Review: Stories of Survival

This new collection is a great opportunity for you to get acquainted with the fiction being written halfway around the world

To honor the memory of beloved fantasy writer Aiki Flinthart, the Aussie Speculative Fiction Group has launched the charity anthology Stories of Survival, where various Australian authors have contributed their explorations of characters who stay strong against heavy circumstances.

The Storyteller by Kylie Fennell, a tale told by a tree so that others may keep telling it, makes an understated defense of the urgency of preserving and sustaining stories so that in turn they preserve and sustain us.

The Forgotten Sea by Louise Zedda-Sampson boasts an abundance of sensory detail and effective imagery. It begins as your standard haunted house story—but it turns out it's the visitor who carries her own ghosts.

Of Slaves and Lions by Pamela Jeffs follows an exile as they return to their childhood home, meditate on the survival of places and of the meanings they once carried, and wrestle with the ways the past can be a captivity.

Faltering by Monique McLellan is set in a resort town reduced to an artificial simulation of itself, where a returning tourist yearns to find something, even if it's just a shadow, that remains from the time of his first visit.

Maki by Nikky Lee tells the rescue of a beached orca in parallel with a married couple's struggle to rescue their relationship.

Tox Hunt by Tim Borella has as its protagonists the few remaining descendants of a vanity genetics fad that went horribly wrong, now on the run as fugitives in the Australian wilderness.

Three Tasks for the Sidhe by Leanbh Pearson is an exquisite fairy tale, composed with a fine ear for precise verse, about the steadfastness of a love capable of rising above the limitations of human mortality.

Alice's Hope by Jade Wildy is the adventure of a spy and treasure hunter on a desperate quest to deliver into the proper hands a mysterious painting that contains ancient secrets that could save her world.

Divine Engineer by Claire Fitzpatrick is the bad exception in an otherwise fine anthology. Its protagonist is flat and uninteresting, its succession of events does not reach the status of actual plot, and at its core is either an inscrutable metaphor or an appalling incomprehension of basic astronomy.

Spirit of the Koi by Lisa Rodrigues manages to contain a universe of bittersweet emotion in its short dialogue on grief, consolation, and the ancestry of space wolves.

Valuer of Souls by Kaybee Pearson turns the theme of heroic survival on its head and asks which extreme forms of human defiance would make us worthier of scorn than the forces of decay we claim to be fighting.

You Better Not Be Couriering Coriander by Brianna Bullen takes our COVID anxieties and gives them sparkling fairy wings in a fun, fast-paced trip from a land of ghosts to a city of mythic people just trying to get through their day.

Way-Bread Rising by Tansy Rayner-Roberts, another pandemic allegory, draws the reader back to early 2020, when we were all learning to bake our own bread, and adds to the mix a pinch of grandmotherly magic.

Bitter Brews by Kirstie Nicholson shifts the focus just a bit away from the iconic figure of the survivor and toward the set of adversities that force people to become survivors in the first place. This time, the protagonist finds a rescuer, but eventually learns to rescue themself from their rescuer.

Chocolate Cake and Carnage by Aiki Flinthart is a hilarious prison escape adventure where nothing goes according to plan.

Reading these stories is an eye-opening experience. They are in general very short, much more than what we usually call short fiction in American speculative magazines. However, their brief extension does not translate into Hemingwayian dryness: they are highly poetic, rich with lyric virtuosism. Curiously, they all have an open ending, which I don't know whether I should attribute to a feature of the Australian short story tradition or to the theme of this collection, as a way of signaling the possibilities that remain open even in moments of dread. Be that as it may, Stories of Survival is more than deserving of your attention. It can be finished in one afternoon, but it will stay with you for much longer.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Reference: Sheehan, Austin P., Rodrigues, Lisa, and Isaac, S. M. [editors]. Stories of Survival: a Charity Anthology by Australian Speculative Fiction [Deadset Press, 2021].

All proceeds from this book go to Melanoma Institute Australia.

Interview: Kathleen Jennings, author of Flyaway

Kathleen Jennings' Australian gothic mystery novella Flyaway will hit bookstore shelves at the end of July.   The uncanny story takes place in a small town that is full of secrets.  A quiet young woman, Bettina, gets a letter from her vanished brother, starting her down a path of fuzzy memories, the blurred line between urban legend and folklore, magical weeds, people who talk (maybe) in riddles, nested stories, ambiguity and of course, family secrets. And somehow, Jennings manages to cram all of that into a novella!  If you are looking for a fast read that packs an eerie punch,  this could be your book of the summer.

