This year marks the 30th anniversary of the Aurealis Awards. The first Awards for Excellence in Australian Speculative Fiction were for works published in 1995, with the ceremony the following year. What started originally as an initiative of Aurealis magazine has, over the years, taken on a huge life of its own and not only become Australia’s top SFF award, but is also widely recognised by the global SFF community. So, how did this institution come about? Like many great things, it started with a failure.

Let’s go back to 1990. Aurealis magazine had published its first issues and was working hard to foster the development of Australian SFF by establishing itself as a reliable professional market for Australian fantasy and science fiction. We realised at one point, however, that our mission was only half fulfilled. Aurealis magazine fostered short fiction and was encouraging of new and developing writers. That left a gaping hole for the recognition of longer works by more established writers.

In an attempt to fill this gap, Stephen Higgins, the late Peter McNamara and a few others tried to start an award. There was no doubt that there was room for one. We already had the Ditmars, but there was no juried award. There was no equivalent of the World Fantasy Award. The discussion didn’t go anywhere and sort of petered out. Remember, though, this was the early 1990s. Not everyone had email, and the discussion was made via a chain of letters by people in different states. This is not an easy way to get things done. Ultimately, this initial push for an award system failed because everyone had a different idea of how it should work, and the discussion just went around in circles.

A couple of years later I felt that, as an increasingly well-known magazine, we were in a position to have a go at setting up an awards system. I thought that maybe if we started with something modest, it would gather momentum. We couldn’t expect a wide awareness of a new award in its first few years, and we suspected that there might be some resistance because fans were understandably protective of the Ditmars—and this new award was attached to a professional magazine with Australia-wide newsagency distribution. As part of my day job I had been involved with the Awards for Excellence in Educational Publishing, so I knew that the structure was the key. Although the Aurealis Award structure we developed has been tinkered with over the years, it has stood the test of time.

What I felt was absolutely crucial was that all of the eligible works had to be read by the people making the decision. To achieve this, the awards had to seek out works that had, for whatever reason, not been entered. The whole point was that at the end of the process, we could say that what we declared a winner had been carefully chosen by having every conceivable work that met our criteria read and considered. This is not easy to achieve in practice because of the workload involved, and it’s one of the reasons we came up with different categories with separate judging panels.

The other important reason for having different categories was so that spaceships were being compared with spaceships, dragons with dragons and so on. To achieve this in the early years we had four divisions with two awards in each division, giving us a total of eight Aurealis Awards:

Division A Science Fiction: Best Novel and Best Short Story
Division B Fantasy: Best Novel and Best Short Story
Division C Horror: Best Novel and Best Short Story
Division D Young Adult: Best Novel and Best Short Story

Although this type of structure is more common now, at the time most of the SFF Awards just lumped things together into broad categories. We were breaking new ground. As far as I’m aware Division D was the first specific Young Adult award anywhere in the world, not just the first Young Adult SFF Award.

So, what happened in that first year 1995? Arguably, you could call it a Greg Egan triumph. The Western Australian writer of hard science fiction won the Best Science Fiction Novel with Distress and the Best Science Fiction Short Story with ‘Luminous’ and had two other Short Story Finalists ‘Mister Volition’ and ‘Wang’s Carpets’.

Greg went on to win several more Aurealis Awards in the early years but, for reasons I’m still not clear on, he declined the Best Science Fiction Novel Award for Teranesia in 1999. We know it wasn’t Aurealis-Awards-specific because he also declined Teranesia for the Ditmar Award that year. Technically you can’t decline an Aurealis Award, but I guess you can say you’re declining it and have it on record. Early last year I finally had to throw out the trophy that I’d been keeping in case Greg changed his mind. I’m assuming he actively chose not to have his works considered since, although he did win another Aurealis Award for Best Collection for Oceanic in 2009, which he again declined. I may be wrong, but I’m not aware of him declining any of his other 176 award wins and nominations.

​I still have clear memories of the first awards ceremony on 22 March 1996. One thing I remember was to reach the upstairs venue of Justin Ackroyd’s Slow Glass Books on 305 Swanston Walk, we had to walk through what could be described as a BDSM store. I often wondered what Sean McMullen’s young daughter Catherine at the time made of it!

