review | ANDREW MACRAE

• Angela Challis and Shane Jiraiya Cummings (eds): Australian Dark Fantasy and Horror (Brimstone Press, ISBN 0980281709, $19.95)
• Sarah Endacott (ed.): Orb Speculative Fiction 7 (Orb Publications, ISBN 9771442558015, $15.95)
• Stephen Higgins and Stuart Mayne (eds): Aurealis 37 (Chimaera Publications, ISBN 977103512001, $12.50)
• Russell B. Farr and Nick Evans (eds): The Workers’ Paradise (Ticonderoga Publications, ISBN 9780958685672, $25)

The term speculative fiction, or SF, encompasses at least three kinds of fiction: fantasy, science fiction and horror. One of the interesting features of the contemporary Australian field, at least in its short form, is the way it blends genres in innovative and often exciting ways. Genre is by definition never pure; it’s a game, a negotiation between reader and writer on one level, and between the writer and all that has gone before on another. On the evidence in these four publications, Australian SF writers are well disposed towards these genre games.
    There has been an explosion of activity in the Australian scene in recent years but it remains, nonetheless, a small community and I’m a part of it, as both a writer and an editor. It’s impossible to write a review like this without reviewing stories written by friends, colleagues, editors and publishers. Bear that in mind as you read.
    Australian Dark Fantasy and Horror 2006 is the first anthology by Brimstone Press <www.brimstonepress.com.au>. It brings together selections of the best horror and dark fantasy for the year 2005. The two editors, Angela Challis and Shane Jiraiya Cummings, are well-known in the Australian horror community. Challis edited the much-lauded and now defunct Shadowed Realms, a webzine of flash fiction. Jiraiya Cummings is a writer and editor of the HorrorScope reviews site which focuses on Australian horror.
    Strangely enough, stories of supernatural, atmospheric horror are in the minority in this collection, and many of the pieces are intriguing mixes of other genres. Trent Jamieson’s ‘Tumble’, for example, is an engaging blend of science fiction, western, detective fiction and horror, all brought together in a distinctly Australian locale. Dirk Flinthart’s ‘The Red Priest’s Homecoming’ is closer to traditional fantasy with horror elements, set in a beautifully-realised fourteenth-century Venice.
    Kaaron Warren’s ‘Fresh Young Widow’ is a weird atmospheric tale with a surreal fantasy setting. It narrates the story of a young widow responsible for embalming and funereal rituals in which the deceased are wrapped in clay. When her husband is murdered, she tends first his body, and then the body of his murderer when it is brought to her. Like much of Warren’s work, this unsettling piece with its deceptively gentle pacing jars the reader out of any sense of comfortable norms.
    The book also includes some excellent non-fiction, in particular Chris Lawson’s ‘Body Parts’, an intriguing history of the science of anatomy and changing attitudes to the study of the human cadaver. Rob Hood contributes an account of the state of the zombie film, and James Doig’s article on horror literature and censorship in Australia is also noteworthy.
    Sarah Endacott, editor and publisher of Orb Speculative Fiction <home.vicnet.net.au/~kendacot/Orb>, was always willing to take more risks than the older and more established markets. She continues this tradition in Orb 7 with a selection of smart, literate and stylish fiction. Indeed, with a solid publishing record of eight issues (the first was issue 0) published over eight years, Orb has now become one of Australia’s more established markets.
    Paul Haines’ ‘Inducing’ is an entertaining mash-up of science fiction and grunge, with some conspiracy thrown in. It’s the story of a bong-smoking slacker who is recruited into an extra-terrestrial pyramid marketing scheme by his backpacker housemate.
    ‘An Account of an Experiment Conducted by Fra. Salimbene, a Thirteenth-Century Italian Franciscan, Englished from the Latin’ by Adam Browne is based on a true account of the language deprivation experiments carried out by Holy Roman Emperor Fredrick II. In the experiments, children were taken from their mothers at birth and raised in silence to determine what language they would speak, and thus reveal the natural language of God. Browne’s take on the subject is inventive and his writing is literate, playful and engaging.
    Bren MacDibble’s ‘A Complete Refabrication’ is a clever and light-hearted feminist angle on cyberpunk science fiction in which a mother wakes up dead in a digital reanimatarium and is rescued by her teenage hacker son. It features a lobster, a knitting machine and multiple white-robed Jesuses.
    Aurealis <www.aurealis.com.au> has been published continuously since 1990 by Chimaera Publications. Issue 37 is the first outing by new editorial team Stephen Higgins and Stuart Mayne and they present some strong fiction here.
    Rjurik Davidson’s ‘Domine’ is a sophisticated science fiction story about the meeting between a son and his father who has just returned from a faster-than-light voyage. Due to relativistic time dilation, the father is younger than the son. It’s an affecting tale told with an admirable spareness and considerable poise.
    Ben Peek’s ‘John Wayne’ is part of his series of stories about dead Americans. It recounts a meeting between Wayne and Orson Welles. Peek manages to evoke the voices of both and then uses them to provide a critique of race relations in the US.
    The Workers’ Paradise, edited by Russell B. Farr and Nick Evans and published by Ticonderoga Publications <www.ticonderogaonline.org>, is an explicit attempt to use speculative fiction to interrogate the future of work and collectivism in Australia. It takes its cue from the changes the Howard government has made to the industrial relations system, and the guidelines for the anthology are a call to arms for genre writers to explore some of the possibilities and pitfalls inherent in these themes.
    The stories selected in this collection range in tone from the bleak irony of Simon Brown’s ‘Adjudication’, through Kaaron Warren’s weird surrealist feminism in ‘His Lipstick Minx’, to the inventive satirical science fiction of Dirk Flinthart’s ‘Networking for Dummies’.
    This is a strong and diverse collection that shows Australian small press at its best: ludic, subversive and irreverent. It is exactly the type of project that demonstrates the relevance of independent publishing to contemporary culture.
    Judging by these four titles, the small press speculative fiction scene in Australia is in a healthy state, even though, inevitably, the quality of the fiction is not always even across each publication. There is little financial reward in short fiction for Australian writers and publishers and for both the endeavour is a labour of love, but the gems that are to be found will repay the price of admission. Discovering a unique voice, like that of Kaaron Warren, who has a story in three of the four books reviewed, makes the effort worthwhile. The freedom that independent publishers afford Australian SF writers to mix genre produces some compelling hybrids that defy categorisation and take Australian SF into new places.

Andrew Macrae is an SF writer and editor currently working on a PhD in Creative Writing at Victoria University. He also recommends the following recent publications in Australian speculative fiction. Daikaiju 2: Revenge of the Giant Monsters is a follow-up to the successful Daikaiju! anthology, a collection of, you guessed it, giant monster stories published by Agog! Press <www.catsparks.net/agogpress>. Fantastical Journeys to Brisbane, published by IZVORI in Zagreb, Croatia, is a continuation of the strange and fruitful relationship between the Brisbane-based speculative fiction community and Serbian fantasist, essayist and publisher Zoran Zivkovic <fantasticaljb.spaces.live.com>. Fantastic Wonder Stories is a collection of contemporary Australian speculative fiction edited by Russell B. Farr and published by Ticonderoga Publications <www.ticonderogaonline.org>. New Ceres is a twice-yearly webzine of fiction, articles and artwork set in New Ceres, a shared-world milieu blending science fiction with eighteenth-century culture <www.newceres.com>

© Andrew Macrae

Overland 188–spring 2007, p.60

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