know that all Bujold's novels in this universe have been made available to download as ebooks, in a variety of formats, providing newcomers a way to try out the series, become addicted from the first chapter, then go out and buy all the books in hard copy, including Cryoburn. Which one do I recommend you start with? Cordelia's Honor, an omnibus edition that includes the novels Shards of Honor and Barrayar, starring Miles' mother and father; they provide a great background of the "universe" and the history of major series characters. It’s where I started and they remain among my favourites.

This review first appeared in the Aurealis Magazine subscriber newsletter.

Book Review | Stone Spring by Stephen Baxter

Gollancz

Review by Stuart Mayne

Hot on the heels of his near future world flood duology (Flood and Ark), Baxter is back on the flood theme with Stone Spring, a Mesolithic speculative fiction novel about what would happen if the North Sea hadn't flooded entirely.

As usual with all of Baxter's novels this is a well researched and lively written narrative of high excitement with the ability to delight and move the reader.

Ana is fourteen. Her father is missing, her mother dead. Ana lives on the coast of Doggerland, a vast and fertile plain that linked Britain to mainland Europe during the Mesolithic era. But the world is changing. The ice age is coming to an end and the glaciers are retreating and the seas rising. One fateful year a tsunami sweeps inland and scatters Ana's people. But if the people of distant Jericho could build a wall to keep the world out surely Ana's people could build a wall to keep the sea out?

As much as this is a book of environmental disaster and man's ingenuity to overcome natural disaster it is also, in Baxter's best skill, a story of family and the jealousies that lead man to do bad things to the one's we love the best.

This review first appeared in the Aurealis Magazine subscriber newsletter.

Quillblade by Ben Chandler

Random House

Review by Carissa Thorp

Looking for something exciting and complex for your teen to read? Something you might also enjoy yourself? Quillblade is just the thing. 

Our heroes, the slave twins Lenis and Missy Clemens, are Keepers of a small group of Bestia aboard the Hiryū, an airship gifted to the Warlord of Shinzō by the Puritans. The Bestia are creatures that have “affinities” for elements, enabling them to power the world’s technologies, including airships. Lenis and Missy, themselves having affinities with the beasts, are essential to running the airship. Compelled to stay with the ship when it’s stolen the day after it arrives in Shinzō, they are pulled into a dangerous and mystical adventure they don’t understand.

Imaginatively inspired by Anime, Japanese culture, and world myth and history, the story tumbles head-long into a mysterious and thrilling plot set in a world that is obviously wide and deep, full of endless possibilities for more story. This is a good thing as there’s apparently six novels in the series. I finished Quillblade surprised that so much had happened in such a relatively slender novel; epic in a regular sized package. Full of great ideas that are familiar but never cliche, Quillblade is a top read.

This review first appeared in the Aurealis Magazine subscriber newsletter.

Book Review | Elves – Once Walked With Gods by James Barclay

Gollancz

Review by Karen Simpson Nikakis

It is extremely difficult to think of elves without thinking of Peter Jackson’s rendition of Tolkienesque elves as being tall, slender and blonde. From the lithe athleticism of Legolas to the serene beauty of Galadriel and the wisdom of Elrond, Tolkienesque elves might fight with the required ferocity, but their motivations are lofty, and their more desired pursuits that of poetry and music. The contrast with Barclay’s murderous, treacherous and ethnically or ‘thread’ divided elves couldn’t be more startling. Gone too is the cool arboreal gloom usually favoured as elvish habitation, replaced with tropical, parasite infested jungles. The hero Takaar is in self-imposed exile and in his absence, the various ‘threads’ turn on each other. Aided by human mercenaries, no act is too despicable, no murder too bloody. And like the elves, it took me a considerable way into the narrative before I could work out whose side I should be on. This is the first book in a trilogy, but its darkness and reliance on the events in the back story, make me think it would be far better suited as Book Two.


This review first appeared in the Aurealis Magazine subscriber newsletter.

Book Review | Tymon’s Flight by Mary Victoria

Harper/Voyager

Review by Crisetta MacLeod

I caught up with Voyager’s new kid on the block at Aussiecon4 in Melbourne. She told me her background was in animation. She worked on Lord of the Rings, which is what took her to New Zealand, where she has lived for ten years after travelling the world ceaselessly. Her family is Iranian, Jewish and English, and her husband is French. They have a cute little four-year-old daughter who was wearing very covetworthy pink boots. Her husband designed the evocative cover, showing a quaint flying machine in the tree canopy.