To add to the magic, Jennings designed the gorgeous cover art of Flyaway, and she sketched her way through her story telling process. This is a woman who truly thinks in images, and I am in awe.  To better understand what I'm talking about, allow me to point you in the direction of this article Jennings' wrote at Tor.com where she touches on story telling through images, sketchbooks, and how the cover art of Flyaway came to be.  There is so much art-thought behind Flyaway, that at times I have to talk about the novella as a piece of fiction, and at other times I have to talk about it as a piece of art that is separate from a plotline.

Jennings' short fiction and artwork has won so many award and been featured in so many places that to be honest I don't know where to start.  Her cover art and illustration has garnered her three World Fantasy Award nominations, and multiple Ditmar awards (she even designed a Ditmar!). Her illustration clients include Subterannean Press, Tor.com, Small Beer Press, and Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, among many others.  Her short fiction has appeared in/is forthcoming in Strange Horizons, Tor.com, Eleven Eleven Journal, Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, multiple Year's Best collections, and multiple anthologies.


You can learn more about Jennings' writing and artwork at her websites, Tanaudel.wordpress.com and KathleenJennings.com and by following her on twitter, @tanaudel.

Let's get to the interview!

NOAF: Your new novella Flyaway is an Australian gothic family mystery, which you wrote while getting your Masters in Philosophy. What do Gothic style family mysteries have to do with Philosophy? How did this novella come about?

K.J.: An MPhil (Master of Philosophy) is a research higher degree - basically a half-size (Doctor of Philosophy). They can be in any field, and mine was in Communication and Arts (Creative Writing). Sometimes they're purely academic research, but mine was practice-led. That means I wrote a book to figure out a question, as well as writing a big research paper about it. I did an MPhil because I knew it was the right size for my research question, and because I didn't think Flyaway needed to be a long book. (I've got a new, bigger question now, so I've started a PhD this year).

The question I had for the MPhil was: how do writers of beautiful Australian Gothic stories manage to make them beautiful and Gothic. A lot of Australian Gothic tradition is very hot and ugly and violent (for good reasons), but there are some gentle, gorgeous books which still use a sense of sublime to create that very Gothic terror. I wanted to do that.

I grew up on a cattle property in western Queensland, reading fairy tales, and for me it was very beautiful. I didn’t recognise the landscape in a lot of Australian stories - but it was the only landscape I knew for the fairy tales. But it was also frightening sometimes, and the older I got the more I found out about the real terrible history, and also had the chance to see places where those fairy tales came from, and how differently they fit into (say) the Black Forest, or Dartmoor, or Iceland. I wanted to tell a story that acknowledged the history of Australia, while still loving the physical place, and looking at how the stories I grew up with don’t always fit Australia. And I wanted to illustrate it!

NOAF:  Who are some of your favorite Gothic writers? Why is Gothic literature, and Australian Gothic Literature, such a fun genre to read and write?

K.J.:  I'm a fan of the classics, like Jane Eyre, of course, and I love M. R. James' Ghost Stories of an Antiquary. In Australian Gothic literature, the books I looked at for my MPhil included Joan Lindsay's Picnic at Hanging Rock, which I adore (it's a little, lovely book), and Rosalie Ham's gorgeously textured The Dressmaker, and quite a few of the illustrated stories in Shaun Tan's Tales from Outer Suburbia. There are so many good books (and shows) that it's easy to give too many examples — but I’'ve recently discovered Kim Scott's Taboo, which is dangerous and fascinating and touches on a lot of themes common to Gothic literature.

NOAF:  When Bettina learns her brothers might still be alive, what are her emotions like? How does she react? Is she open about how she feels, or does she tend to keep her emotions to herself?

K.J.:  Bettina's emotions are tricky things, and I had to work on them when editing Flyaway. To start with, I like characters who are emotionally buttoned down, which meant in the early drafts I just left out emotion! Then I had to carefully add it back in. But on top of this, Bettina isn't just buttoned down. There are layers to what she's able to feel at any point in time, and reasons she can't be open even to herself, especially when she first learns about her brothers. At that point, she feels a mild puzzlement at finding something that doesn't make sense in her careful life - a loose thread that she pulls . . .

NOAF:  You put a lot of hints into your prose, using very specific words to mean specific, or multiple things. What was your writing process like, to make the prose do what you needed it to accomplish?

