The Year's Best Australian SF & Fantasy - vol 05 Read online

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  The Year’s Best Australian

  Science Fiction & Fantasy

  [Volume 05]

  ED BY BILL CONGREVE

  Scanned & Proofed By MadMaxAU

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  Contents

  Introduction

  Painlessness Kirstyn McDermott

  for want of a jesusman Jason Fischer

  Hush Deborah Biancotti

  This Is Not My Story Dirk Flinthart

  Truth Window Terry Dowling

  Nightship Kim Westwood

  Fearless Flying Apartment People Geoffrey Maloney

  Wives Paul Haines

  The Census-Taker’s Tale Kaaron Warren

  Getting Rid of Mother Robert Hood

  The Last Deflowerer Karen Marie

  Bitter Dreams Ian McHugh

  The Goosle Margo Lanagan

  The Empire Simon Brown

  Ascension Martin Livings

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  Introduction

  Welcome to the fifth volume of the Year’s Best Australian SF and Fantasy.

  The year that was, 2009, saw the publication of a number of magazines and anthologies in the speculative field. In 2009, MirrorDanse Books was also due to publish a volume highlighting the best stories of 2008. However 2009 also saw the deepest impact of the global financial crisis on the Australian economy, a crisis which is lingering as nations which assumed the debt of an ethically compromised financial sector are themselves struggling with the consequences.

  It was this crisis which caused MirrorDanse not to publish a best of 2008.

  However with the publication of a range of magazines and such excellent anthologies as Jack Dann’s Dreaming Again, 2008 was a strong year. Similarly, small presses actively published a range of anthologies and magazines in 2009, making that also a strong year. Two notable anthologies were X6: A Novellanthology, edited by Keith Stevenson for Coeur de lion, and New Ceres Nights, edited by Alisa Krasnostein and Tehani Wessely for Twelfth Planet Press. Therefore the volume you hold in your hands covers the best of both 2008 and 2009, a double bonus. You’ll also notice that the size of the book has increased to match the intent.

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  A dealer at Sydney’s Mind Body and Spirit festival a few years ago had a supply of SMA spoons. Shaped memory alloy is a nifty concept discovered for perhaps not so nifty motives by the Nazis in WWII, but one for which nobody has discovered much of a practical purpose. Have you heard of it? Unless you’re an engineer, you’re not alone.

  The idea is simple: some special alloys can exist in different shapes at different temperatures - and can be moulded into those shapes. The crystalline structure of these metals lines up in different directions according to temperature. As the temperature changes, so does the shape of the metal. An SMA screw can change shape to resemble a nail (or a hook, or an ingot, or whatever else it has been shaped to remember on the other side of the temperature barrier) and vice versa as it cools down. As a society, we value metals for structural integrity and heat and electricity conduction, not for their ability to behave like boiled spaghetti drying in the hot sun - SMAs imply a fundamental contradiction in our ‘cultural knowledge’ and expectations of metal. SMAs don’t have regular uses, hence society as a whole is generally unaware of them.

  But this ignorance of SMAs can be used in other ways.

  Back to the Mind, Body & Spirit Festival. Imagine a chunk of metal which at room temperature in an air-conditioned building resembles a spoon. Give the spoon to a person who lightly strokes it, slowly heating it to body temperature, and the chunk of metal remembers that at this temperature it is meant to resemble a spoon bent into a pretzel. Exit a punter who has just been convinced that they’re Uri Geller, and that they are a very special human being. Won’t work on an engineer, but engineers are scarce at such festivals.

  This is a simple meme supported by a technology unknown to most (Clarkes’ law: a sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic), and little more complex than a chain letter. The act of communication that has taken place depends on a variety of factors, the most important of which are the willingness to believe of the subject, the need of the subject for a sense of individual worth, the low level of education in the area in which the communication takes place - in this case a poor general knowledge of science and technology - and, perhaps more importantly, a feedback mechanism which justifies and maintains that low level of education, returning the person to the pattern of behaviour and thought patterns that allowed the meme to work in the first place.

  This meme seeks to tell the truth, or uphold a principle, by telling a lie.

  Is a work of fiction any different?

  All good fiction tells the truth, or upholds principles (in the case of commercial fiction, the simple need for entertainment), by telling lies. There is perhaps a moral difference, in that most fiction does not pretend to be telling a literal truth.

  There are a number of other parallels with modern fiction. There is very little difference, if any, between a piece of fiction and a meme. Fiction is a narrative which relies on internal consistency and a similar assumed social knowledge of the communication act on the part of both the writer and the reader. A piece of fiction competes with a range of other activities (food, exercise, work, conversation, sleep, sex, Playstation 3, etc) for the attention of the reader, therefore it must have coded within it factors which the reader finds worthy of attention, which will divert attention away from other distractions and back into the text. (Such factors might be characterization, style, plot, the questioning nature of the narrative, etc.) A piece of fiction should not contain those factors which may break the hold on the reader: poor spelling or grammar, poor research, etc.