Another memory I have of the first Aurealis Awards ceremony was that Garth Nix told me he wouldn’t come down to Melbourne from Sydney for the awards ceremony unless I told him whether he had won. Fair enough, but I was really keen to make sure that the night had some surprises. I also wanted as many winners there as possible, so I told him he had won. What I didn’t tell him was that he had won two awards for Sabriel: Best Fantasy Novel and Best Young Adult Novel. I also rearranged the order of the announcements so that his second win was the climax of the night. Garth was genuinely shocked and overwhelmed when I announced it, and the first Aurealis Awards finished with a bang. This was exactly the sort of thing we were hoping would happen. It was the first award Garth had ever won. Awards are important, and Garth’s double win no doubt helped kick off his New York Times best-selling career. With his 15 wins (two over my own fantasy novels) and 39 nominations, we can say Garth Nix has dominated the Aurealis Awards.

Here are the winners of the 1995 Aurealis Awards:

Best Science Fiction Novel: Distress by Greg Egan (Millennium)
Best Science Fiction Short Story: ‘Luminous’ by Greg Egan (Asimov’s Sep 1995)
Best Fantasy Novel: Sabriel, Garth Nix (Moonstone/HarperCollins)
Best Fantasy Short Story ‘Harvest Bay’, Karen Attard (Eidolon #19 Spring 1995)
Best Horror Novel: An Intimate Knowledge of the Night, Terry Dowling (Aphelion)
Best Horror Short Story: Olympia, Francis Payne (Bambada Press)
Best Young Adult Novel (tie): Deucalion, Brian Caswell (UQP)
Best Young Adult Novel (tie): Sabriel, Garth Nix (Moonstone/HarperCollins)
Best Young Adult Short Story: No award

This is the first of my three blogs about the birth of the Aurealis Awards. There are some big plans for the 30-year celebration of the Aurealis Awards this year. Watch out for announcements.

This blog first appeared in a slightly different form in my Editorial for Aurealis #177.

I attended a panel on historical fantasy at the Science Fiction Worldcon in Glasgow. My own historical fantasy, Conquist, was about to be published, so I was particularly interested in this subgenre. In fact, I was really keen to sit on that panel but missed the expression of interest deadline (which is not like me, but there were extenuating circumstances—long story!).

Anyway, while romantasy is the subgenre currently having its moment in the sun, historical fantasy (I’m going to call it histasy) could be waiting in the wings as the next big wave. Publishers and booksellers love comparisons (if you like Book A, you’ll like Book B), so as part of my marketing research for Conquist, I’ve looked into the histasy phenomenon and have come up with a few surprises.
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​​Firstly, histasy does seem to be on the rise (and I certainly wasn’t expecting that when I was writing Conquist). Let’s start with the massive Outlander series by Diana Gabaldon, spanning 18th century Scotland, France and America, which is now nine books and counting, with some of the books candidates for the longest SFF novels ever written, and has been adapted into a long-running Netflix series. Yes, Outlander is actually a historical romance fantasy (histromantasy?), but let’s not go down the fraught path of triple-barrelled portmanteaus.

​Then there’s the New York Times best-selling author R F Kuang’s Babel, which won the Nebula Award, the Locus Award, the British Book Award, Blackwell’s Book of the Year for Fiction and would have had a good chance of winning the Hugo Award if it hadn’t been disqualified by Chinese state censorship. It’s set in an alternative-reality 1830s England, where Britain’s supremacy is driven by the use of magical silver bars that derive their power from words in different languages that have similar—but not identical—meaning.

​V E Schwab’s The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue follows a young French woman in 1714 who makes a Faustian bargain for immortality that curses her to be forgotten by everyone she meets. It was on the New York Times Best Seller list for 37 consecutive weeks and is scheduled for a film adaptation.

​While most histasies until now have tended to focus on British and Western European history from the Middle Ages up to the 19th century, there is wealth of unexplored eras and geographic areas open to discovery by the subgenre. My own novel Conquist is set in 1538 Peru at the time of the Spanish conquest of the Inca Empire, where an army of conquistadors enter a portal and invade a new (fantasy) world in the search for gold and glory with a mission to convert the beings they find there to Christianity.

The only histasy I’m aware set at that time period as Conquist with Spanish main characters is the recently published The Familiar by Leigh Bardugo, who is best known for her YA fantasy Shadow and Bone books, which were made into a stunning Netflix series. The Familiar is set against the backdrop of the Spanish Inquisition and, like The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, has a diabolical Faustian bargain at its heart.

Tell us something you see in this project that might not be obvious to the reviewer.
Conquist has been thoroughly researched and based on historical events. Cristóbal’s story mirrors Francisco Pizarro’s conquest of the Incan Empire. The Pizarro brothers were searching for Manco Incas’ hidden city of Vilcabamba in the Amazon at the same time that Cristóbal is searching for it in the Andes. Lieutenant Héctor Valiente is loosely based on the black conquistador Juan Valiente, a slave who convinced his owner to allow him to become a conquistador for four years as long as he kept a record of his earnings and returned them to his master.
 
