Forever Shores

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 Ring
s
?' 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 somehow 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.