Aurum

Farr (Magic Dirt) gathers seven original Australian fantasy novellas that introduce dark, clever, optimistic, and ominous characters. In Susan Wardle’s romantic adventure “Shatterglass,” a disgraced woman becomes a political pawn when she is married off to a wealthy glassblower whose body is slowly being consumed by glass crystals. Stephanie Gunn’s exceptional steampunk dystopian tale “Pinion” is a gut-wrenching story of the enslaved people who maintain the machines of the elite’s gleaming towers and yearn for freedom. Charm and humor abound in Lucy Sussex’s fantasy, “Lady Brilliana,” in which a 17th-century English Protestant noblewoman is reincarnated as a modern-day cat adopted by the woman’s distant descendant. Joanne Anderton’s grim “I Almost Went to the Library Last Night” is a frenetic cyberpunk tale of a resourceful young man, a teenage girl, and an injured child who survive the mass zombification of the populace through nanomachines. With a wide variety of styles, themes, and sentiment, this anthology offers fans of fantasy a rich trove of visionary landscapes. (Sept.)