  To quote Richard Dawkins, a meme is:’... the unit of cultural inheritance ... A meme is ... anything that replicates itself from brain to brain, via any available means of copying.’ (Unweaving the Rainbow, Penguin, 1998) This is a simplistic but adequate definition; the interesting bit lies in the implications. A meme must contain a self-supporting pattern of logic which directs attention back into the meme, rather than away from it. Notice also that concepts of veracity take no part in the definition. Simple memes are chain letters, ‘children overboard’, advertising jingles and slogans, etc. An example of a more complex meme might be the Western capitalist military/industrial complex’s war against terrorism. Think also of the tools which direct an individual’s attention away from alternatives and back into the meme, one of which is the constant use by authority figures of simplistic terms such as ‘terrorism’, ‘terrorist network’, ‘axis of evil’, ‘weapons of mass destruction’, ‘terrorist attack’, etc, which do nothing but reduce debate to the level of those terms - and the needs of those who use them - hence removing all questions of cause and motive. Notice also that such a meme relies heavily on the control and ignorance of the audience. Ironic, don’t you think? These same people control the spending of education dollars - and which portions of society benefit from that spending. While the content of this meme is, of course, outside the subject matter of this introduction, much may be learned by the writer of fiction in analysing the manipulation of the communication process and the flow of information involved.

  A similar concept is ‘paradigm’. The word obviously existed before Thomas Kuhn applied it to the concept of a dominant pattern of scientific thought. Kuhn tried to restrict the concept to the philosophy of science, but it has drifted since then, which is no surprise. Kuhn was describing a way in which the human mind works, and to restrict this to only one field of human endeavour itself seems to be
an act of paradigm paralysis. What’s that? The inability to see beyond the parameters of the paradigm. This concept is similar to being unable to see outside the reality generated within a human mind by a meme. These ideas of memes and paradigm paralysis are of massive interest to writers of fiction. Think of a narrative as a meme, a deliberate act of generating paradigm paralysis in the reader.

  So, what are the factors involved in the effectiveness of a piece of fiction? What will burst the paradigm paralysis created by the narrative and allow the reader to reject the narrative?

  One obvious factor is research - the ‘world knowledge’ of the reader. Think of how the SMA spoon meme might not create a sense of belief in an engineer. So also a piece of poor research will threaten the attention of a reader with knowledge of that area, and all humans are expert in some kinds of knowledge.

  The suspension of disbelief is terribly important. It is possible to be too anally retentive, but on every occasion a writer betrays the ‘world knowledge’ of a reader, that writer has, for just a moment, broken that suspension of disbelief and risks losing that reader from the narrative.

  I have touched on the concept of the knowledge of the reader. Such knowledge also includes the assumed knowledge - the consensual reality - that exists within a genre. For instance, in SF we can have faster-than-light travel without spending pages thinking of a rational explanation for it. (Though in some stories, such an explanation may be one of the points of the exercise, in which case the author must be careful to make sense on those terms. Once, a couple of decades ago, designing faster-than-light drives was part of the game, but the genre has moved on.) In fantasy we can have prophecies, magic swords and spells without spending pages justifying their existence.

  What are the factors that may shatter that suspension of disbelief? That may draw a reader’s attention away from the content and towards the process, a process which is not being done well?

  The answer is: legion. Readers more interested in style will be lost by typos, poor grammar, too many adjectives, adverbs, etc. Readers more interested in plot will be more forgiving of language (or not notice the language at all, which is surely something any writer could aspire towards), but may be lost by info-dumping and a slow storyline which explores theme and character. Readers interested in ideas may be lost by poor research and by generic narratives which do little more than rehash old plots. Readers interested in character will be annoyed at plots which jerk characters around at whim, forcing them into actions they would never consider for the sake of the next action sequence. All is indeed relative. Think of your audience. Each reader is different.

  Instead of concentrating on negatives, perhaps we should ask ourselves what are the universal components of good storytelling. Firstly, we must recognize that one of the tendencies of a meme is to reinvent itself. One of the tendencies of bad storytelling is to find an excuse for whatever is not done well. It will seek to bring the audience down to its level and keep them there, because there is a commercial process involved as well, and poor storytelling is easy and doesn’t require as great an investment from either writer or publisher. Poor research may, for instance, be excused by claiming that readers don’t care, as long as the story delivers; that the author’s covenant with the reader is one of entertainment, and nothing more.

  Good story-telling, on the other hand, doesn’t need such excuses.

