Forever Shores (42 page)

‘I see.'

Captain Dar sat back in his chair. He eyed the calendar for a moment, then turned away from it. ‘Tough job, the Waste Brigade.'

‘Believe me, sir, I understand that.'

Captain Dar snorted. ‘I'd say you would. Not your ordinary day, yesterday. You picked a good one as your first.' He drummed his fingers on the table. ‘Well, I'm actually glad you've decided to stay. We're one short since Tremen disappeared.'

‘No sign of him, sir?'

‘Nor his friend. Don't worry, we'll catch up with them.'

A knock came at the door. ‘Yes?' Dar called.

The door swung open and the novice wizard appeared. He was pale, his eyes had dark circles underneath, and his beard was matted and straggly. All in all, he looked much better than yesterday.

‘Never again,' he said clearly.

Captain Dar glanced at Lambholder. ‘Take him back to the infirmary. He's still not well.'

The wizard sniffed and drew himself up. ‘I'm perfectly fine, thank you. I was just telling you that I was never going to touch magic again.'

‘Wise decision,' Captain Dar said. ‘Looking for some other trade, then?'

‘Indeed. Something as far away from magic as I can get.'

Lambholder brightened. ‘How do you feel about farming?'

Afterword
by John Foyster

‘The market—oh God, how I hate that word.'

‘The market', of course, is for us a market for some sort of writing. When we think about this past decade, we might also think back to a different decade: a decade at the end, not of the twentieth century, but of the nineteenth century.

At the end of that decade, we can find a remarkable work of fiction which has had substantial impact on writing in the twentieth century. And this is, of course,
The Time Machine
(1895). H.G. Wells' novel was impressive for many readers, and not just any reader: for example, Henry James, when
The Time Machine
was published, was immediately impressed by that work, and indicated that he would himself hope at some stage to imitate H.G. Wells'
The Time Machine
. Eventually, in about 1912, he did begin working on what was to have been a novel about time travel. Unfortunately, he wasn't able to finish that novel.

But there were at around that time many other works of a similar nature. For example, only a few years after
The Time Machine
was published, there was another work, in 1903, by Harriet Prescott Spofford:
The Ray of Displacement
, about another sort of travel. This was about developing a Y-ray that increased the space between matter so that solid bodies could pass through one another. Of course, something like that had to be included in
The Time Machine
if you were to travel through time to the future or the past.

So the thought of writing that kind of fiction was popular in those years amongst many writers and, one assumes, therefore, also very popular with many readers. But it wasn't just fiction that was like that. Physics, at this time, was also particularly concerned about time and space. Although we identify Albert Einstein as someone who worked out how to connect time and space in physics, we could go back much earlier. For example, in music, over twenty years earlier, in the early 1880s Richard Wagner was composing
Parsifal
(1882). Here, Wagner's mythological libretto indicates his interest in the connection between time and space, which was very important to him.

If you go forward instead of backwards in time and identify a change, you find that in the first decade of the twentieth century the composer Gustav Mahler was dealing with compositions handling time in a fundamentally very similar and ‘old-fashioned' way. Then, from the teens of the twentieth century onward, you find Arnold Schoenberg and many other composers getting on to more complex time structures. So, around the transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, there was a lot of interest in the way in which time and space are linked in music. And, of course, if you look at art works, again from about 1912 onwards, through Marinetti and the Futurists, in paintings and sculpture, you can see a change in the way of thinking. If you want a representative work, Marcel Duchamp's
The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even
is a good example of somebody trying to do in art what was done by Wells or Spofford a little bit earlier, with respect to time and how it should be managed.

To take another example from writing, it is not hard to establish that Marcel Proust, in
In Search of Lost Time
, is largely concerned about the movement of time and how we recollect the past, how we anticipate the future, how all these are put together: how we handle these complex relationships between what we believe to be very fundamental aspects of our perception of the universe in which we live.

