“The Apartment on Copernicus Street” by Steve Simpson
“The Red House” by Chris Large
Reviewed by Richard E.D. Jones
Australian fantasy and science fiction, to me, conjures up images of the DreamTime, of aboriginal men and women gathered around a small fire, the tiny light dwarfed by the light show of the billions of stars wheeling around the sky above. Yeah, I’m pretty much living on the stereotype of Australia. Throw in a dingo and a boomerang, maybe a shrimp on a barbie, and we’d have the whole Magilla.
That stereotype, however, isn’t on display in the fifty-eighth edition of Aurealis, which came out in late February and bills itself as Australian fantasy and science fiction. Two writers, one from Australia and one from Tasmania, gather together under the Aurealis banner to tell two very different stories.
Springing from the keyboard of Steve Simpson, we get to read the story of “The Apartment on Copernicus Street,” a tale of a very odd alien invasion of Brazil and the rest of the world.
The aliens arose from the center of our solar system, the sun, and rode magnetic waves to crash upon the surf of Earth’s magnetosphere. At which point the nations of the world promptly shot nuclear weapons to the locations of the nine alien ships, which promptly vanished.
It was only months later that the world began to notice something a little different about life on Earth. Cells began to generate more and more energy; eventually, multicellular life would create so much energy that it would spontaneously combust, translating to a brilliant blue flame that shot up towards the heavens. So it was with bees. So it was with all the humans on Earth.
All the humans except for Aldona, a mechanic at Damasco Auto. Just before the invasion began, the magnetic grapple with which she was lifting a Passat, overheated and a wave of phantom electricity washed through her. And somehow made her immune to the color humana, which translates loosely to the human touch, to warmth. In this case, a much more literal interpretation than would normally be given.
Aldona lives in an apartment on Copernicus Street with her companion, Xavier, a specialist in solar flares. When he is given a job in Argentina, he leaves Aldona for a year, only for her to find that separation will last much longer as the number of intense blue flames shoots ever higher.
Eventually, Aldona is left to wander the streets of Viamão, bereft of all life but hers, missing the movement of anything not driven by the wind. She is alone, awaiting the return of the alien ships that must be waiting to collect the planet as their own. She is all alone, but for the strange shadows she sees cast on the wall of her apartment. Shadows which seem to be . . . moving of their own volition?
Told in a languid manner, “The Apartment on Copernicus Street” manages to wring from its slow pace a feeling of quiet desperation. Even though cataclysmic events are happening all over the world, we see almost none of that in this story. Aldona faces the coming extinction of life on Earth with a sense of the inevitable riding on her shoulder. Almost everyone she meets gives off that same sense of quiet acceptance.
It’s an interesting stylistic choice on Simpson’s part. Instead of the loud hysterics I’d think would accompany an alien invasion, followed by a deadly change to the laws of physics, Simpson gives us a quiet story of acceptance and, possibly, hope. The story is well-written, but for a distressing tendency to use passive construction, but I’m willing to give that a pass as I’m thinking it’s probably there to reinforce the feeling of passivity arising from the story itself.
The story is a somewhat engaging tale that, while a different take on an old trope, in the end, doesn’t really do enough to distance itself from those stories that came before.
The second story of the issue is called “The Red House” and it comes from author Chris Large. If “The Apartment on Copernicus Street” was full of a detached lassitude, this story is probably it’s exact polar opposite.
Filled to the brim with vivid description, anger, blood and hate, “The Red House” tells the story of the rise of a madam at a house of ill repute somewhere in a Weird West where zommies think and eat brains, where dogs look just like people until the right phase of the moon changes’em and smokes come and haunt as they please.
And a young girl called Wendy, a fine-looking little thing, is trying to make her way as a nameless little whore for Jake, the zommie who runs “The Red House.”
Wendy is a girl who knows what she hates – zommies, dogs, and, most of all, smokes – but has very little idea of what she loves. Or even likes. Growing up a naïve little farmer’s daughter out in the sticks, the girl who would be called Wendy fell for a line o’ bullcrap laid out by a smoke named Gold Pan Pete.
The smoke told her she could fly with him to a place filled with magic and treasure and all it would cost her was her name, and that for only ten minutes or so. Gold Pan Pete lied ‘bout most of that, but did tell the truth about taking Wendy to a different place. He sold her to zommie Jake the drunk. Wendy made a tiny life for herself at The Red House, mostly content to live with the devil she knows.
When Gold Pan Pete took her name, he also stole knowledge of her from everyone else in the world, including her mommy, who did nothing as Wendy done got dragged away. With no place to call home, Wendy figured, it made just as much sense to stay in The Red House, if only to avoid the vicious beatin’ Jake kept handing out to the whores who didn’t do what he told ‘em.
All that changes when Wendy decides to do a favor for a good-looking woman name of Dorothy. Wendy doesn’t charge Dorothy for a roll in the sheets and finds herself in a bit of a relationship, but it’s one that Jake doesn’t approve of since Wendy didn’t get paid none.
Things come to a bit of a head when Dorothy appears in Wendy’s bed a few nights later, even though Wendy done locked her door and there ain’t no way Dorothy could of got in without her bein’ a smoke.
Right up until the last little bit of the story, Large seemed to be telling a story that had been told pretty much before. Don’t get me wrong, Large told the story with a bunch of new things added and told it in a way that really kept me rushing from one sentence to the next, but it seemed like a bit of a tired plot.
Right up until the end, when Large twisted the story up a bit into something different, but also something that, on further reflection, should have been obvious from the start. That’s a good trick. And certainly one I appreciate.
“The Red House” is a bit of a dense start, in that you have to get used to the narrative style. Very little is out-and-out explained, but I found that to be a nice aspect of the story, working out what was what on my own. The prose style was more than a little infectious, as you might have guessed. All in all, Large is a writer I intend to follow.