Geoffrey Maloney (1956– ) is an award-winning Australian writer of speculative short fiction who lives in Brisbane with his wife and three children. Through much of the 1980s, Maloney backpacked around India, Nepal, and Africa, and studied Indian history at Sydney University. Maloney’s first story, “5 Cigarettes and 2 Snakes,” was published in 1990 in Aurealis, Australia’s premier speculative fiction magazine. Since then more of his stories have appeared in Aurealis, as well as in magazines and anthologies such as Eidolon, Nova SF, Harbinger, Redsine, Abaddon, The Devil in Brisbane, Albedo One, New Writings in the Fantastic, and Antipodean SF—some collected in Tales from the Crypto-System (2003), which was nominated for a Ditmar Award. Along with Maxine McArthur and others, he helped set up the Canberra Speculative Fiction Guild in 1999. This resulted in the anthology Nor of Human…An Anthology of Fantastic Creatures with Maloney as the editor.
In 1997, Maloney’s “The Embargo Traders” was nominated for the Aurealis Award for best science fiction short story, and he has received multiple nominations for that award since. In 2001 he won the Aurealis Award for best fantasy short story for “The World According to Kipling (A Plain Tale from the Hills).” The story was subsequently included in Wonder Years: The Ten Best Australian Stories of a Decade Past (2003). He has also appeared more than once in The Year’s Best Australian Science Fiction and Fantasy.
“Remnants of the Virago Crypto-System,” first published in Ann VanderMeer’s surrealist/avant-garde magazine the Silver Web in 1995, is a story about what happens after the aliens leave, among other things. It is a powerful, haunted, and enigmatic post–New Wave science fiction story.