Forever Shores Read online

  Wakefield Press

  Forever Shores

  In 1990, with his wife, Mariann, Peter McNamara steered his genre magazine Aphelion Publications (1985–1987) towards book publishing. As a specialty genre publisher, Aphelion went on to produce fourteen trade paperbacks, including the highly successful anthology Alien Shores. Through his steerage as the Convenor of the Aurealis Awards, Peter has brought Australian authors in the science fiction, fantasy and horror genres to national as well as international acclaim. The Mac Award honours his outstanding contributions to the genre in Australia. He lives, with Mariann, on the edge of Adelaide’s CBD.

  Margaret Winch lives in the Adelaide Hills. She earned her literary stripes lecturing and tutoring engineering and technology students in Literature and Society at South Australia’s Institute of Technology, after completing a History honours thesis in the same field. Margaret writes and reads extensively across mainstream and many more isolated genres, and Peter looks to her for advice and direction. Their friendship goes back more than 30 years, during which time they have exchanged (not always agreeably) a great variety of literary advice and opinion.

  Wakefield Press in association with Aphelion Publications

  1 The Parade West

  Kent Town

  South Australia 5067

  www.wakefieldpress.com.au

  First published 2003

  This edition published 2012

  Copyright in this collection © Peter McNamara and Margaret Winch, 2003

  Copyright in the stories remains with their authors

  All rights reserved. This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced without written permission. Enquiries should be addressed to the publisher.

  Edited by Gina Inverarity

  Cover painting by Conny Valentine

  Cover designed by Liz Nicholson, design BITE

  National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-publication entry

  Forever shores [electronic resource]: fiction of the fantastic.

  ISBN 978 1 74305 183 2 (ebook: epub).

  1. Science fiction, Australian.

  2. Fantasy fiction, Australian.

  I. McNamara, Peter, 1947– .

  II. Winch, Margaret, 1945– .

  A823.087608

  for Jack

  who carried a brightly burning torchto the New Land

  and in memory of George

  whose unstinting professionalism

  and great generosity

  prepared the way.

  My special thanks go to my wife, Mariann, and son, Patrick,

  my extraordinary family, whose vitality and resolve got me through the difficulties of assembling this anthology

  … and to my co-editor, Margaret, whose clear and precise assessments covered for my own tardiness and inadequacy.

  Peter McNamara

  Contents

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction by Margaret Winch

  Introduction by Peter McNamara

  The Phoenix Isobelle Carmody

  Players in the Game of Worlds Damien Broderick

  Rain Season Leanne Frahm

  Glimmer-by-Dark Marianne de Pierres

  The Sword of God Russell Blackford

  The Gate of Heaven Rosaleen Love

  The Boy Who Didn’t Yearn Margo Lanagan

  A Spell at the End of the World Alexander James

  The Isolation of the Deciding Factor Carmel Bird

  Queue Jumping Tim Richards

  Dr Who? (or The Day I Learnt to Love Tom Baker) Ben Peek

  Frozen Charlottes Lucy Sussex

  A Gorilla Becomes a Jeep Edward Burger

  Rynemonn Terry Dowling

  Stone Gift Robert N. Stephenson

  A Room for Improvement Trudi Canavan

  Waste Michael Pryor

  Afterword by John Foyster

  Contributors

  Acknowledgements

  ‘Rain Season’ by Leanne Frahm was first published in Eidolon #27 (Eidolon Publications 1998); ‘The Boy Who Didn’t Yearn’ by Margo Lanagan was first published in White Time (Allen & Unwin 2000); ‘The Sword of God’ by Russell Blackford was first published in Dreamweavers (Penguin 1996); ‘Stone Gift’ by Robert N. Stephenson was first published in Tessellations (eds Kain Masson and Jason Blechley 2000); ‘The Phoenix’ by Isobelle Carmody was first published in Green Monkey Dreams (Penguin/Viking 1996).

  Thanks go to Russell Blackford, Van Ikin and Sean McMullen, editors of Strange Constellations (Greenwood Press 1999); Paul Collins, Steven Paulsen and Sean McMullen, editors of the MUP Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy (Melbourne University Press 1998); and Dirk Strasser, Stephen Higgins and Keith Stevenson, editors of Aurealis, for the use of biographical and archival detail.

  Introduction

  by Margaret Winch

  Fantasy 1. imagination unrestrained by reality. 2. Psychol. a sequence of more or less pleasant mental images, usually fulfilling a need not gratified in the real world.

  Reality is what we humans as social animals have agreed (through conditioning, osmosis and social control) to call reality; it is the world-taken-for-granted (Berger 1969). Different societies/cultures adopt a consensual stance on different realities and therefore display different fantasies. Fantasy has always been with us, its nature remains the same, but its specific examples change over time and place, as the definition of reality changes. To identify the themes of popular fantasy is to reveal the underbelly of a social culture, its deepest hopes and darkest fears.

  Western reality, since the Age of the Enlightenment, has relied on rationalism and scientific ‘fact’. Reality in this definition is what is able to be tested by methods appropriate to the dominant scientific paradigm—observable, replicable and therefore susceptible to consensus. What is not available to such testing is fantasy (other than real). Fantasy is the body of beliefs, ideas, experiences, images that cannot be explained or accounted for by science or logic. It is not ‘evidence based’ in the sense that science requires. It posits a different world entirely.

