Dreaming Again Read online

  Dreaming

  Again

  Edited by JACK DANN

  Scanned & Proofed By MadMaxAU

  CONTENTS

  Introduction — Jack Dann

  Old Friends — Garth Nix

  A Guided Tour in the Kingdom of the Dead — Richard Harland

  This is My Blood — Ben Francisco and Chris Lynch Nightship — Kim Westwood

  The Fooly — Terry Dowling

  Neverland Blues — Adam Browne The Jacaranda Wife — Angela Slatter The Constant Past — Sean McMullen The Forest — Kim Wilkins

  Robots and Zombies, Inc. — Lucy Sussex This Way to the Exit — Sara Douglass Grimes and the Gaijin Daimyo — A. Bertam Chandler

  Lure — Paul Collins

  The Empire — Simon Brown

  Lakeside — Christopher Green

  Trolls’ Night Out — Jenny Blackford

  The Rest is Silence — Aaron Sterns Smoking, Waiting for the Dawn — Jason Nahrung

  The Lanes of Camberwell — Cecilia Dart-Thornton

  Lost Arts — Stephen Dedman

  Undead Camels Ate Their Flesh — Jason Fischer Europa — Cecily Scutt

  Riding on the Q-Ball — Rosaleen Love In From the Snow — Lee Battersby The Lost Property Room — Trudi Canavan Heere Be Monsters — John Birmingham Purgatory — Rowena Cory Daniells

  Manannan’s Children — Russell Blackford The Fifth Star in the Southern Cross — Margo Lanagan Twilight in Caeli-Amur — Rjurik Davidson

  Paradise Design’d — Janeen Webb The New Deal — Trent Jamieson

  Conquist — Dirk Strasser

  The Last Great House of Isla Tortuga — Peter M. Ball

  Perchance to Dream — Isobelle Carmody About the editor

  INTRODUCTION

  BY JACK DANN

  Please forgive me, gentle readers, for a bit of lycanthropic railing and howling at the moon, but there’s something I need to get off my chest; and it concerns the brilliant, edgy, ground busting, wondrous book you’re holding in your hand. (And I’ll explain why I feel I can hype this book with impunity in a moment.)

  There is one very important name missing from the editorial credit.

  Janeen Webb and I co-edited the prequel to Dreaming Again ten years ago. That book was called Dreaming Down-Under. Publishers Weekly compared it with Harlan Ellison’s classic Dangerous Visions; Peter Goldsworthy thought it was probably ‘the biggest, boldest, most controversial collection of original fiction ever published in Australia’; Neil Gaiman said, ‘Ignore it at your peril; it’s the book your friends will be talking about’; Jonathan Strahan, co-editor of The Year’s Best Australian Science Fiction and Fantasy, wrote that ‘It may be the most important anthology of Australian speculative fiction ever published’; and Gardner Dozois, editor of The Year’s Best Science Fiction annuals said that it ‘may well be the best overall anthology of the year.’ It was the first Australian volume ever to win the World Fantasy Award, and it also won the Australian Ditmar Award for Best Anthology. Stories from Dreaming Down-Under dominated both the Ditmar and the Aurealis awards: All six short story nominations for the Ditmar Award came from Dreaming Down-Under, and stories from Dreaming Down-Under won the Aurealis Award in both the science fiction and fantasy short story categories. Two stories in the volume were optioned for film, and others were chosen for American Best of the Year collections. And in the recently published reference work Australian Speculative Fiction: A Genre Overview, Donna Hanson writes: ‘This collection has been credited with putting Australian writing on the international map. It brought to the forefront Australia’s best-known authors and launched a few others. This anthology is so pivotal to the Australian scene that it is still being talked about and is still in print.’

  Not bad innings!

  Since Dreaming Down-Under was published, Janeen and I have been constantly queried as to when we were going to do another volume. Our refrain was consistent: ‘When the time is right.’ We wanted to wait until the climate had changed … until new authors started writing the stories that would shock, astound, and delight us; and we wanted to give the established and up-and-coming authors showcased in the original volume time to develop new styles, themes, and audiences.