Why do you want to tell this story? Why are you the right person or even the only person who can tell it?
The story of conquistadors invading a fantasy world has been with me for a long time. I understand fantasy. My fantasy and science fiction novels and short stories have been translated into several languages and I’ve co-edited Aurealis, Australia’s best-selling fantasy and science fiction magazine, for over 30 years. I understand conquistadors. I’ve studied their strategies, their battles, and their diaries over many years. I know what drives them. I know their flaws. I also understand that at the heart of a good story are the decisions that the characters make, and at the heart of those decisions is how the characters make good the bad ones that they’ve made.
 
What drives you to write? Why do you want to do this as a career and not just as a hobby?
I write to be heard. I’ve been writing and selling stories from the time I could put pen to paper. It’s always been more than a hobby for me. I wrote a Superman story when I was eight years old, made several copies (with illustrations) by hand, and then enlisted my friends to help me go door-to-door in the neighborhood and sell them for 2 cents each. We made enough money to share a large bag of candy. I have made a living out of various forms of writing over the years, but five years ago I asked myself honestly what I would like most to achieve, and the answer was to write a novel that works as a movie and a matching screenplay.

The countdown in my head has started. It's 50 days until my historical fantasy Conquist is published by Roundfire Books. Although I can hardly wait for publication on 1 September after all the years I've lived with this novel, in a way I don't really want the days until then to rush by. It's not just that I'm very aware that many of the promotional hard yards are pre-publication—there's still a lot to do over the next 50 days. I also want to savour the time before reader reality inevitably bites. At the moment, it's still all about possibilities.

I believe the novel genuinely delivers what's on the cover (which we all know is not always the case). I hope you agree:

​Does the wave of AIs with natural language capabilities herald the end of fiction as we know it? If you think that the question is absurd, you haven’t really got to grips with the sorts of things that GPT and other generative AI software can do.

The American science fiction magazine Clarkesworld has the following message on their website:

Statement on the Use of "AI” writing tools such as ChatGPT
We will not consider any submissions written, developed, or assisted by these tools. Attempting to submit these works may result in being banned from submitting works in the future.
 
Editor Neil Clark announced in February they were temporarily closed to submissions because of the sudden 38%  increase in what they called ‘AI spam’ submissions. He says he can spot them because there are some obvious patterns. Sheila Williams said Asimov’s experienced a similar increase. She says ‘The people doing this by and large don’t have any real concept of how to tell a story, and neither do any kind of AI. You don’t have to finish the first sentence to know it’s not going to be a readable story.’
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Here are some questions to think about regarding the future of fiction, with a stab at the answers based on my current understanding:
 
Who owns the copyright of AI-generated fiction.?
Well, either no one or the humans who wrote the material that the AI was trained on. The words aren’t actually copied from anywhere. The AI generates words which it has statistically predicted from the Web as a response to an instruction and rephrases the material. The words have never been put together in exactly that combination before.
 
Who can pretend they have actually written a work of fiction that was generated by an AI?
Er… anyone can. Maybe at this still relatively early stage of these AIs, you can tell (or think you can tell) that the work wasn’t written by a human, but you could never be absolutely certain. (And the AIs will only get better.) Ironically, one criteria you could use is to see if the work has no grammatical errors or incorrect word usage—but of course, that could also be a sign of a highly competent writer. Plagiarism-checking software has been around for some time, so some sort of AI-identifying software is possible, but will it be good enough to keep pace with improvement in AIs?
 
Can AI-generated fiction be truly original?
Science fiction writer Ted Chiang sees a human author's first draft as often an original idea, badly expressed, while the best an AI can generate is a competently expressed, unoriginal idea. One way to look at what the AI does is create an amalgam of photocopies of original documents. Originality is always lost through the photocopying process. On the other hand, there are also lots of unoriginal human fiction authors around. Being truly original is a high bar that few writers achieve. And yet, each human’s life is unique, so the perspective they bring to a work of fiction has originality as its seed. The best writing comes from skilled writers who can turn that unique perspective into fiction. An AI can’t do that.
 
Can AI generate fiction that ignites an emotional response in the reader?
Authors create emotional responses through combinations of words. If you ask an AI to write a horror story, I suspect it can glean how to achieve the fear effect with all the sources available to it. Can it create fiction that makes the reader laugh? Maybe: puns can be generated, jokes have structure, certain situations are inherently funny. What about making them cry? Who knows? I’m sure someone will put that to the test. Can an AI generate the sense of awe that a great work of science fiction or fantasy can? I suspect not, but then as a writer of speculative fiction I’m biased. The most powerful emotional response to a work of fiction, however, goes deeper than fear, humour. sadness or awe, it’s the sense of human connection that the reader feels with the words spun by the writer. An AI can’t do that.
 
