Aurealis #135

by Stephen Higgins (Editor)

  ‘The price?’ Cristóbal shivered. Did he really want to know the answer?

  Tagón lifted his head. ‘Look at me. You can see it.’

  ‘I…’

  ‘Every time we travelled through one of these hidden paths, we became more twisted, uglier, more misshapen.’ Tagón swallowed. ‘At first it was in small, insignificant ways, but over time the deformities multiplied. With each secret path we took, our bodies revealed what we suspected truly lay in our hearts. We were once a race as fair as yours. Now we had become monsters.’

  Cristóbal reached up to feel the pockmarks on his face. ‘That’s why you were determined to allow yourself to be baptised and prove you weren’t demons?’

  ‘Yes, and it’s the reason our helmets are so important to us. If we can create a perfection to crown our deformities, then we can’t possibly be the monstrosities we appear to be. We always believed that, as long as our people remained alive, we could redeem ourselves.’

  Tagón hesitated, compulsively running his fingers through his beard. ‘And for us to hold to that belief, we needed to stop you at all costs. From the moment we saw your army, your war-beasts, and your weapons, we knew that our survival was at stake. You were heading ever closer to the wind-whisperer lands.’

  ‘But you gave us no chance.’

  ‘We knew what would happen. We’d seen it before. It was inevitable that you would become slaves of the wind-whisperers. Your ground weapons combined with sky attacks meant our very existence was threatened. We had to stop you by any means. It’s why we killed the Incan runner. We thought he was showing the way forward for your army.’

  ‘And you were right about everything.’

  Tagón nodded again and glanced at Sala. ‘Anyway, enough of the past,’ he said. A female ñakaq approached them, carrying a bundle in her arms. ‘Let me introduce you to my newborn son.’

  To be concluded in Aurealis #136.

  The Author: Dirk Strasser

  Dirk Strasser has won several Australian Publisher Association Awards and a Ditmar for Best Professional Achievement. His short story, ‘The Doppelgänger Effect’, appeared in the World Fantasy Award-winning anthology, Dreaming Down Under (Tor). Dirk’s fantasy trilogy The Books of Ascension (Pan Macmillan) and short stories have been translated into several languages. The short story version of Conquist was published in Dreaming Again (HarperCollins). His screenplay of Conquist was a Finalist at the 2019 Cinequest Film & Creativity Festival, Richmond International Film Festival, the Fresh Voices Original Screenplay Competition and the Byron Bay Film Festival. He has co-edited Australia’s premiere speculative fiction magazine Aurealis for over 120 issues and founded the Aurealis Awards. www.dirkstrasser.com.

  Story Behind the Story

  Conquist is ultimately about the decisions we make. Nueva Tierra is a world that strips people of all their crutches. I wanted to explore how the characters reacted in a world without a point of orientation, where they were truly untethered, where they couldn’t excuse or escape the consequences of their actions, and where sometimes the decisions forced on them were impossible to resolve.

  The Artist: Leah Clementson

  Hi readers! I’m Leah Clementson, an animator/Illustrator living in the Big Smoke of Melbourne. I’m probably a little too enthusiastic about what I do and when I’m not making cartoons. You can usually find me reading about wizards, crime, and wizards committing crimes. If you want to see more of my work, head on over to my website leahclementson.tumblr.com.

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  Barbara Baynton and the Horror of Women’s Lives

  Gillian Polack

  Not every work written a while back is forgotten. Some are not thought of as speculative fiction, however. Barbara Baynton (1857–1929) had a life that itself could be the subject of story, including a rural upbringing in the Hunter region of NSW, a divorce when her first husband ran off with a servant, and sulking at her third husband who refused the throne of Albania. Baynton published one novel and a range of short stories. While her reputation was in hibernation for some years, it has recently been woken and she’s now often placed on lists of classic Australian authors who should be studied.