K.J.:  Thank you! I so much enjoy foreshadowing and layers, clues that make sense on rereading, allusions to paintings and poems - I like finding them as a reader, or recognising them lately when I found the image they referred to, and it's an awful lot of fun putting them in as a writer. The process is fairly simple.

First, generally, I read a lot, and have a habit of finding unlikely connections between things: links, theories, puns, echoes, etc.

Second, when I wrote the first draft I just put all the words in - especially all the adjectives! -th at seemed appropriate: there were heavy-handed jokes and unnecessarily long strings of descriptions.

Third, having all of those in there helped as I got near the end of the draft: there were traps I set in early chapters that I could spring in later ones, hints and echoes that suggested ways to end bits of the plot.

Fourth, when I edited, I strengthened those connections - and also cut out all the adjectives that weren't the right one.

NOAF:  So, what does happen to all those bits and pieces that you decided weren't ultimately needed?

K.J.: I don’t think they ever entirely go away. Some adapt, some become cryptids, some stick around causing untold trouble, muddying waterholes . . .

NOAF: What are some of your favourite fairy tales?

K.J.:  I’m fond of "Little Red Riding Hood", for all its variations and possibilities, and how useful the girl-in-a-wood is as a starting point for telling new tales, and because of what Dickens did with it as a frame for other fairy-tale allusions in Our Mutual Friend. "The Seven Ravens" is another I come back to a lot when I'm writing, as is "Beauty and the Beast", and the ballad "Tam Lin": all three about transformation and dogged - even defiant - loyalty. But I love the imagery and logic of fairy tales generally, like bowls of gems.

NOAF: You are a writer and an artist. When inspiration strikes, how do you know if the idea is best executed as a piece of fiction, or as a piece of artwork?

K.J.:  Sometimes I will have an idea and know it's a story or a drawing - they have different lengths and content. But other times I will be scribbling and a mood, movement, or aesthetic will emerge. Then I either play around with it until a phrase or thumbnail sketch "clicks" and I know I want to do it in a particular way. At other times, I won't have a direction for an idea. Then I'll often pick a type of story or art I feel like playing with but didn't have an idea for, and I'll try to shoehorn the idea into it. At that point, the format starts to shape the inspiration to fit it.

NOAF: You have an amazing essay on Tor.com where you discuss how creating Flyaway changed your opinions on decorative illustration. How do you think this could change your artwork, going forward?

K.J.: Thanks again! I hope it will teach me to be more definite about how I want a book-as-object to look. I tend to be cautious and responsive, because I like working around other people's ideas and requirements: it’s an enjoyable challenge, and helps a lot with decision-making! For Flyaway, I had the chance to illustrate a project purely to please myself - and to follow the illustrations into new places in search of that final style. So I hope it will make me take charge of some future projects for other people, too, and create a sort of grand aesthetic overlay for those stories. But at the same time I was working on ornaments for some books by Holly Black, and having a marvelous time inventing little illustrative dividers and chapter headers - it was very like writing all those little links and clues and ambiguities into Flyaway - so I will pursue more of that illustrative-decorative work, too.

NOAF: Thank you so much! 

POSTED BY: Andrea Johnson lives in Michigan with her husband and too many books. She can be found on twitter, @redhead5318 , where she posts about books, food, and assorted nerdery.

Microreview [Book]: Terra Nullius by Claire G. Coleman

This stealthily speculative look at invasion and oppression in Australia is as difficult as you'd expect, but accomplished and rewarding.

Cover design by Grace West

I thought I knew what to expect, going in to Terra Nullius. I'd seen the book recommended on speculative sites, I'd read enough about it to know that its take on colonisation and extermination of indigineous people was almost but not quite based on the experience of Australia's indigenous communities following the British invasion in 1788. And yet, by a hundred pages in, I was starting to doubt what everyone and everything (including the book's own blurb) was telling me. Was I missing clues to a larger mystery? Were there adjectives that I was misreading or apparently historical references that I was misinterpreting? Where, to be blunt, was all the science fiction?

Of course, if you're paying attention, that's an intentional feature of Claire G. Coleman's brilliant debut novel, which offers a perspective on the invasion of Australia which is very much a speculative novel, and yet still inexctricably and uncomfortably intertwined with the real historical treatment of Aboriginal Australians over centuries of white rule. Coleman herself is Noongar, a community from the south coast of what is now Western Australia, and Terra Nullius is the product of a black&write! indigenous writers fellowship. Despite being a first novel, this is a book that's utterly confident both in its content and its narrative structure, and for very good reason.

