Ghost of the Neon God – Aurealis Award Winner

Australia’s premier award for speculative fiction is the Aurealis. It is a juried award, and genuinely features the best of Australian SF. I get anxious every year in the lead up to the short list announcement, elated if I make the cut, and more anxious still in the days before the ceremony.

So it was a huge honour for me to win the Aurealis Award for Best Science Fiction Novella this year, for Ghost of the Neon God. The book was a fix up of sorts, coming about in an unconventional way, over several years (I discuss the writing of it here). It was a tough sell (novellas are even harder than novels when it comes to trying a find a publisher), that ultimately got published only because they wanted my second original novel, The Escher Man (the novella, if you will, became part of the package).

Ghost of the Neon God is my first major work set in Australia, and certainly atypical for a cyberpunk work in that regard (our futures tend to be depicted as a Mad Maxian wasteland, whereas cyberpunk generally has a US or east Asian setting). The work holds a special place in my heart because of this.

Anyway. I’m elated. The Aurealis celebrated its 30^th anniversary this year, and was ably hosted by Garth Nix, a giant of Australian speculative fiction and the most-awarded individual in its history, winning a rather ostentatious fifteen times. You can watched the ceremony here, if you’re sufficiently bored right now and have a couple of hours to kill (not knocking Garth here, but it is an awards ceremony, and they can only be so interesting).

Ghost of the Neon God is my fourth Aurealis. Previously I’ve won Best Horror Short Story (2016) and Best Science Fiction Novella (2020). These two stories appear in my collection, Neon Leviathan. I also won Best Science Fiction Novel (2022) for my debut, 36 Streets.

Anyway: if you’re up for a top-shelf one-sitting read that will plunge you into the terrible beauty of the vast Australian outback, I might have something for you. I’ll list all the places the novella is available, below. But before that, I have included an excerpt from the acceptance speech I gave. I spoke to an issue deeply important to me.

Finally, my novella is about an artificial intelligence that potentially could destroy the world. It’s a classic SF trope. But, quite frankly, I prefer that type of AI over the grasping and mindless glorified autocorrect that passes for AI today. I have – and I suspect nearly everyone watching – had works stolen by a megacorp. Used as fuel to feed the golems owned by the techbros. It’s shameless.

Sometimes it feels like nothing can be done – that they can break the law and take our IP without consent or compensation. But nothing is inevitable. It’s only inevitable if we don’t fight. We have to fight for our rights as creators, personally, professionally, and culturally.

Personally, we must never use AI in our work. Professionally, we should add anti-AI clauses to our publishing contracts, which I’ve been doing for a couple of years now. By culturally I mean: awards like the Aurealis, and our conventions, and our spec fiction associations, must refuse to have anything to do with works that use generative AI. We must make it clear that our community supports true creators and artists, and no-one else.

I’ll finish with a quote from Nick Cave, and his thoughts about ChatGPT.

As humans, we so often feel helpless in our own smallness, yet still we find the resilience to do and make beautiful things, and this is where the meaning of life resides…

It is our striving that becomes the very essence of meaning. This impulse – the creative dance – that is now being so cynically undermined, must be defended at all costs, and just as we would fight any existential evil, we should fight it tooth and nail, for we are fighting for the very soul of the world.

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