Summary:
There is one outstanding story in this group, You Are Born Exploding by Rich Larson (Clarkesworld #183, December 2021), and another strong piece, Bots of the Lost Ark by Suzanne Palmer (Clarkesworld #177, June 2022), a sequel to her previous Hugo Award-winning story about Bot 9. There are also two good stories by Ray Nayler.
[Story Links]

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Editor: Neil Clarke

Fiction:
7th Place (Tie):
Philia, Eros, Storge, Agápe, Pragma • novella by R.S.A. Garcia ∗∗
Sarcophagus • novelette by Ray Nayler ∗∗∗
5th Place (Tie):
Homecoming is Just Another Word for the Sublimation of the Self • short story by Isabel J. Kim ∗
The Failed Dianas • short story by Monique Laban ∗
2nd Place (Tie):
You Are Born Exploding • novelette by Rich Larson ∗∗∗∗+
The Cold Calculations • short story by Aimee Ogden –
Bots of the Lost Ark • novelette by Suzanne Palmer ∗∗∗+
2021 Winner
Yesterday’s Wolf • short story by Ray Nayler ∗∗∗

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At the beginning of 2022 Clarkesworld readers were able to nominate and then vote on their favourite stories, non-fiction and covers from 2021. These are the eight story finalists.

In joint seventh place out of eight stories¹ is Philia, Eros, Storge, Agápe, Pragma by R.S.A. Garcia (Clarkesworld, January 2021),² which is set in the same series as the recently reviewed Sun from Both Sides (Clarkesworld #152, May 2019), features the same two characters, Eva and Dee, and takes place before, during, and after that story.
This one starts with a rather confusing prologue where Brother-Adita, Sister-Marcus and an Admiral track down a “shell” (a robot cum AI, I presume) and—when they unexpectedly find it is still active—the Admiral throws the other two out of the cave and brings the roof down on himself and the shell.
The rest of the story consists of three interwoven narrative threads titled “Now”, “Then”, and “Before”. The “Now” thread opens with Eva and Dee at home talking—or rather signing (again, for some reason, they mostly communicate this way even though they can speak and hear)—about a goat they have bought before it is suddenly turned into gore. Dee realises that one of Sister’s drones has tried to kill Eva (Sister is Eva’s AI twin), and the rest of this passage turns into a combat chase with Eva ending up partially injured and hiding on a riverbank. Dee eventually manages to save her, while Sister—who realises she has been hacked—shuts herself down.
After the couple get back to their house, Eva gets a message from her daughter on Kairi and find outs (after they travel to make a secure call now that Sister is disabled) that there has been a Consortium attack on Eva’s people, the Kairi Protectorate, and seven people have been killed. They also learn that this was accomplished by hacking into Sister and using her “kinnec”, a communication system.
The rest of this thread sees Eva travel home to learn that the Consortium has discovered that she destroyed one of their ship AIs (this event is described in the Sun from Both Sides) and that their attack was retaliation. Eva also ends up in a political fight with the rulers of the Protectorate about what should happen to Sister (Eva opposes their plans to reboot her as it is apparently equivalent to death, and something that has already happened to Sister before).
The second thread, “Then”, begins (confusingly as this opens immediately after Sister’s attack in the previous thread) with Eva in a crashed, partially submerged ship (Sister) with someone cutting her out. We later discover that person is Dee, and that this is how the pair met. The rest of this thread mostly focuses on her recovery and their developing relationship. Eva eventually learns (during a long heart-to-heart) that Dee is an exiled Grand Master of Valencia, while Dee learns she is a Primarch of the Kairi Protectorate.
The third “Before” thread is chronologically the earliest of them all, and recounts a previous battle with the Consortium at the Cuffie Protectorate which ended with Sister damaged and Eva executing a (spoiler) “Nightfall Protocol” that wipes Sister and kills a lot of the Consortium AIs.
These three threads eventually merge together as we see, among other things: Eva getting a dispensation to marry Dee; Eva mind-merging with Sister to sort out the virus problem; Eva vetoing war at the Kairi Parliament and opening negotiations with the Consortium; and the repatriation by the Consortium of the minds of the children they kidnapped. One these minds, Xandar, joins Sister in her ship at the end of the story after the AI has been cleared of the virus. Eva and Dee now have a kid.
I didn’t enjoy this story as much as Sun from Both Sides for several reasons: first, there is far too much plot here (see above), which makes it hard to keep up with what is going on—something compounded by having three stories running in different time periods; second, some of the description is unclear (e.g. the opening passage); third, there is no real climax to the story, but what feels like a series of negotiations instead; fourth, some parts of the story feel padded (the family get-togethers and the Eva getting to know Dee scenes dragged on and, while I’m talking about family matters, I’d suggest you don’t have far-future children call their mothers “Mom”, as that colloquialism catapulted this non-American reader right out of the story—as did a later “asshole”); fifth, the sign language is presented as italic text, which makes for a lot of tiring reading (and can also cause difficulties for those with dyslexia); sixth, and following on from the latter, if you are using masses of italics for speech why wouldn’t you use a bold typeface for the Now/Then/Before chapter headings and perhaps number and/or date them? Readers would then have a better idea of where they are in the chronology of events. I’d also add, with respect to chapter headings, that the “Philia”, “Eros”, “Storge”, “Agápe”, and “Pragma” ones seemed completely irrelevant to the story. I still don’t know how they fit in.
So, in conclusion, too (unnecessarily) complicated, too unclear (in places), and probably too long as well. This wasn’t bad but it was a bit of headscratcher and/or slog at times.
∗∗ (Average). 21,000 words. Story link.