The key element of these works of fiction is that they try to explain to us how the world really exists. Wells in
The Time Machine
is trying to explain to us what the world is like in a universal sense. In that particular case, he goes and imagines the far past and the far future, but there is a continuum and that is, I suggest, the real world. When you come to a case like
Parsifal
, and music, perhaps it's not quite so true that we're talking about the real world. What Wagner is dealing with in the case of
Parsifal
is the Christian myth and the mythological notion of how time and space might be put together.

Interestingly enough, during the decade of the 1890s, William Morris was writing quite a few novels which were, in a sense, mythological. His approach was not to describe the world as it physically ‘really' is, but rather to try to describe how the world might be. And he and a number of other writers at the same time tried to do exactly this. So one has writers such as Wells, Proust and a number of others trying to describe how the world really was, and occasionally having to deal with issues such as time, and then one also has other writers who thought it was useful to describe the world, not as it really was, but as it might be in some mythological sense.

An interesting development followed, from 1910 to the 1930s, when writers began to have the opportunity to demonstrate what they meant by the nature of the world. A very early example was Hugo Gernsback's
Ralph 124C 41+
(1911–12), in which Ralph, a future scientist, is able to describe to us what the world might be like in the future. Later, Gernsback realised that there was a substantial (though not a huge) market for this kind of description: that is, let us try to imagine what the world really might be, in more detail. Gernsback started to publish fiction of that kind, which eventually led to the first science fiction magazine in 1926. But, before that, other writers were able to enjoy approval by writing more stories of a mythological kind, so that
Weird Tales
began to be published from 1923 onwards.

But there was something different about the fiction that was published in these two magazines. It might have been about the old mythology. It might have been about the future. But, rather than being novels, this fiction was, to a substantial extent, short stories. From 1923, with
Weird Tales
, and 1926, with
Amazing Stories
, the magazine publishers gave writers an opportunity to publish short stories about ideas, not about people, and therefore they could use substantially different approaches to what they were wanting to examine.

Earlier, there had already been short stories and novels that we now might call ‘science fiction' and ‘fantasy'. The new magazines from the 1920s dealt basically in short stories. One other change also needs to be noted. By the time we come to the end of the twentieth century, when we consider the kind of fiction that we could describe as a genre, we have fiction which is set in the future or the past or an alternative past, and we have mythological fiction, but we also have examples of short fictions which don't require the world that the writer has invented to be completely described. This is a kind of fiction that many people write. In fact, it is sometimes identified as being a fiction for a particular market.

‘The market—oh God, how I hate that word.' That sentence appears in Tony Ramsay's twenty-first-century radio adaptation of a novel written by George Gissing in 1891:
New Grub Street
. One consequence of the existence of a market for science fiction, or for fantasy, or for mythological fiction, is that works are published not because they have an idea or a structure that the author wants but, rather, because the author has had to contribute to a market that a publisher or an editor really wants. So it is important not to get confused between the kind of fiction that writers develop according to their own belief in what they need to express, and the kind of fiction that Gissing's character Edwin Reardon remarks upon: ‘The market—oh God, how I hate that word.' Alternatively, Gissing also give us an account of marketable skills, and let's hope that writers in these stories do not match Gissing's character Jasper Milvain: ‘My talent flourishes at 500 words'—their talent flourishes at a greater length.

Contributors

Carmel Bird
was born in Swan Hill, but is more easily recognised as a Melbourne-based contemporary fiction writer whose stories are frequently found in literary journals. However, she often pushes the envelope into science fiction, fantasy and horror, where some of her most intriguing work can be found. Bird also conducts workshops and masterclasses in writing, and is one of those rare few who can support herself from her literary output.

Russell Blackford
is a Melbourne-based author, editor and critic. ‘The Sword of God' won Best Fantasy Short Story in the 1996 Aurealis Awards, and several other stories, most notably ‘Lucent Carbon', have been shortlisted in the SF and Fantasy Divisions in other years. While Russell's fiction is usually published within Australia, his critical essays appear internationally, particularly in the
New York Review of Science Fiction
. His background in the Law has given rise to a number of articles on industrial relations and constitutional theory, and he has co-authored a critical history of Australian science fiction with Van Ikin and Sean McMullen.

