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Summary: Aurealis, 2004
Aurealis is a long-established Australian magazine. It has had some difficulties in recent years. More transition is coming -- editor Keith Stevenson is stepping down, to be replaced by Robert Hoge and Ben Payne. The only issue to appear in 2004 was a very thick issue -- numbered 33/34/35, meaning it was a triple issue, I suppose. Indeed it was more than twice as long as the issue I saw last year (though not quite three times as long).
There were just over 100,000 words of fiction in this issue. One piece was a novel excerpt, leaving about 93,000 words of new short fiction: 3 novelettes and 16 short stories (one of these latter 7400 words by my estimate).
I thought the mix was quite uneven -- some very striking stories, and some tedious stories (and of course some in the middle). The best of the novelettes was Lee Battersby's "Father Muerte and the Rain", definitely one of the "striking" pieces. Father Muerte seems to be the dominant personality in a curious isolated touristy sort of town, where strange things happen and some people live for a long time. One day there is a rain of insubstantial coelacanths -- insubstantial to most people, but not to Father Muerte, nor, significantly, to an elderly man who has just arrived.
The best of the novelettes was Jeffrey Ford's "A Night at the Tropics", about a cursed chess set and the bully who stumbles into possession of it. (My word count for this story was 7600, so it may not actually be a novelette.) There is also an excellent Carol Emshwiller story, "My General",one of her recent war stories, about a woman assigned a POW from the opposing forces as field labor.
Among the short stories I found myself definitely preferring the straight SF -- some of them quite exotic SF. For example Adam Browne and John Dixon's "Ringcycle" puts an opera star on Saturn's rings -- though not quite the rings we expect. Also set in a rather different gas giant environment is Trent Jamieson's "Porcelain Salli", in which genetically engineered creatures in Jupiter's orbit interact with mostly normal humans -- all of them penned in the Solar System by ominous AIs. And Snare's "Stick This Down Your Spike" is a cynical look at an AI made from a human template and adapted for asteroid mining -- with rather different motivations than its creator. Other good stories come from Gregory Hill, Shane Dix, and Harvey Welles and Philip Raines.
