![\"Aurealis](\"https:\/\/www.markwebb.name\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/11\/8fd1f0bc3d0cc08df44990bc6d59a6eb18b4ed78-thumb.jpeg\" "\\"Aurealis")
<\/a><\/p>\nIssue #56 from November 2012 of the\u00a0Aurealis<\/a>\u00a0magazine is a monthly magazine showcasing Australian speculative fiction and with an emphasis on Australian content and news. This edition was edited by\u00a0Dirk Strasser. This month is a second “Award Winners” editions, with two short stories that won Aurealis Awards this year. This is really the last edition of Aurealis for 2012 (I know, I mistakenly said that last month!), with the publication kicking off again in 2013.<\/p>\n Fittingly, Strasser’s editorial focuses on summing up the 2012 publishing year for Aurealis, including their focus on turning around submissions quickly and highlighting their campaign to become recognised as a professional market by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. If they get to 1,000 subscribers they will increase their payments to 5c a word. Go on, you know you want to<\/a>.<\/p>\n This month’s first award winning story is\u00a0The Fruit of the Pipal Tree\u00a0<\/em>by Thoraiya Dyer<\/a>, which won the Best Fantasy Short Story award at this year’s Aurealis Awards.\u00a0The Fruit of the Pipal Tree<\/em>\u00a0originally was published in the\u00a0After the Rain\u00a0<\/em>anthology which I have unfortunately not had the pleasure of reading. It is a beautifully written story, with some lovely imagery and well developed characters. My hopefully non spoiler description of the plot is “A scientist travels to a research camp on the Geruwa River in Nepal to attempt to save the suss dolphin from extinction”.<\/p>\n The supernatural elements are kept to the last part in this story, with a very effective build up and skilfully inserted back story combining to make the ending quite powerful.<\/p>\n The second award winner in this month’s edition was\u00a0The Past is a Bridge Best Left Burnt\u00a0<\/em>by Paul Haines<\/a>, which was part of his collection\u00a0The Last Days of Kali Yuga\u00a0<\/em>(which I have reviewed here<\/a>) and won the Best Horror Short Story category. Paul Haines sadly passed away from cancer earlier this year before winning the Aurealis. If you are interested in horror then I can’t recommend\u00a0The Last Days of Kali Yuga\u00a0<\/em>strongly enough – it is an extremely powerful collection with writing skill I could only dream of possessing.<\/p>\n Both stories were very worthy of award, and together they make a great edition of Aurealis (as I mentioned last month, purchasing this and issue #55 is a very cost effective way to get exposed to some excellent Australian short fiction).<\/p>\n Crisetta Macleod tantalises us with the thought that we may indeed not be real, using the vehicle of Philip K Dick’s tales to illustrate her points. I have decided, on mature reflection, to proceed as if I am real in my day to day life but I must admit it was touch and go for a while.<\/p>\n There are the normal array of reviews of books. Robert N Stephenson is concerned that North Americans tend to replace decent genre TV shows with mindless crap in his\u00a0Rants and Raves<\/em>\u00a0segment. Rob Parnell calls for more strong roles for women on the big screen in\u00a0Surfing the Dark Side<\/em>. And Robert Jenkins both swash and buckles his way through a review of the US TV series Revolution in his\u00a0The Couch Potato Speaks<\/em>\u00a0article (I’ve been giving Revolution a go, but I agree with Rob’s assessment – I just can’t warm to the Gen Y protagonist. Which probably officially makes me old).<\/p>\n As always Carissa’s Weblog provides a round up of some of the more interesting articles around on the web in the area of Australian speculative fiction, mostly in the form of audio interviews and video.<\/p>\n And I said it last time and I’ll say it again – I’ve really enjoyed the Aurealis series of publications through 2012, and I’m looking forward to 2013.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" <\/p>\n <\/p>Hi,\n Welcome to Mark Webb’s author website. At this point the site is rather sparse – I’ve only recently started writing and there isn’t a lot to show for it right now. You can check out\u00a0my biography<\/a>, see …<\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[35,14,15],"class_list":["post-1509","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","tag-aurealis","tag-review","tag-specfic"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markwebb.name\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1509","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markwebb.name\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markwebb.name\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markwebb.name\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markwebb.name\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1509"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.markwebb.name\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1509\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1515,"href":"https:\/\/www.markwebb.name\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1509\/revisions\/1515"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markwebb.name\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1509"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markwebb.name\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1509"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markwebb.name\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1509"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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\nThis\u00a0work\u00a0by\u00a0Mark Webb<\/a>\u00a0is licensed under a\u00a0Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Australia License<\/a>.<\/p>\n