Tymon’s story is based in Mary’s tree world–the canopy of the tree is as large as the Himalayan mountain range. We talked about Avatar, and I told her about Kaaron Warren’s Walking the Tree, but Mary Victoria’s tree world was originally based on Iggdrasyl, the Norse legendary tree which encompasses the world. Tymon the protagonist is a rebellious orphan, raised in a Seminary. (Mary doesn’t apologise for her use of familiar tropes!) On completing his studies he is sent to a distant part of the canopy, as assistant to a dissolute missionary. It is there that he meets with the people who have been used as cheap labour by his original masters.

One of them is ritually sacrificed annually to the tree by being thrown off into the swirling cloud-filled depths below. After getting to know the locals, Tymon becomes disaffected from his origins, and joins forces with the oppressed peoples. To tell more is to spoil the story!

Mary scrapped the first version of her book, and then rewrote it entirely from scratch. Her second volume is due out in February, so we don’t have to wait long to find out what happens next.

This review first appeared in the Aurealis Magazine subscriber newsletter.

Win Books and DVDs in our October Subscriber Newsletter Competition

This month Orbit have given us THREE copies of New Zealand author Helen Lowe’s debut novel Heir of Night. And Madman Entertainment have once again come up with a great DVD prize of THREE copies each of The Fifth Element and 20th Century Boys.

Subscribers to Aurealis Magazine should refer to this month's aurealisXpress newsletter for details on how to enter.

 

Book Review | Path of the Stray by Kim Falconer

Harper/Voyager

Review by Crisetta MacLeod

The prologue leads us from a familiar Falconer scene into the first book of a new trilogy. In an austere and deteriorating world, autocratically ruled, Luka is working with cryogenically preserved DNA to drag wolves back from extinction. He links up with Janis and her daughter Loni, witches both. Janis is working on nanotechnology and when combined with Luka’s research…but I’ve said enough, the story will be spoiled. Suffice to say that the werewolf results of their combined efforts are spirited away to a parallel world which is free of pollution and oppression. One baby wolf is lost in the transition, and as an abandoned and resentful orphan becomes a cruel oppressor. Falconer peppers her story with astrological references, as we have come to expect from her. She also uses another Falconer trope, in that the two worlds between which her characters travel have differences in elapsed time.

An engrossing read demanding full engagement from the reader.

This review first appeared in the Aurealis Magazine subscriber newsletter.

Russell Blackford reviews Classic Australian SF series

Australian writer, philosopher and literary critic, Russell Blackford, has reviewed each of of the 6 books in the Classic Australian SF series:

The Crowned Skull by Fergus Hume

The Shrieking Pit by Arthur J Ress

Vandals of the Void by James Morgan Walsh

A Bid For Fortune by Guy Boothby

A Week in the Future by Catherine Helen Spence

Out of the Silence by Erle Cox


See our sidebar for links to the Aurealis Store.

AussieCon 4 Schedule for Aurealis Magazine and Chimaera

Aurealis Magazine will be in the Dealer's Room at table 10.


Nuts and bolts: Editing YA spec fic, an insider’s view

Editing YA Speculative Fiction requires special skills. Industry insiders share their experiences.

Sarah Hazelton, Zoe Walton, Amanda Pillar, Rani Graff, Stuart Mayne (chair)
Friday 10am, Room 212


Directions in Australian horror 

Tracking the movement from the traditional to the new, and maybe back again.

Stuart Mayne, Bill Congreve, Angela Slatter, Trent Jamieson, Honey Brown
Friday 3pm, Room 210


The best-kept Secrets of Australian horror 

Our scholars present an introduction to the under-known genre authors of Australia’s past.
Stuart Mayne, Lucy Sussex, Kyla Ward, Marty Young
Saturday 1pm, Room 204


Classic Australian SF Launch - Sunday 11am, Room 203


Classic Australian SF Panel - Sunday 12pm, Room 217


20 years of Aurealis 

Aurealis magazine has survived and flourished for 20 years. For Australian SF magazines, that’s several lifetimes. How did this happen? Come and hear about the journey, the lessons learnt, and how it all began from current and past editors.

