Aurealis “The Winding Sheet” by Baden M Chant
“Shitmining” by Greg Foyster
“Bigger Fish” by Jared Millet
Reviewed by David Wesley Hill
The October Aurealis opens with “The Winding Sheet” by Baden M Chant, which is set in a surreal world where Kami—seemingly Shinto spirits—“flitted through the trees, trailing after images of purple and red and gold.” It’s the Winder’s job to tend to the dead, and he does this by tracing the ley lines residing in the corpse in silver ink, and then by wrapping the body in a winding-sheet that “melded with the inked ley lines and took up their soft and liquid light.” Unfortunately, the Winder is an old man now and having trouble performing his duties. So he takes on a very young apprentice to follow in his footsteps, mistakenly believing he has years in which to bring the novice up to speed, only to learn, as all mortals do, that less time remains to him than he assumed…. Ultimately raising more questions than it answers, “The Winding Sheet” left this reviewer less entertained than confused. I still can’t figure out why the Winder’s apprentice was born amid “rows of green, swelling brassica placenta.” In a cabbage patch?
Next up is “Shitmining” by Greg Foyster, which takes place in a near future where once again Westerners are robbing the Third World of their natural resources, in this case an island of guano somewhere off the coast of South America, beneath which is a “giant face carved out of stone.” It’s always best to let sleeping gods lie, but there’s money to be made, and the mining continues even after the local Quechua workers quit in superstitious dread of disturbing the deity slumbering beneath the fecal mountain. The situation gets even shittier, so to speak, when the buried statue’s face is revealed, leading to a quite Hitchcockian—and very crappy—ending…. An amusing scatalogical tale that would have made Jonathan Swift smile.
The issue ends in a big splash with “Bigger Fish” by Jared Millet, set on Brobdin, a dark water world where everything “eats everything else.” Mora Waro is director of the show Crade’s Universe, sort of a hybrid between Man Vs. Wild and 60 Minutes. She’s ostensibly on the planet to film the host, Hector Crade (according to the author, a cross between Anthony Bourdain and Evel Knievel), riding a behemoth dragon ray. Actually, though, Mora has revenge in her heart, and is determined to murder the man who killed her sister—Etron Golding, PR chief of Harvester Interstellar, the company that controls Brobdin. Of course, it’s best to dig two graves in such a situation, and it’s unsurprising that Mora and Hector end up on the bottom of the ocean in a wrecked submersible when her plan goes awry. How she and Hector manage to extricate themselves from this dire predicament—and Mora’s eventual confrontation with Golding—makes for a clever, exciting, and satisfying science fiction tale. Recommended.