  Well, that time is here, and Janeen and I were supposed to co-edit this book, but circumstances — damn all the fates, Norns, dark angels, doctors, germs, miasmas, and especially hollow-headed bureaucrats who gather like storm clouds just waiting to mix a multiplicity of metaphors and rain on our respective parades — have forced her to sit this one out. Janeen is a private person. Her ‘circumstances’ are nobody’s business. But, dammit, she should have had her name on the cover of this book.

  Instead, she has looked over my shoulder, constrained me from my more florid idiocies, provided support, wisdom, and critical feedback. After all, she was an internationally known critic before she became a novelist.

  So … what about this book? What about Dreaming Again?.

  Well, for a start, this is what I wrote to the authors:

  Dreaming Again will showcase the very best contemporary ‘wild-side fiction’ (those stories that have an edge of horror or fantasy, or could be categorised as magical realism) and the very best genre fiction, which includes science fiction, fantasy, and horror. We are looking for brilliant writing, style, and fresh ideas. Our only criterion is quality. Your story can be ‘new-wave,’ or cyberpunk. It can be a ‘New Yorker story’, hard science fiction, soft science fiction, magic realism, contemporary fantasy. It can be a quiet vignette or groundbreaking extrapolation. We’re looking for the brilliant stories that we’ll remember in the years to come.

  Dreaming Again will cross genres to showcase a combination of the very best Australian genre and non-genre short fiction. It will contain the cream of Australian science fiction, fantasy, horror, Aboriginal fantastical fiction, and mainstream magical realism. This is the anthology that will shake up the established thinking about the ‘shape’ of contemporary writing in Australia … that will open up — and redefine — the literary canon.

  We are very interested in science fiction, fantasy, horror (dark fantasy), and stories of magical realism that use the Australian experience and geography; but that is secondary to good story. If your killer idea takes place in the far future, or in space, or on an alternative world — fine. Again, our criterion is quality.

  This is an invitation to participate in the making of literary history. If you have a story that represents the very top of your form, we’d love to see it.

  I won’t apologise for shooting for the stars, for turning my back on reasonably good stories and reasonably good writers, for wanting only the golden-tipped prose that makes old men think they are young, or makes the hair stand up on the neck, or carries the reader into that detailed daydream we call sense-of-wonder. I won’t apologise for wanting only those stories that galvanize, that stimulate wonder and thought and laughter … that cause discomfort … that in their small, subtle, and mysterious ways transform all those who encounter them.

  And, yes, I’m excited about the stories in this volume. And, yes, this probably sounds like hype. So what? This book isn’t about the editor. It’s about the stories. It’s about the numinous light shows and the Cimmerian darkness created by the talented authors who contributed to this book. It’s theirs … their talent, their ideas, their unique perspectives on life and death and the universe. They are the poets and tale-tellers and culture-changers. They are some of the best writers working in this wild, beguiling land with its great red heart and vast desert expanses. They are some of the best fantasists working in this country edged by blue seas, coral reefs, rainforests, and sophisticated urban culture. It just so happened that I was lucky enough to see these stories first and with great love and respect inclu
de them in this showcase collection, this ten year celebratory sequel to Dreaming Down-Under.

  In his generous preface to Dreaming Down-Under, Harlan Ellison wrote: ‘Because the work, all this work, all this fresh, tough, and brilliant work, all these stories, they need no California fantasist to shill for them. They speak for themselves. They have voices. Now, go away; and listen to them.’

  Harlan was absolutely right.

  You don’t need my introduction or story notes; you just need the stories that are waiting like patient angels — or disguised demons — to embrace you. So I would not take offence if you gave up on this introduction right here and now and started reading the stories. In fact, in this unusual ego-less frame of mind that I seem to have slipped into … I would urge you to do so.

  However, should you be in the mood for some shading and perspective and background, I’ll soldier on. After all, this bit of the book is free!

