Aurealis “Dying Mountain” by Baden M Chant
“Full Term” by Scott Steensma
“Macaws in the Yukon” by Eric Del Carlo Goshev
Reviewed by Geoff Houghton
The first story in Aurealis #177 is “Dying Mountain” by Baden M Chant. It is an alternative history set in a Sanatorium in the European Alps during the early part of the 20th Century. This world shares many characteristics with the historic pre-First World War Europe, the major difference being that magic not only exists but is widely practised alongside and as an equal to the science of that period.
The Sanatorium exists to isolate Mages who lose conscious control of their magic. It is closely modelled on the TB clinics that existed before the invention of reliable anti-bacterial therapy, where “treatment” concentrated on controlling the symptoms and slowing the progress of a disease that was usually terminal.
The first person narrator is a female mage with early and limited symptoms. The narrative centres upon her relationship with a more seriously affected young woman who refuses to accept her symptoms as an unfortunate and probably fatal affliction. Instead, the youngster persists in treating these changes as a transition to something greater.
The author supplies a clear and believable explanation of the benefits, for both individual mages and wider society, of accepting semi-voluntary seclusion and the currently accepted standard treatment once they detect the early symptoms of loss of voluntary control of their magic. The reader must decide for themselves whether refusal to accept that apparent necessity and their almost inevitable doom is a reasonable alternative or merely delusional.
The second offering this month is “Full Term” by Scott Steensma. This is set in a near-future Australia where bioscience and surgery has advanced enough that a male can be surgically modified to carry a foetus to term.
The first-person narrator is a pregnant man. The most interesting twist to the story is that our point of view character is not carrying a child to share this joy and burden with a loving partner but in order to produce an identical clone of himself. The second and most morally ambiguous revelation is that his intent is to have his mature brain transplanted into the clone as a form of life extension.
There are serious technical reasons why this would not be practical but the author has done his best to address them as reasonably as necessary in a story that includes the word “fiction” after the word “science.” The reader is encouraged to allow a pass on those technicalities in order to address the fascinating moral dilemmas that the existence of such a surgical treatment would create.
The last story is “Macaws in the Yukon” by Eric Del Carlo Goshev. This is a story of alien first-contact, set on a climate-devastated Earth a century or more into the future. On this heat and storm stricken planet, only the extreme northern and southern latitudes can support unprotected life. Elsewhere, humanity clings desperately to a precarious existence maintained by a fallible and slowly failing technology.
The aliens have set up an underground encampment in the Yukon to which humans may come to attempt what communication is possible. The visitors communicate/teach by a procedure described as “The Narrative” in which a few selected survivors directly access some tiny part of the Visitor database via one-use surgically implanted brain grafts. The procedure is unreliable, incomplete and wasteful of human resources, with some humans learning nothing and most adding just a tiny step forward to the ongoing knowledge base.
The story is notable for the absence of any clearly delineated villains. The human governments appear weak and uncaring, but that is portrayed as an unfortunate necessity of the world-wide disaster rather than any correctable human failing. Death stalks the planet and resources are too few for an overly tender attitude to those who cannot contribute to the precarious survival of the species. The aliens appear to be benign but are sufficiently alien that it is supremely difficult to communicate with them and impossible to comprehend their motives. The only true villains to be identified are the heedless dead of past generations who allowed this disaster to come about by their feckless inaction.
The only ray of hope in this slough of despond is our Point of View character. She is the daughter of one of the early speakers with the aliens and the first of a generation who may be able to hasten that process by communicating in a less convoluted and wasteful manner. Perhaps her new talent is evolutionary, perhaps the aliens have performed a similar rescue before and deserve the credit, but even at the last, our author offers no guarantee that that anything will be enough to save humanity from itself.
Geoff Houghton lives in a leafy village in rural England. He is a retired Healthcare Professional with a love of SF and a jackdaw-like appetite for gibbets of medical, scientific and historical knowledge.