Dirk Strasser, Stephen Higgins, Michael Pryor, Keith Stevenson, Stuart Mayne
Sunday 3pm, Room 217

Jatta by Jenny Hale

Scholastic

Review by Crisetta MacLeod

Here be dragons! This is a great tale in the best of fantasy traditions, but Jatta is a heroine with a severe monthly problem—she has been cursed, and on the full moon becomes a werewolf. Her father the king and her brother Arthmael seek to protect her as she horrifies all around them with her bloodlust and ferocious strength. The kingdom is also threatened by a tyrant who comes marauding through a magical portal. Jatta and Arthmael set forth on a quest to save the kingdom, and cure Jatta of her curse. With the aid of a magical object and loads of courage and perseverance… but I musn’t spoil the story! Just imagine wakening to find yourself covered in blood, with your bedroom destroyed, and your beloved brother horribly wounded—then imagine what it felt like to discover gradually that this bloody mayhem was all your own doing! This is a wonderfully imagined situation, and you will find Jatta’s doggedly faithful brother to be a likeable character indeed. So often the story seemed to be about to end in tragedy, and then…

Weblog for August

Weblog items appear first at our Twitter page: http://twitter.com/aurealisXpress 

Fiona McIntosh will be on ABC's Talking Heads on 30 August 6:30pm http://bit.ly/aNEjo8

UTS Alumni Profile of Deborah Abela (Grimsdon) http://bit.ly/cDrtnG

2010 Ditmar Nominees http://bit.ly/d5Wq3T

The Small Picture Podcast interviews Alexandra Adornetto (Halo) http://bit.ly/bcf5MO

Noni Hazelhurst interviews Director Joe Dante (Gremlins, Innerspace), in Oz for #MIIF, on ABC 
Radio http://bit.ly/bTJOW6 mp3

Boomerang Books interview with Alexandra Adornetto (Part 2) http://bit.ly/a5NIWf

SMH interview with Neil Gaiman http://bit.ly/96wULk Also "Comic geeks take over the Opera House" http://bit.ly/cqSXMz Includes video.

Meanjin - Sci-fi Illustration: Travellers in Space http://bit.ly/cBySG7

Klingon Cave Tours - In Australia! http://bit.ly/cBV8Ep

Hugo award looms for legend among Legends | The West Australian features Jonathan Strahan http://bit.ly/aJ3T3T

VoyagerBooks Chat with Kim Falconer in August!: http://wp.me/pa7QW-yA

Sean Williams shares where his stories are made @BookChickCity http://bit.ly/b45c4M

Latest Writer in Residence at insideadog.com.au is @RichardNewsome http://bit.ly/cQJcHY

GeekSydicate’s Women in Genre Fiction interview with Karen Miller http://bit.ly/cBcD8J

Open spec fic short story markets in Australia, a round up! http://bit.ly/bWauaS

Comic Con video interview with Scott Westerfeld & Keith Thompson by Suvudu http://bit.ly/cKmMPX

Garth Nix and @JonathanStrahan contribute to the "What 'Sword and Sorcery' Means to Me" Mind Meld @sfsignal http://bit.ly/chfnFP

Australian Speculative Fiction Blog Carnival for July @ HorrorScope http://bit.ly/btFUa4

Paul Collins interview at Ripping Ozzie Reads http://bit.ly/av7RDc

Two George Ivanoff interviews: at Aus Lit Review http://bit.ly/a9HweY and SYN FM http://bit.ly/auvNeZ (direct link to mp3)

Glenda Larke on Geek Syndicate! http://tinyurl.com/2d6dp5z

Margo Lanagan’s Singing My Sister Down—a SUDS production, 11-21 August!: http://tinyurl.com/25b8hof

2010 Sturgeon Award Winners http://bit.ly/ax0726 

Damien Broderick tied for 2nd for story in @JonathanStrahan's Best SF&F of the Year #4

Rich Horton on four new Australian anthologies: http://bit.ly/dsrtVi

"Guest post: Creativity and the Scientific Mind by Graham Storrs | Not Enough Words" ( http://bit.ly/d6yLp4 )

Sandy Fussell – Author Interview | The Australian Literature Review http://bit.ly/a6mYZP

Follow Alexandra Adornetto on twitter @AlexandraHalo

Angela Slatter's Drive-By interviews with Kaaron Warren http://bit.ly/d5EQsI Karen Brooks http://bit.ly/9MMjVs Lezli Robyn http://bit.ly/aZvfUr Jason Nahrung http://bit.ly/cI3Pag

Meanjin has six questions for Margo Lanagan http://bit.ly/c6xh28

The Small Picture Podcast | Mars: A Survival Guide by Guy Murphy. http://bit.ly/9wgrnq

A limited edition version of Shaun Tan's 'The Arrival', with bonus material, coming in September: http://bit.ly/c7wLMz

Sydney Writers' Centre podcast: Patrick Ness http://bit.ly/afvEQS