  She didn’t write a great deal of fiction. Her short stories were collected into a volume in 1902, Bush Studies. Two stories from the collection are of particular interest to speculative fiction readers: ‘A Chosen Vessel’ and ‘The Dreamer’. From one direction, both stories are ‘outback’ tales. Like many of Henry Lawson’s stories, they depict life on the land. Unlike Lawson’s, they are not about mateship and the struggles they depict do not have good outcomes. This is the main reason they fit neatly into the corpus of Australian Gothic writing.

  Baynton has been resurrected because her view now reflects something we’ve seen, that we’re currently trying to understand. Her bleak view is not the only view of the bush, but it’s an important one. Women’s Colonial Gothic is sub-genre of speculative fiction, and Barbara Baynton’s work demonstrates several of its most critical techniques. ‘The Dreamer’ is a good example of how she does this. A woman travels with enormous difficulty only to find something that shatters her life at the end of the voyage. The Gothic is in the transformation of a journey into something where danger glints at every step, but where the danger is in no way the worst that can happen. Both over-the-top and every day, Baynton uses a very Australian form of the Gothic.

  In many 19th-century short stories with gritty or otherwise realistic bush settings, women are more part of the setting than part of the story. Women are permitted to be seen in others, but they are not given carriage of the plot or the literary themes. This is why Baynton’s work is now so visible: those two stories alone entirely depend on women. The stories unveil the terror that can be inflicted upon women… as dark narratives, fitting in the Women’s Colonial Gothic spectrum.

  There has been less discussion by critics from a related angle, where the stories are considered as tales where horror and darkness are core. Yet, when I read ‘A Chosen Vessel’, I see that all these aspects fit together, very tightly. Women’s Colonial Gothic and horror are bound by the same string.

  Genre helps us delve into this story. Both ‘A Chosen Vessel’ and ‘The Dreamer’ are almost unredeemedly negative and have Gothic resonances throughout, and both stories end tragically. ‘A Chosen Vessel’ fits within the speculative fiction range, although it’s not generally described as speculative fiction. Its darkness and Gothic tone bring it into the fold.

  ‘A Chosen Vessel’ is especially interesting for genre readers. A reader cannot fully understand the tragedy of the woman without understanding how the story is Gothic and how it turns to horror and yet…

  It was first published as a realist short story by the simple means of the editor cutting out a whole section. This diminished the range of meanings, for it excised the interpretative, visionary part. It also reduced the choices presented to the reader in how to interpret the suffering of the main character, for it took out the observer. In taking out the observer, it made it that much harder to interpret the suffering of women as partly due to the choices made by men. It reduced the horror element considerably. Rape and murder read more vindictively when someone dismisses cries for help as a religious vision.

  In ‘A Chosen Vessel’, Baynton wrote a story that matched and criticised a lot of recent events in Australia. Anne Summers documented the same pattern of events in her classic study, Damned Whores and God’s Police (1975). Baynton’s story (before it was cut) presented the stereotypes women were expected to fit into and presented them starkly.

  The first (published) section is realist and the second (unpublished initially) is visionary. Women were not only God’s police—they were also living emblems of the Virgin Mary. This reflected 19th-century Australia but it also reflects the present for large numbers of Australians, with the stand many women take against rape and harassment. The #MeToo element, where many women stand up and say, ‘It happened to me—don’t just walk by’ p
oint to what happened in Baynton’s story before the cuts.

  The main character of the second section simply walks by. He’s so taken with his vision that the cries for help are from the Virgin Mary that he does nothing for the woman who calls out.

  It has typical Gothic elements of its time. The darkness of the crow and the bleakness of the atmosphere. I’ve written about Australian Gothic in other articles. It began, as a published genre, in 1818, with the first literary publication of Van Diemen’s Land. It contains (and this is important) frequent links to real life or stories of the land.

  Due to this Gothic underlay and the history of what kinds of work readers expected from Australian writers from early on, even the realist segments of ‘A Chosen Vessel’ are speculative fiction according to modern definitions.