How much instruction would a writer need to give an AI for it to generate a publishable work of fiction?
Minimal instructions will most likely result in a bland, uninteresting work that wouldn’t make it to publication. However, if you are a meticulous planner, then including detailed plot outlines, world build and character descriptions could result in something publishable. The 'garbage in garbage out' rule applies. The success or otherwise depends on the quality of the input. As every planner knows, there is an enormous amount of time and effort needed before the writing begins, so the success or otherwise will depend on all that work. If you are more of a panster (that is, fly by the seat of you pants), then the joy of the writing is in the discovery, so you probably would see any point in using AI to write fiction. Either way, the AI may end up being some assistance to some fiction writers, but it can’t replace them.
 
What are fiction writers feeling about the potential impact of AIs?
They’re not happy. I’ll give just one quote. This is from British-Australian dark fantasy author, Alan Baxter: ‘In a world where people are still cleaning toilets and working in mines, I can’t believe we’ve got the robots making our art and stories. I thought robots were supposed to do the shitty jobs to allow more people to pursue their passions. AI is simply a hideous and well-focussed encapsulation of capitalism at the expense of humanity.’
 
What’s the most optimistic outcome of AIs for fiction writers?
AIs could end up being support for fiction writers rather than making their life harder. At some point it will be possible to feed an AI your novel manuscript and ask it to generate a synopsis of your novel to a set word count, taking on a burden that many writers loathe. If it could, for example, provide a narrative description f a particular place at a particular time in history, it would short-circuit a considerable amount googling and other research. The AI could also provide some required technical information in natural language specifically catering to non-specialist readers which can be adapted for a work.
 
We all know the definition of science fiction is notoriously hard to tie down. One way of looking at it is as the form of fiction that speculates on the impact of actual or imaginary science and technology. While the world heralds the latest technology and grapples with its consequences, the science fiction world has already explored its potential impact on individuals and society.

With the recent explosion AI systems into our awareness, we are in a truly science-fictional moment in history: here is technology that science fiction writers have speculated about for decades. While this is either ecstatically or shockingly new for most of the world, to science fiction readers and writers it’s a matter of reality catching up to our imaginations. As a collective, we’ve already thought about where AI could take us.

With anything startingly new, there are the true believers, nay-sayers and head-in-sanders. For those of us into science fiction, this is simultaneously an ‘Oh, wow!’ and ‘Oh, shit!’ moment. We can see both sides. We’ve already pictured the potential future in our imaginations. So, let’s prepare ourselves for the exploration. ​

We live in interesting times.

This blog appeared in a different form as the Editorials for Aurealis #158 and Aurealis #159.

A more recent prequel I’ve read is Philip Pullman’s La Belle Sauvage (2017), the first book in The Book of Dust trilogy. Philip coins the term ‘equel’ for this novel, describing it a companion work to his His Dark Material trilogy that can be read on its own. Whatever the case, it seems to also meet the other criteria for great prequels by expanding our understanding of the divinatory alethiometer and the enigmatic particle Dust. Pullman manages to maintain high levels of tension, despite the fact that we know the baby Lyra will survive, by focusing the story on a new character Malcolm who is trying to save her.

​One thing isn’t in doubt: when a prequel is done really well, it can be immensely satisfying.
A version of this blog appeared in Aurealis #157.