Damien Broderick
is a Melbourne-based author, editor and critic, widely regarded as the grand old man of Australian genre fiction. He has had a major impact as an Australian SF writer since 1964, and is undoubtedly the country's leading theorist of the genre. He has three times won Aurealis Awards for his fiction—both at short story and novel length. His non-fiction books rank with those of Paul Davies in their breadth and understanding of their subject matter, and his critical essays can often be found in the
New York Review of Science Fiction
. Broderick is also the science book reviewer for the
Australian
newspaper.

Edward Burger
is a Melbourne-based writer of short stories, experimental prose, poetry, performance scripts, and a novel. He has been published in numerous literary journals and on CD, and has appeared on radio and TV. He frequently performs his work at spoken word events around Melbourne, and in 1999 he was winner of the Melbourne Fringe Festival Spoken-Word Award. Whilst only some of his work falls into the fantasy/sci-fi genre, much of it is fantastical, bizarre or surreal. Burger is inspired by the absurdity, diversity and complexity of life. His work is intended to be a tribute to the boundlessness of the imagination and the freedom this inspires.

Trudi Canavan
lives in Melbourne, where she runs an illustration and graphic design business called The Telltale Art. In her spare time she is the designer and art editor for
Aurealis Magazine
, and has managed the Aurealis Online website. She has recently sold a fantasy trilogy to a leading local publisher.

Isobelle Carmody
was born in northern Victoria, and raised in the Geelong area. She completed a BA majoring in Literature, before working in public relations and journalism. She became a full-time writer in 1988, and quickly became one of Australia's leading young adult writers. Her work often straddles the boundaries of science fiction, fantasy and horror. Carmody believes that the short story is the most perfect form of literature.

Terry Dowling
is a Sydney-based and internationally acclaimed writer of science fiction, fantasy and horror: his stories often appear in US collections. He is the author of a number of books, including
Rynosseros
,
Blue Tyson
,
Twilight Beach
(in the
Rynosseros
cycle),
Wormwood
,
The Man Who Lost Red
, and two horror collections,
An Intimate Knowledge of the Night
and
Blackwater Days
. His fiction has won him numerous awards, including ten Ditmars, two Readercons, A Prix Wolkenstein—and two Aurealis Awards in the horror division. Dowling is also a reviewer for the
Australian
newspaper.

Leanne Frahm
was born and raised in northern Queensland. She was notable in the early 1980s for being the most successful writer to come out of the workshops of the 1970s, building an international career with her short stories. In 1996, a limited-edition collection of some of her work, featuring a new SF novella,
Borderline
, appeared from MirrorDanse Books.
Borderline
went on to take out the Aurealis Award in the science fiction division.

John Foyster
died recently, struck down by an irreversible condition in that part of his being that had, until then, served him so well. John was best known for his awesome intellect, the speed by which he would read and absorb complex documents (he was a statistician by vocation) and his critical analysis of a wide range of literature, especially his favourite genre, science fiction. Personal integrity was his hallmark, and carried over into all aspects of his work and personal life. Thinking ‘outside the square' was a constant in his life, and many of his colleagues found themselves swept along in his wake. Much of his work was located overseas, particularly in Malaysia and South Africa. On the negative side, he suffered from polio as a boy, and was revisited by consequences of the disease during the last decade of his life. He left the certainty of permanent employment and its superannuation benefits, and became an independent consultant. His registered company was called Foyster Fact and Fiction. With this, as with every other part of his life, he never looked back.

Alexander James
was born and raised in Adelaide. He has a background in advertising, but more recently has pursued his creative side with work on various novels, feature films and television projects—including the revival of a classic BBC science fiction series. ‘A Spell at the End of the World' is an introduction to the universe of Barker Moon (which includes a series of short stories, several novels and a television series … which, if all goes well, should present themselves some time this millennium).

Margo Lanagan
was born in Newcastle, and is a writer, poet and editor. Her early novels are distinctly for young adults, but she has also written teen romance novels under various pseudonyms. Her latest collection,
White Time
, represents her best work to date, and the collection itself ranks with the finest of the past decade.