  How does one learn to recognize a meme for what it is? Try investigating it from a point of view outside the meme. Here is an exercise: ask yourself why it is such a complete fruitcake as Osama bin Laden isn’t standing on a fruitbox at Hyde Park Corner having rotten tomatoes thrown at him. What is Western capitalism doing that gives him his power? What excuses does Western capitalism provide that allow him to manipulate people outside its sway? What is Western capitalism doing to prevent this questioning of itself?

  What fiction must do, for the duration of the narrative, is exactly that: it must prevent by any means available the questioning of process by the reader. This implies that the writer must go through some semblance of this process themselves. The inherent stability of the narrative must come from within, even while the factors it relies upon for communication are external. One over-riding principle is that of intellectual integrity. Stories that are presented with such an integrity have a narrative authority which others lack. A narrative with this kind of integrity will hold me where other narratives don’t.

  Some fiction creates its own paradigm by challenging other paradigms, by challenging the reader’s perception of the world. This also is a kind of fiction I favour.

  These factors, of course, are different for every reader.

  Other principles?

  On style: Don’t over-punctuate; don’t overuse adjectives and adverbs; avoid passive verb use; don’t overuse strong words in a short space (unless it’s the right word); don’t worry about the verb ‘said’ - it’s invisible, and the alternatives are not; don’t change viewpoints within paragraphs, and preferably not within sections, and so on. These things all attract attention to the words, to the language, and away from the content. At the other extreme, in some narratives style is the point of the exercise, leaving little substance underneath. This is often a weakness of literary fiction.

  On ideas: Being original always helps, although in some genres the definition of original is more restricted than in others (epic fantasy, romance, etc). The more original the idea, the more time and space a writer will need to establish the idea. That’s why, if you don’t know a genre, you risk boring your readers, or being a laughing stock. (And one reason why so many mainstream writers fail when moving into genre fiction.)

  On plot and character: Don’t neglect one for the other. Have characters your readers can empathize with, and be true to them. Integrate plot and character, don’t jerk one around to accommodate the other, choose them to supplement each other.

  On theme: Don’t preach. The already converted will be bored, and you’ll lose everybody else. Allow your characters to act out your ideas, and their plight will engage a reader’s empathy. This can be tough - some readers need to be preached to in order to have their own prejudices agreed with, and these readers can be vocal in assuming that this lack of a judgemental intrusion by an author into a piece of fiction implies that the author is, in fact, preaching the opposite (eg, criticisms of American Graffiti, by Brett Easton Ellis). Be aware that readers of this nature are most likely not your audience. Create your characters carefully, and be true to their story and their point of view.

  On semantics: This is one area where many beginning writers fail. A basic rule is: One sentence = one idea. There is a hierarchy of meaning in the English language: the letter, the word, the phrase, the clause, the sentence, the paragraph, etc. Research the principles of this, particularly the manner in which subject, object and verbs and verb phrases interact with each other within sentences. If you find yourself dealing with new subject matter, begin a new sentence.

  Communication occurs because of the unspoken agreement between writer and reader on a set of rules. If you don’t understand those rules, or make a lazy assumption that the rules either don’t exist, aren’t important, or don’t apply to you, then don’t assume you are communicating with your reader.

  The perfect story will, of course, have an original idea, compelling characters, theme, plot and style, all of which will interact to create a gestalt greater than the sum of the parts. And the sun will shine over the world forever.

  Finally, in today’s competitive publishing industry, a world of diminishing resources, niche marketing of common ideas, and - with the exception of a handful of bestsellers - shorter print runs, don’t expect your editor to save your butt - there are another dozen writers with marketable personalities standing in line waiting to take your place. As a writer, these things are your responsibility.

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  As a reader, in these pages you’ll find stories which maintain their intellectual integrity, which will challenge an
d entertain you, and which won’t allow you to escape until they’re done, if then.

  Bill Congreve, Chatswood, August 2010.

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  Painlessness

  kirstyn mcdermott

  Christ, not again. Hard enough to sleep with the afternoon sun sleazing through the Venetian blinds, the dull ache in each and every joint of her sweatsick body, and Faith groans as she rolls over to grab the bottle of water beside her bed. Blister pack of tablets beside that, antibiotics of some kind, and RelaxaTabs as well because the doctor refused to prescribe her any sort of decent sleeping pill; she takes two of each.

  Natural rest, my arse.

  Hard enough to sleep with the near constant vertigo and the quilt pulled right up to her chin, sweating and itching beneath it because otherwise she’ll only wake up with chattering teeth and her fingernails a disturbing shade of blue.

  Hard enough without this: the sobs and muffled shouts pressing through the shoddy townhouse wall, the nameless thumps and yesterday even the sound of smashing glass.

  Faith pulls the pillow over her head but it’s too hot, too close; she can’t breathe properly even when she’s not trying to smother herself. Stretches her legs instead, trying to kick the cramps from her knees, and when the shouting from next door starts up again she raises a fist for the umpteenth time to pound against the wall.