What’s the longest SF novel you’ve read? In a genre known for worldbuilding and galactic-size plots, SF is well-represented in the long novel stakes. Still, I’ve always been a little reluctant to tackle really long novels. They better be bloody good!
Here are some of the most well-known SF door-stoppers:
Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings is up there at 470,000 words. It was the very first mega-long book I read. I was twelve years old. Although I was a voracious reader, the books I had read up until that time were more the Narnia and Enid Blyton size. Yes, The Lord of the Rings created the fantasy trilogy phenomenon, and you can quibble that it’s really three books, but it was only released in three volumes originally because of the paper shortage after World War II. I read it in the intended form and in which it has generally been published since, which is as a single book. It's often cited as the longest genre novel of all time—but it isn’t.
It is pipped by Stephen King’s The Stand, which I’m reading at the moment, at 472,376 words. Interestingly, the original published version in 1978 wasn’t that long at 322,000 words, but the Kingster decided to publish the version he had originally written before his publishers made him cut it. I’m really enjoying it, but it’s taking me a lot longer to get through because life seems to get in the way now more than it did when I was twelve. I wonder whether he knew that by publishing the extended version, he would be overtaking Tolkien? King has form in the door-stopper genre: It was 445,134 words.
George R R Martin cracked the 400,000-word mark twice in his Song of Ice and Fire series with A Storm of Swords at 422,000 words and A Dance with Dragons at 420,000 words. Apparently, he was worried about the length in the earlier books in the series and took great pains to keep them down to a modest 300,000 words by moving chapters to the next volume. That process will eventually catch up with you, I guess. Since we’re still waiting for the series conclusion, I think it’s too early to discount his efforts in the largest genre book of all time stakes.
Others in the over 400,000 category are Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon (415,000), Diana Gabaldon’s An Echo in the Bone (the seventh Outlander novel) (402,000), and Patrick Rothfuss’ The Wise Man's Fear (400,000).
But if you’re looking for the longest SF novels of all time, it can sometimes come down to genre definitions and whether you only include best-sellers. Here are some of the contenders: Tad Williams’ To Green Angel Tower (520,000), Diana Gabaldon’s The Fiery Cross (502,000) and A Breath of Snow and Ashes (501,000), Mary Gentle’s Ash: A Secret History (500,000), and Brandon Sanderson’s Oathbringer (495,000).
You have to admire writers who can produce high-quality writing over such enormous word lengths. But does size ultimately matter? I'll explore this in part 2.​

H​ave you ever wondered how different screenwriting is to writing novels or short stories? After concurrently writing a screenplay and novel version of my conquistador fantasy short story ‘Conquist’ (Dreaming Again, Ed. Jack Dann, HarperVoyager), I’ve got a pretty good idea.

The two are very different.

We all have books that we read when we were younger and which led us into fantasy or science fiction or whatever genres we choose to spend the bulk of our time reading as adults. These are often called gateway books, those novels that opened up reading for us. While some of my gateway books into fantasy include staples such as The Hobbit, Lord of the Rings and the Narnia series, I would also count a handful of more obscure books as my way into fantasy in particular. I suspect we all have some of these lesser known books in our reading past that have had a profound influence on us.

​I think of these as portal books. A gate is a public entrance, a way in that everyone is aware of. Some of us may choose not to enter, but there’s no denying its renown. It’s there for everyone to see, bold and unforgettable. Like Babylon’s Ishtar Gate or the Golden Gate of Byzantium or the Meridian Gate to the Forbidden City. But whereas a gateway is public, drawing attention to itself, portals are hidden, only visible to the few—and that’s often where the truly profound magic lies. It’s these sorts of books that reveal most about us. While gateway books are those we share with others, portal books are more personal—they divulge our uniqueness. We rarely talk about them because others will most likely not have read, or even heard of, them.

One of my portal books was so buried in my past I couldn’t even remember the name of it. (By coincidence, it also featured a type of portal as a plot device.) It was by British author E (Edith) Nesbit. Her most famous novel is The Railway Children, but this well-known book had little impact on me and I barely remember reading it. At around age eleven I scoured my local library for E Nesbit books. I found many of them a little disturbing. She didn’t write like the other authors I’d read. There was an edge to it I couldn’t quite put my finger on. Perhaps I’d now call it a hint of the grotesque, a slightly off-kilter frisson. The novel I remember most powerfully, the one that I would nominate as my key portal book, was about a dirt-poor crippled orphan boy in Edwardian London who mysteriously travels to an alternative world 300 years earlier where he’s a healthy son of a nobleman. The story didn’t pivot around predictable plotlines. I haven’t re-read it since, but I remember the boy moved between the two periods several times until it got to a point where he had to make a choice. I remember being floored by his freely-made decision to stay in the world where he was dirt-poor and crippled because he was needed there. The novel was called Harding’s Luck.

It’s usually relatively easy to pinpoint how gateway novels have affected you. The influence of portal books, by their nature, is harder to tie down. I’ve only recently realised the connection between this book and my latest novel, which while having a totally different setting, structure and feel to Harding’s Luck, is about portals and the crucial decisions they force on people.
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I don’t expect too many of you to have read Harding’s Luck, and I suspect its life as a potential portal book is over. Younger readers these days will probably baulk at the Edwardian street language, and for those of us older readers, the time for gates and portals into reading will never return. You can quite easily find Harding’s Luck online these days. But of course, it doesn’t matter whether or not you’ve read it. You all found your own portals.

This blog appeared in a different form as an Editorial in Aurealis #115.