Rosaleen Love
is a Melbourne-based writer of science fiction, contemporary fiction, and fantasy. She lectures at the Swinburne Institute of Technology in the history and philosophy of science. Love is strongly connected to the feminist movement, although her work is usually light-hearted and/or clever, with a touch of wry self-deprecation, rather than being politically confrontational. Unsurprisingly, given her leaning to mainstream, she began her writing career with a series of short stories in contemporary literary journals and by 1989 had published her first collection:
The Total Devotion Machine and Other Stories
, which she followed in 1993 with
Evolution Annie and Other Stories
. These latter stories best describe the niche Love has taken upon herself—a fashioner of scientific fables.

Ben Peek
is a Sydney-based author. He is the creator of the Urban Sprawl Project, a pamphlet that mixed photography and prose about the Sydney suburbs. He co-wrote the short novel
The Enigma Variant
with Chris Mowbray, which was published by MirrorDanse Press. His short fiction and poetry have appeared in a number of magazines and anthologies around the world, and most recently he has appeared in the magazine
Voiceworks
, and the anthologies
Passing Strange
, edited by Bill Congreve, and
Agog! Fantastic Fiction
, edited by Cat Sparks. He has a bimonthly column on the website www.popmatters.com titled ‘Sydney Before 2 am'. He is currently doing a PhD in fiction at the University of New South Wales.

Marianne de Pierres
is a Brisbane-based author and co-founder of the Vision writers' group. She is published in children's and adult fiction and reviews books for the literary supplement of the
Courier Mail
. Her short fiction has appeared in
Eidolon
,
Agog!
and
Fables and Reflections
. She has also sold a three-book series, featuring her fatal femme,
Parrish Plessis
, to Orbit books in the United Kingdom.

Michael Pryor
was born in Swan Hill, but was educated and grew up in Geelong. Pryor is a secondary school English teacher. He is best known as a children's writer, with his stories appearing in a variety of magazines. Most of his adult fiction has appeared in
Aurealis
magazine. He has also produced four novels in the young adult genre. At all levels, his work is witty and humorous, his story ‘Waste' (which appears here) being typical of his approach.

Tim Richards
was born, raised and is currently living in the small Victorian town of Hampton. Richards is an author with a propensity for abstract ideas, for the abstruse and the unusual. He is a self-professed ‘obsessive-compulsive diarist' with an intriguing relationship with time and memory. More plainly, he is reguarded as a writer of contemporary fiction, with a strong leaning to fantasy. His latest novel,
The Prince
, has placed him firmly in the path of the critics. Many consider him persona non grata, but he is beginning to create a quiet cult following with his unusual bent towards philosophic irony and his affinity with the obscure nature of post-modernist writing.

Robert N. Stephenson
is an Adelaide-based writer, editor and a literary agent. He divides his time between writing short fiction, his own occasional unpublished novels, and editing the works of other novelists who, like him, are trying to break into the mainstream book market. He has sold short stories to
Interzone
,
Aurealis
,
Nowa Fantastyka
and even had two appear in his own, short-lived magazine,
Altair
. The story in this anthology is his most rejected story and also the one he had the most belief in despite the opinions of others. In 2003 Robert will take up the tutoring position in creative writing at the Australian College of Journalism, where he hopes to share his experiences. With 40 stories now in print he feels the future may be just that bit brighter than the hard slog it took to get there. Persistence, he has found, is the key in the writing business.

Lucy Sussex
was born in New Zealand, and moved to Australia at an early age. Her work ranges over science fiction and fantasy into her own form of surrealist mainstream, and often mixes all three areas with great success. Her short story, ‘Merlusine', falls into this category and took out the Aurealis Awards Fantasy category in 1997, while being short-listed for science fiction at the same time. Sussex has co-edited three anthologies of mostly original stories, has published a mainstream children's book,
The Peace Garden
, and three fantasy novels, the best known of which are the young-adult novels
Deersnake
and
Black Ice
. Her short work is collected in the fine
My Lady Tongue And Other Tales
.