Support Australian Speculative Fiction
Discover and support Australian speculative fiction with our curated list of must-read books. Explore thrilling sci-fi, fantasy, and horror novels from talented Aussie authors.
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RealmShift
by Alan Baxter
Isiah is having a tough time. The Devil is making his job very difficult. Samuel Harrigan is a murdering lowlife. He used ancient blood magic to escape a deal with the Devil and now he's on the trail of a crystal skull that he believes will complete his efforts to evade Lucifer. But Lucifer wants Samuel's soul for eternity and refuses to wait a second longer for it. Isiah needs Samuel to keep looking for the crystal skull, so he has to protect Sam and keep the Devil at bay. Not for Samuel's sake, but for all of humanity. RealmShift is an engrossing Dark Fantasy thriller; a fascinating exploration of the nature of people's beliefs and their effect on the world around them. Magic, action and intrigue, from dank city streets to the depths of Hell and beyond.
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MageSign
by Alan Baxter
Three years have passed since Isiah's run in with Samuel Harrigan and the Devil. With the help of some powerful new friends, Isiah desperately tries to track down the Sorcerer and his cult of blood before they change the world forever.
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Spare Key
by Robert James Frederick Hamilton
...This was the way it always started. First he would see them and the air would thicken. Then the image of them bound. Then came the screaming and the Red Room would appear with the glittering, new meathook waiting just for them. And there in the Red Room he could play for as long as he wanted... This volume also contains the short stories 'The Filmmakers' & 'Writer's Block'.
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Agog! Terrific Tales
by Cat Sparks
The latest volume in the Agog! anthology series, with stories by Australian contributors: Lee Battersby, Deborah Biancotti, Leigh Blackmore, Simon Brown, Adam Browne, Jack Dann, Marianne de Pierres, Brendan Duffy, Dirk Flinthart, Robert Hood, Sue Isle, Chris Lawson, Martin Livings, Kate Orman, Tracey Rolfe, Lucy Sussex, Kyla Ward, Kaaron Warren, Janeen Webb, Scott Westerfeld, and Sean Williams.
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Agog! Smashing Stories
by Cat Sparks
The third volume in the Agog! anthology series, with stories by Australian contributors: Deborah Biancotti, Simon Brown, Marianne de Pierres, Brendan Duffy, Grace Dugan, Dirk FlinthartPaul Haines, Richard Harland, Robert Hood, Trent Jamieson, Louise Katz, Justine Larbalestier, Martin Livings, Claire McKenna, Sean McMullen, Ben Peek, Jeremy Shaw, Bryn Sparks, Iain Triffitt, and Kim Westwood.
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Dreaming Again
by Jack Dann
Following the World Fantasy Award-winning Dreaming Down-Under, acclaimed editor Jack Dann gathers thirty-five of the best and brightest in a golden age of Australian fiction to pen fantastic new tales to shock, astound, and delight. The outstanding bestselling authors include Garth Nix, Terry Dowling, Sean McMullen, Kim Wilkins, Sara Douglass, A. Bertram Chandler, Cecilia Dart-Thornton, Stephen Dedman, Trudi Canavan, John Birmingham, Margo Lanagan, Janeen Webb, Isobelle Carmody, and many others.
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An Intimate Knowledge of the Night
by Terry Dowling
Adult short stories of rapture, fear and dark mysteries of the human spirit, featuring several award-winning stories like 'The Last Elephant'. Each story can stand alone, but each linking piece by the author is interrupted by phone calls from his friend Raymond, a former mental patient, as they carry out their idea of a shared all-night vigil. Casual at first, these calls soon become strange and tense and change forever the way the author sees the world. The author has written several novels and short stories.
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Through Soft Air
by Lee Battersby
There are places where the world you know, and the worlds you don't, swap, or merge, or disappear entirely. These are the soft places, the transparent moments. The ghosts of World War One will steal your future. Masons will carve the date of your death before your gaze. Those versions of yourself from every universe there is will meet, and haunt you for the rest of days. You will find no safe footing, and the ice beneath you is cracking . . . Lee Battersby is one of Australia's fastest rising speculative writing stars, and here, for the first time, are collected twenty-five journeys into the pop-culture melting pot he calls a mind.
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Never Seen by Waking Eyes
by Stephen Dedman
Two dozen dark tales from one of Australia's finest genre writers.Drawing on inspiration from such diverse sources as Japanese mythology, European folklore, modern urban legends, and ancient native Australian and American traditions, as well as the literature of Shakespeare, T.S. Eliot, Bram Stoker, Lewis Carroll, and Edgar Allan Poe -- the author tells stories of humanity's deepest desires and most dreadful nightmares. Dedman journeys into the past, present, and future...to the jungles of Malaysia, outback ghost towns, and modern metropolises...to places both too familiar and unfamiliar to give comfort.An accomplished storyteller, Dedman re-imagines supernatural entities like vampires, succubi, and ghosts and combines them with modern terrors such as ecological and scientific horrors and the eternal evils of the political and the rperverse. His stories are disturbing, erotic, or amusing -- or any combination of the three.With one original story and several never published in the United States or the United Kingdom, Never Seen by Waking Eyes will serve as an apt introduction for many to the darker short works of Stephen Dedman.
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The Art of Arrow Cutting
by Stephen Dedman
If he'd known all the trouble following her, itinerant photographer Michelangelo "Mage" Magistrale would have thought twice about helping the beautiful, distressed woman at the bus station. In return for a ticket she gives Mage what she says is the key to her apartment, but he quickly discovers that it's much more: it's a key to any door, to any place, to incredible power--and there are people who will stop at nothing to possess it. Suddenly Mage is on the run from Calgary to Los Angeles, under constant attack from ninja, Yakuza thugs, and terrible creatures ripped from Japanese mythology. His only hope is to discover the secret of the key and master its power--to learn the art of arrow cutting--before he comes to the inevitable confrontation with the dark forces pursuing him.
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Foreign Bodies
by Stephen Dedman
When Mike Galloway, a regular sort of guy for San Francisco, 2014, descends into the nightmare world of poverty and joblessness, he finds he must face more than starvation and homelessness. He's now at the mercy of a deadly world of political intrigue...from the future. He awakens to find his mind has been slipped into the body of a homeless woman, his body taken over by a man from the future, and nothing can ever be the same. Now, to survive, he must combat neo-Nazi forces from the future who are desperate to mold the world to fit their own twisted vision. Galloway might not have thought the world perfect as it was, but these men will stop at nothing to make it a living hell for everyone but their chosen few.