  Within the two positions of women in Summers’ historical overview, the female protagonist is raped and thus cannot be pure and virtuous, and Hennessy (the man who passes, the one who could have been a saviour) is dreaming of God. The dark reality and the religious view represent a strong set of cultural assumptions from the period and brings, as I’ve explained, a Gothic interpretation of Australia into the 19th century and into the 20th. Baynton’s interpretations of them are particularly bleak. Instead of pushing the rape and death to the back, and making the woman irrelevant, her experience is key to the story. Even when Hennessy walks past and dooms her, he sees her pain and her emotion. The story is about distancing and choosing not to act, but it is also about what happens to the person who is not helped.

  Landscape echoes the experience of the characters. While I call this ‘Gothic’ because of the period it was written and set, it has a lot in common with more modern horror stories, with each element of the story being explored through characters, actions and through the vocabulary that illuminates both.

  In another way, too, it’s horror: Gothic fiction has a sense of pageant and colour and of leaving everyday life to do its thing. This story is about everyday life. The ordinary becomes extraordinary and is terrifying. If Hennessy had not walked by and had not been engrossed in his vision, then the woman would have been saved and the elements of Gothic would have linked more closely to the earlier Gothic narratives in 19th-century Australia. The story would have been fraught, but it would have told of survival.

  This story, then, is important because of the way it uses earlier narrative constructs to underline the darkness, to reinforce it and to transform it from exotic to near and brutal.

  This is not all there is in the tale. For me, the important elements that Baynton brings are women to the bush narrative, realism (in a dark way, turning the known into horror) to the same bush narrative, a clear and obvious accounting of women and men interpreting events differently to the disadvantage of women (this is an extreme and graphic version of it, but the lack of understanding of a man plays a decisive role in the woman’s fate) and how it’s possible to bring speculative fiction elements to a dark reality narrative.

  The edits to the tale are also important. Bayton’s written version of the story says all the things I explain here. The edited version doesn’t even say half of them. By dropping the supernatural element, the story retains its Gothic overlay, but loses much of its meaning. That difference between male and female perception and interpretation falls by the wayside, and, because of this, some of the horror is lost.

  One of the reasons for the loss of an element of the horror is because religious belief is not part of the final fate of the woman. The visions Hennessy thinks he sees and his interpretation are drawn directly, as is everything else in this story, from one of the sets of cultural viewpoints from Baynton’s time and place. In this case, it’s the need to ascribe higher religious meaning to most things, and the importance of the self (in particular the male, Christian, British-origin self) in that interpretation. Hennessy, in claiming vision rather than checking to see if someone was in trouble, was putting himself into the centre of the story that was not about him. Baynton is not claiming that all Christian men of that background do this—she’s pointing out that Hennessy did. This brings to mind the #NotAllMen tag that followed the #MeToo. There are some interesting cultural congruencies over time.

  The moral of the full story is that awareness of others ought to enter into certain situations. The enactment of a man’s need to see himself as a visionary pushes the story into horror. The edited story is a Gothic-tinged tragedy. Not only does this story have two quite different meanings, but it contains two different genres. The editor was intrusive and restrictive.

  By colouring the story with Gothic elements, as I’ve said, Baynton reinforces the darkness. This form of translation into Gothic makes the everyday a little more distant and makes it easier to bear. By doubting the visionary nature of belief, Baynton does the opposite with the more positive sense of women in the bush. She points out that mistaken thoughts by men can be as difficult to women as the original misdeed. #MeToo shows us the same sense of there being a wider society where women are hurt on a daily basis. Baynton’s fictional response to similar events is a powerful one.

  Given the nature of the edit, it’s possible that Baynton is closer to us than she was to her peers in many ways.