  The twentieth century mined deep veins of fantasy that revealed the extent of disillusionment with the dominant reality—here we can acknowledge the great dystopian fantasies, among them Brave New World and Animal Farm. But the Age of Aquarius saw a different response, an escape from the horrors and complexities of the twentieth century and a return to simpler heroic values and magic. The release of The Lord of the Rings in the 1960s coincided with the flowering of the hippie movement, flower power, and ‘drop out, turn on, tune in!’ This was a sea change in popular fantasy and brought about a host of imitations during the last three decades of the century. For those of us old enough to remember, the question ‘Where were you when you first read The Lord of the Rings?’ has almost the same capacity to call up the sense of a life-changing event, a fulcrum, as the question ‘Where were you when you heard JFK had been assassinated?’ (Or, for those who are younger, we could perhaps say it was like ‘Where were you when you heard about September 11?’)

  In the present collection, Alexander James in his story A Spell at the end of the World cleverly picks up on this, when he conceives of a popular work of heroic fantasy (surely The Lord of the Rings) as having been engineered by the London Supernatural Council (a kind of Guild of Sorcerers) with the express purpose of providing cover for the work of sorcerers in the age to come. How? ‘It will cement the sorcerer’s art as fantasy, enter culture and divert ordinary people from our reality.’ In James’s hands, what is presented as fantasy is the real reality.

  So, could it be that the worlds created by some of the fantasy writers of the past thirty years are s
omehow more real than the grubby and increasingly frightening everyday life we share? Fantasy is criticised by some as escapist drivel, pulp fiction, unworthy of serious interest. Much of fantasy has escapist appeal, indeed, but it is not coincidence that many of its themes are linked to and tap into the pressing social concerns of our time—the environmental movement, for instance, the increasing popular obsession with natural healing and alternative medicine, the interest in witchcraft and other esoteric religions. Could it be that, while reflecting the sense of alienation that many of us feel with our world, fantasy also—in expressing our deep yearning for reconnection with the natural world, with spirituality, with what we would like our selves to be—provides us with a basis on which to build a better reality?

  Then, of course, there are the popular fantasies described as ‘paranoid’ by those who cling to the ‘realities’ of scientific, economic, social and political progress. There are many horrific fictional examples of ‘science gone wrong’ but, interestingly, two of the most prevalent recent fantasy themes have been those of alien abduction and government conspiracy, expressions of a dark and fearful questioning of the ‘accepted’ reality. Here, we have only to look at the extraordinary success of The X Files, the statistics on those (particularly in the United States) who believe that they have seen UFOs or been abducted by aliens and subjected to bizarre scientific/medical experiments, the continuing interest in the Rothwell Incident, the Bermuda Triangle. Recent terrorist activity in the real, everyday world may prove to have diverted attention from alien enemies, but it’s a reasonably sure bet that political conspiracy will fuel fantasies for some time to come. And the fact that our previously unquestioned realities have been shown to be vulnerable will doubtless provide new, richer material for fantasy writers.

  For those of us who first fell to fantasy in a serious way on the publication of The Lord of the Rings, and those who have been acquainted with it through the recent successful films adapted and directed by Peter Jackson, the main attraction is likely to have been the wizardry involved in constructing an entire world, different from our own but connected to us too by means of values to which we can aspire. This is something appropriately worked through in vast volumes—trilogies or longer—the most common form of fantasy during the last thirty years. Think of David Eddings, David Gemmell, Stephen Donaldson, Terry Goodkind. But also more recently, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Robin Hobb, Juliet Marillier, Holly Lisle, Sara Douglass and Fiona McIntosh.

  Much more long fantasy is being published by women than ever before. Might this be because the New Age fantasy values conform more readily to what have traditionally been seen as ‘women’s values’? So while David Gemmell, for example, has had success with his popular Chronicles of the Jerusalem Man, a combination of swords and sorcery and Western shoot ’em up adventure, we are increasingly seeing fictions that concern themselves with spirituality, healing, nurturing, interaction with the natural world, and a desire to preserve rather than master.

  What of short fantasy? It seems that in recent times this has so far been much less frequently published. Among other restrictions, the short form obviously lends itself far less to the creation of comprehensive worlds and the exploration of large themes and narratives. So in putting this anthology together, there have been some surprises. Foremost was the huge variety of stories submitted. This posed a dilemma: how were we to define ‘fantasy’ in a short story form? At first, one of us got hung up on the selection criteria while the other growled, ‘Fantasy is whatever I say it is!’ In the final selection, fantasy has been whatever we agreed it was. Out of the range of submissions, we agreed on those of excellence that could be designated fantasy. We rejected those that, though excellent, we agreed were mainstream or science fiction. While not every reader will agree with us, we are confident that the result is a collection that ranges from conventional to modern, and expands the definition of the genre.