  Ten years ago, Janeen and I had an agenda. Then as now, we wanted to shake up the established thinking about the ‘shape’ of contemporary writing in Australia: to open up — and redefine — the literary canon to include the non-mimetic side of our literature. We wanted to showcase the very best contemporary stories that pushed the envelope of genre fiction and those stories that used genre tropes or might be considered magical realism. We referred to those stories as ‘wild-side fiction’ to convey that evocative, almost dangerous sense of being right out there on the edge. And we wanted to get the word out to the rest of the world that there was something happening here in Australia.

  Here’s a snapshot of how it looked back in 1998: The genre culture was vibrant. Writers and fans were meeting regularly at science fiction conventions, which were rather small and intimate. Mainstream publishers such as HarperCollins Voyager, Pan Macmillan, Random House, and Penguin were developing new lists of Australian fantasy and SF writers; and new, vigorous small press publishers such as Eidolon, Ticonderoga, Aphelion, and MirrorDance were pushing boundaries and publishing some wonderfully quirky and imaginative work. There was healthy competition between the two major Australian genre magazines Eidolon and Aurealis, each featuring cutting-edge fiction by Australian authors. Jonathan Strahan and Jeremy Byrne were editing the annual Year’s Best Australian SF, fantasy, and horror fiction; and although the Australian Ditmar Award (voted on by readers) had been long established, two new professional awards were created: the Aurealis Award and the Turner Award. A generation of hot new talented writers such as Sean Williams, Simon Brown, Lucy Sussex, Stephen Dedman, Aaron Sterns, Paul Brandon, K. J. Bishop, Kate Forsyth, Richard Harland, Ian Irvine, Cecilia Dart-Thornton, Margo Lanagan, Scott Westerfield, Fiona Mcintosh, Janeen Webb, and Kim Wilkins were making their bones and pushing the various envelopes; and established professionals such as Garth Nix, Terry Dowling, Damien Broderick, Isobelle Carmody, Sara Douglass, Sean McMullen, Greg Egan, and Rosaleen Love were writing at the top of their form. Harlan Ellison thought we were experiencing a Golden Age of Australian Science Fiction, and, indeed, it sure as hell felt like something was going on. In fact it felt like the heady days of the late 1960s when SF writers in England and the United States challenged genre conventions and started a period of experimentation called The New Wave.

  What were we challenging ten years ago?

  We weren’t really challenging genre conventions (although we did, sans polemic and proclamations); and although there was plenty of literary experimentation, we weren’t part of any movement. We were part of a vibrant, creative community; and we felt that something new and exciting was happening, and it was … us. It was as if we had suddenly broken through the barriers of distance and isolation. Yet although individual writers had gained international recognition, Australian genre fiction in general was still flying under the radar. Most Australian genre writers weren’t connecting to the influential American, European, and British publishers, editors, critics, and, most importantly, readers. All that began to change after the publication of Dreaming Down-Under and the catalyzing World Science Fiction convention, a truly international event, which was held in Melbourne. A number of American editors, friends that I had known for dog-years, approached me with, ‘Damn, you were right about these Australian writers. They’re terrific’ I was much too humble and ego-less to say, ‘I told you so.’

  According to The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction, the ‘renaissance’ in Australian genre fiction gained wide acceptance thanks to Jonathan Strahan and Jeremy Byrne’s Australian Year’s Best series, David Hartwell and Damien Broderick’s huge reprint anthology Centaurus … and Dreaming Down-Under.

  So we all did it in the nineties.

  Why then do a sequel to Dreaming Down-Under now? After all, a sequel is a dangerous sort of two-headed literary beast. Dreaming Again will inevitably be compared with Dreaming Down-Under. There sure as hell better be a good reason for this book.

  So what’s changed?