  The Author: Gillian Polack

  Gillian Polack is a writer, editor and historian. Several of her novels and her short story collection have been shortlisted for Ditmar or Aurealis Awards. Her novel The Year of the Fruit Cake won the 2020 Ditmar for best novel. She’s edited two anthologies and has several dozen short stories published (some to very mild fanfare, some not). She consults privately and teaches writing and history and literature in various places. Her research is currently about how narratives work and how writers create them, including how culture is encoded and how history is used in fiction. Website: www.gillianpolack.com. Facebook: Gillian Polack. Twitter: gillianpolack.

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  Cthulhu in California—The Writing of Michael Shea

  Emmet O’Cuana

  Michael Shea

  I’m sorry I didn’t discover the writing of Michael Shea (1946–2014) until after he passed away. Shea was a prolific writer of horror and fantasy fiction, a number of whose Cthulhu Mythos tales were collected in the anthology Demiurge (Dark Regions Press 2017, edited by S T Joshi). Shea exchanges the New England setting of H P Lovecraft’s stories of Cthulhu, shoggoths and Elder Gods for San Francisco. He also takes in themes of growing gentrification in California, inequality of wealth and Silicon Valley entrepreneurialism.

  In doing so, Shea challenges the bigotry and discrimination that underpins Lovecraft’s writing. The Cthulhu Mythos is known for its themes of cosmic horror, with human protagonists encountering sanity-shredding alien gods or ancient races. Their existence reveals that the human race is a largely insignificant sideshow in this planet’s history. The Mythos gained in popularity down the years as Lovecraft encouraged peers in the pulp horror scene to utilise his creations in their own writing. He showcased the work of Clark Ashton Smith, Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Machen, knitting some of their concepts into his wide universe of gods and monsters.

  Lovecraft’s writing also features eruptions of hateful language towards African Americans, Middle Eastern cultures, and any European south of the Austrian border. It’s a feature of his writing, with all its visionary excess and elaborate language, that I’ve never been able to stomach.

  The Shadow Over Innsmouth (1936) opens with a description of government agents kidnapping the inhabitants of the titular town. The narrator reveals they’ve been taken to concentration camps. He goes on to describe how he arrived at Innsmouth, learning along the away about the racially mixed population and a foreign cult introduced by a ship’s captain named Marsh. When he finally meets an Innsmouth resident, he remarks on how greasy he looks, saying: ‘[j]ust what foreign blood was in him I could not even guess. His oddities certainly did not look Asiatic, Polynesian, Levantine, or negroid, yet I could see why the people found him alien’.

 
; He goes on to suggest racial degeneration as being his assumption, which as Claire Fitzpatrick (Aurealis #120) argues was a concern of Lovecraft’s, given a family history of rumoured incest. But I would suggest, for Lovecraft, incest and people of different racial backgrounds having families are the same. It was the foreign racial groups (i.e. non-Anglo-Saxon immigrants to Innsmouth) that the narrator in this story is identifying as degenerate. And Lovecraft would both publicly and privately in correspondence make similar claims, railing against immigration and the increasing liberty of Black Americans. In his blog article ‘H P Lovecraft’s Madness’, author P Djèlí Clark has concisely quoted from letters and stories of Lovecraft, showing how the writer’s personal racism informed his fiction.

  Shea’s writing, in both the locale and the contemporary period, reframes the nature of his Cthulhu tales. Shea sets his stories in an America that Lovecraft was terrified of seeing the dawn of, an America that was slowly becoming more equitable to its citizens. Disgustingly, the New England author wrote in a letter to Maurice W Moe on 18 May 1922 that immigrant residents of a New York neighbourhood should be gassed to death.

  But where Lovecraft infused his writing with his bigotry, closely associating ‘fishy’ Innsmouth residents occupying an American town with a rising tide of immigration from non-English speaking countries, Shea takes a different approach. His protagonists in stories like ‘The Pool’, ‘Tsathoggua’ and ‘The Presentation’ are day labourers reliant on insecure employment, people sleeping rough in the city, or freelancing comic artists desperate for commissions.