  For many readers, fantasy has always had to do with the magical, the different from the here-and-now everyday pedestrian world—an escape to a better world, perhaps. But these stories push the envelope in all directions—some horrific, some humorous, some ironic, some New Age, some just weird—in a variety of different styles and contexts. We hope there will be something for everyone who reads fantasy here, and also for those readers who haven’t tried it before.

  Introduction

  by Peter McNamara

  I’ve only a couple of personal notes to add.

  Both notes concern my belief that genre writing and publishing in this country doesn’t work hard enough at building or reinforcing its own mythology.

  Something for me to note positively was the pleasure I received when I found that the assembly of this anthology was coincident with Terry Dowling’s return to the Rynosseros cycle. An even greater pleasure was to recently receive from Terry a package of these stories to read: the three short pieces, ‘Coyote Struck By Lightning’, ‘Coming Down’ and ‘Sewing Whole Cloth’, that assemble to form ‘Rynemonn’. Tom Tyson is the nearest we have to an icon of Oz genre writing (whatever became of Chandler’s Grimes?)—we all want to see him complete his personal journey, but none of us want to lose him. Like the red desert he inhabits, he’s part of us.

  But as one icon shifts ground, a replacement emerges—so that another coincident pleasure was the arrival—only in short story form at this stage—of Alexander James’s urban sorcerer, Barker Moon (though I believe ‘A Spell at the End of the World’ features one of Barker’s ancestors).

  At once, I was both struck by lightning and under a spell. Why not, I asked myself, centre the anthology around this rare crossover of characters and worlds? Why not take the opportunity to offer this resonant Tom story to all those who have waited so long for it (sorry, Terry, but you’ve hardly been rushing it), and push young Alexander (another unhurried writer) along by thrusting his alter ego out into the public glare?

  I feel as if I’m right in the middle of one of those very rare moments in genre history. There’s electricity involved. I want to hold the moment, but, of course, everything is transitory, and I know I can’t.

  But other anthologists can come back to it. Though the Blue Captain’s destiny now presents itself, Tom has far from run his course (this moment will need to be revisited)—while Barker is just striding onto the stage. We haven’t got a feel for him yet.

  To personal note number two, an accounting for my tastes.

  The line between science fiction and fantasy is often blurred beyond distinction. Stories readily slide across the boundary, and are defined only by the reader’s personal tastes and intuition, and perhaps, if one can pick it, the author’s intent.

  The Aurealis Awards, which splits into divisions of science fiction, fantasy, horror, young adult and children’s genre literature, regularly points up this difficulty in categorisation. Recently, Terry Dowling’s ‘The Lagan Fishers’, Jack Dann’s ‘The Diamond Pit’ and Lucy Sussex’s ‘Merlusine’ turned up in short-lists on both sides of the fantasy/science fiction dividing line. My instincts and reading of intent told me they were all fantasy stories, but in a couple of cases, even the authors disagreed with me. It seems they had intended quite the opposite.

  One author pressed on me the fact that their tale was set some considerable period into the future, and that automatically made it science fiction. I disagreed. Setting, for me, has little or nothing to do with it. Tone and architecture are the defining characteristics.

  Which brings me to something a bit more detailed about my view of why we chose these stories. Storyline is probably the first thing I try to pick up on—and that doesn’t necessarily mean a steady progression from beginning to middle to end (not that there’s anything wrong with that!) but some ‘journey’ has to be involved. And the storyline has to rise out of the plot. That’s fundamental.

  There’s not much room in a short story to develop character, but I still like to get a feel for the characters—more than height and hair or eye colour. Style, tone
and voice are all aspects that lift a story (and are vital in sketching the characters), but what I look for most eagerly is good architecture—at its most basic, the way form complements content. As I see it, the storyline is the ‘telling’ of the tale, but the architecture is its true ‘expression’.

  Short stories are a contained force, and many writers find them more difficult to execute than the less urgent, often-rambling novel form, but, when well constructed, they take on an elegance to which novels simply can’t aspire. We should all be reading more anthologies.

  While I’m confident that everything in this anthology is classifiable as fantasy, some stories would look equally at home in other categories. ‘Rynemonn’, ‘Players’, ‘Glimmer’, ‘Heaven’, ‘Waste’ and ‘A Room for …’ would not be out of place in a science fiction collection, while ‘Spell’ and the gruesome ‘Charlottes’ could find a home in anything with the word ‘dark’ addressing it. The leanings of the others split between pure fantasy and mainstream.

  Though everything is really mainstream, isn’t it? We just like to think we’re different.

  The Phoenix

  Isobelle Carmody

  ‘Princess Ragnar?’

  Ragnar turned to William and tried to smile, but her hatred was so great that it would allow no other emotion. She did not feel it as heat but as a bitter burning cold flowing through her, freezing her to ice, to stone. Driven by such a rage, a princess might unleash her armies and destroy an entire city to the last person. She might command the end of a world.

  ‘Princess? Are you cold?’

  She barely heard William’s words, but when she shook her head, before he turned away to keep watch for Torvald, she saw in his pale-green eyes the same blaze of devotion that had flared three summers past when he had pledged himself to her.

  Her mind threw up an image of him making that pledge, the words as formal as the words from an old Bible.