  Well, thanks to the phenomenon known as Clarion South, often called a ‘boot camp for writers,’ some astonishing new writers have surfaced … and we find ourselves once again squinting into the bright reflections of another gold-tinged time … a continuation and consequence of Australia’s golden age of genre. Writers such as Kim Westwood, Jason Fischer, Chris Lynch (and his American collaborator Ben Francisco), Christopher Green, and Peter M. Ball are all ‘products’ of Clarion South. They are some of the names that we will certainly recognise in the future. The ‘New’ writers of the 90’s such as Trudi Canavan, Cecilia Dart-Thornton, and Margo Lanagan are making seven-figure deals, winning awards, and making international names for themselves, while the last generation of ‘hot’ writers, such as Garth Nix (who has over four million books in print), Sean Williams, Terry Dowling, Isobelle Carmody, and Sara Douglass, have garnered major international audiences and are going from strength to strength.

  There is also a generation of writers who have been around for a while … and have suddenly sparked. Richard Harland comes to mind. He won an Aurealis Award and the prestigious Golden Aurealis Award for his satiric horror novel The Black Crusade. For my money, his Dreaming Again story ‘A Guided Tour in the Kingdom of the Dead’ is a knockout. And … there are those important established writers who did not have stories in the original Dreaming Down-Under, such as the bestselling authors John Birmingham and Garth Nix.

  When I started editing this anthology, I’ll confess that I was worried that I might not find the keep-you-up-at-night, genre-bending stories by the new Young Turks. Man, was I wrong about that.

  In short, enough time has passed.

  It’s a whole new world of writers working under the southern sun.

  It’s steam-engine time again.

  It’s time to take another laser-lit look at what’s happening in this special place.

  And lastly — and firstly and in-between — it’s all about the stories!

  I invite you to go forth into this land of wonder, terror, and mystery … this wild side of Terra Australis.

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  OLD FRIENDS

  GARTH NIX

  Bestselling author GARTH NIX was born in Melbourne in 1963, grew up in Canberra, and has lived in Sydney for the past twenty years. A full-time writer since 2001, he has worked as a literary agent, marketing consultant, book editor, book publicist, book sales representative, bookseller, and as a part-time soldier in the Australian Army Reserve. More than 4.5 million copies of his books have been sold around the world and his work has been translated into thirty-six languages. His books include the award-winning fantasy novels Sabriel, Lirael and Abhorsen; and the young adult science fiction novel Shade’s Children. His fantasy novels for children include The Ragwitch, the six books of The Seventh Tower sequence, and The Keys to the Kingdom series that begins with the CBC Honour Book Mister Monday. Garth’s books have appeared on the bestseller lists of The Hew York Times, Publishers Weekly (US), The Bookseller (UK), The Australian, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Sunday Times (UK). He lives in a Sydney
beach suburb with his wife and two children.

  The poignant and evocative story that follows explores the calm before the storm and the eternity known as friendship…

  I’d been living in the city for quite a while, lying low, recovering from an unfortunate jaunt that had turned, in the immortal words of my sometime comrade Hrasvelg, ‘irredeemably shit-shape’.

  Though I had almost completely recovered my sight, I still wore a bandage around my eyes. It was made from a rare stuff that I could see through, but it looked like dense black linen. Similarly, I had regrown my left foot, but I kept up the limp. It gave me an additional excuse to use the stick, which was, of course, much more than a length of bog oak carved with picaresque scenes of a pedlar’s journey.

  I had a short-lease apartment near the beach, an expensive but necessary accommodation, as I needed both the sunshine that fell into its small living room and the cool, wet wind from the sea that blew through every open window.

  Unfortunately, after the first month, that wind became laden with the smell of rotting weed and, as the weeks passed, the stench grew stronger, and the masses of weed that floated just past the breakers began to shift and knit together, despite the efforts of the lifesavers to break up the unsightly, stinking rafts of green.

  I knew what was happening, of course. The weed was a manifestation of an old opponent of mine, a slow, cold foe who had finally caught up with me. ‘Caught’ being the operative word, as the weed was just the visible portion of my enemy’s activities. A quick examination of almanac and lodestone revealed that all known pathways from this world were denied to me, shut tight by powerful bindings that I could not broach quickly, if at all.

  I considered moving to the mountains or far inland, but that would merely delay matters. Only the true desert would be safe from my foe, but I could not go there.