Terra Nullius incorporates the stories of a rotating cast of both Settlers and Natives living in Australia, from the few remaining natives living in precarious remote settlements, to variously well-meaning or abusive nuns running homes for Native children, to turncoat Settlers trying to find their place (with all the unconscious bias and assumption of primacy that entails) among the Native resistance. Its heart, however, is Jacky, a young Native who has just escaped from the abusive clutches of the abusive religious "school" where he and other children were slowly starved and locked up in cages at the slightest provocation. Jacky is now running across the continent in the vague hope of finding the place he was originally taken from, despite no memories and very little hope that it will still be around. Jacky's story, centred around the energy of his desperate, hungry run, forms the backbone of Terra Nullius around which all the other narratives intertwine and eventually come together in brutal but not hopeless conclusion.

As noted above, there's a very distinct turning point in Terra Nullius. In the Small Beer Press paperback version, it sits in what an initially unassuming sentence at the bottom of page 121, just under halfway through the book. It brings the science fictional elements to the fore by changing the context of information that the reader is receiving and catches us up with visual and historical clues which are, of course, immediately available to everyone inside the narrative. As a literary device, I'm sympathetic to people who find this kind of artificial mystery frustrating and hard to get past, but in the case of Terra Nullius I think it's used to great effect, especially if you're already aware that something is going on. By setting up a narrative where we understand that there's a twist of some kind, but not exactly what it's going to be, Terra Nullius invites us to constantly question what parts of its story we believe, and to engage with the sense of historical reality in its first half, and the speculative elements are tied to that historical record in a way which reinforces the things we found plausible and drives home the implications of those parallels. It's a device reminiscent of the sudden left turn into speculative content in recent horror films like Get Out and Sorry to Bother You and it has a similar impact here, even if the execution is different in novel form.

(I'm going to discuss spoilers directly now and, in case it's not obvious, I HIGHLY recommend you go and read the book first!)

It transpires, of course, that despite the fact this is the Australia of our world, the division between Settlers and Natives is not one between Australian Aboriginals and White European invaders, but between the remnants of the human race and a grey-skinned amphibian species of aliens who are generally referred to as Toads. The Settlers have basically exterminated humanity from most of the earth, with only a few outposts like dry desert Australia where they are completely unsuited to living which remain the last frontiers of human freedom and resistance. There's a very clear and artificial language shift after the initial reveal happens, and suddenly the discussion of Toads' different physiology and tolerances are everywhere in a way which re-contextualises elements like the slow starvation of children in the nun's school or the references through Settler eyes to Australia's hostile alien landscape. As noted above, there are characters like Johnny Star, a former trooper who abandons the Settler cause after being forced to participate in a massacre, and Sister Mel, one of the few nuns who acts compassionately to children in her care, which introduces complexity to the cast of characters without letting the Settler mentality as a whole off the hook.

The success of this story for a reader is likely to stand or fall on the success of the twist, and for me it was extremely effective on every level. Each chapter is preceded by historical quotes and extracts dealing with policies towards Natives, taking a variety of tones from condescendingly paternalistic to backing outright extermination, interspersed with some stories and perspectives from Natives themselves. It took until the "turning point" for me to begin questioning the veracity of these records, as they line up so exactly with the kind of historical records we'd expect to see from the historical records of policy towards Aboriginal people in Australia. In revealing that these were not real documents, Terra Nullius really makes us think about why they might be real, and what it says about humans that yes, this really was how we compartmentalised and exterminated our own in the not-at-all-distant past. As Coleman points out in her Author's Note at the end of the book, the concept of Australia as "Terra Nullius", empty land open for the taking, was not overturned in Australia's legal system until 1992, and the real historical events which inform narrative elements like the School and the oppression that the free Natives are running from are still very much felt in Australia today.

Terra Nullius is a hard book, full of desperation and powerlessness against an unstoppable system which has ground its victims into dust. However, it's also an important story from a perspective which remains marginalised and under-understood, and one which I'm very glad I made time for. I'm continuing to expect more good things from Coleman, whose second book is due out in Australia later this year, and I'm extremely grateful that her voice and perspective has reached the global SF conversation.

The Math
Baseline Assessment: 8/10

Bonuses: +1 A novel where form and content complement each other brilliantly; +1 Speaks to the historical context in a complex but unforgiving way

Penalties: -1 The abruptness in the twist might be off-putting to some

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10

POSTED BY: Adri is a semi-aquatic migratory mammal most often found in the UK. She has many opinions about SFF books, and is also partial to gaming, baking, interacting with dogs, and Asian-style karaoke.