Aurealis #146 rounds off another year of fine speculative fiction and non-fiction by the Aurealis team. Kick off your fiction reading with the nightmarish, toothy horror of Verity Borthwick’s ‘The Tannfé’. Then move onto Maria Lewis’ ‘The House That Hungers’, a part haunted house story, part revenge fantasy, part omigod-when-are-we-ever-gonna-get-out-of-this-shit wish fulfilment spawned from so many of us forced to do battle with the confines of the walls around us. And finally taste Caitlin Rozakis’ eerie and emotional ‘Those Who Remain’ which opens with a hooded woman, a green lantern, and a haunted face, and find out why she keeps the lantern even as it feeds off her soul.
Amy Laurens explores the fraught history of goblins in ‘Goblins: Greed, Anti-Semitism and Neurodivergence Throughout History’. Lachlan Walter looks at Post-Apocalyptic Fiction, Hopepunk, COVID-19 and the Fallacy of Near-Total Barbarism and Gillian Polack introduces us to world-building in early Australian speculative fiction.
And if you’re looking for long fiction SF, check out our reviewers’ picks for best speculative fiction books in 2021.