•

Also in joint seventh place is Sarcophagus by Ray Nayler (Clarkesworld #175, April 2021), which opens with the narrator, who has had a copy of his mind beamed into a “blank body” on a far-flung alien planet, recording in his log that he is the only one who has made it—all his colleagues’ downloads were scrambled and their blanks recycled. Worse still, he finds the planet is a polar wasteland that appears inimical to human life.
He subsequently decides to try and make it to a depot that is thirty clicks away, even though he is hampered by problems with his suit’s battery draining faster than he can recharge it (the surface of his suit doubles as a solar panel). During his journey he sees thermal vents (a sign of heat sources under the ice) and feels the vibrations of glaciers moving beneath him. Then he finds signs of alien life, the brittle chitinous exoskeletons of tiny animals which he scans and photographs. During this process he realises he may be the first human to discover alien life, but that he has no-one to share it with.
Then, shortly afterwards, he makes an even more profound discovery:

It wasn’t until midday that I hit the maze.
There must have been a massive steam collapse, years ago, under this part of the glacier. Or perhaps the pressure from its motion was pushing up against an obstacle, some ice-drowned reef of stone. The surface of the glacier had deformed and cracked, breaking up into blocks and slabs. Many of the slabs were ten or more meters high.
Canted towers of ice, sapphire in their cores, stretching as far as I could see with the binoculars. A city of ice. No way around.
That was when I saw it. It was just for a moment. A second, perhaps? Two?
Enough time to send a lacework trident of terror through me, up every vein and artery to the base of my brain, where the old, old fears live. Tooth and claw in the dark. Death by drowning. It must have been five kilometers away. It was visible so briefly; I could almost convince myself I had hallucinated it. How to describe it? The surface of it was pale. Smooth, fish belly pearl. It must have been three meters tall, at least—and nearly that wide. What Earth metaphor could encompass it? It was nothing like a bear, an ape, a wolf. If it had a face, I did not see it—but then, its outline, that awful plasticine, oily white against the white behind it, did not allow me to read its shape well.
Did it even have a head? It had four limbs and was standing on two of them. Or crouched over two of them. But were they feet? Legs? Its vague body undulated with malevolent power, writhing beneath its sickening skin.
And in the moment I fixed the binoculars on it, I knew it had seen me. It turned the upper part of itself in my direction. It seemed to fold deeper into itself, the way an animal will tense, growing smaller like a spring tightening, shrinking into its own core. It shuddered. Squirmed in its sallow sheath of skin.
Then it was gone, sliding down into the maze that I, too, would have to enter.

The rest of the story (spoiler) sees him working his way through the maze while he appears to be stalked by the alien—which, at one point, when he partially falls into a crevasse, he throws an axe at to scare away. Then, when he reaches the depot and finds an alien burial cairn nearby, he examines the body and sees that it appears to have the kind of impact damage caused by a crash.
The last pages see the narrator’s tent blown over in a storm, a concussion, and him waking to find that he is being dragged through the snow by the alien. He ends up in a warm cave with the creature observing him. Then, when he attempts to communicate with the creature, he discovers it is actually the sentient EVA suit of the buried alien—and it finally opens up so he can climb inside.
The strengths of this story are its cracking beginning and The Thing-like polar setting and suspense. Unfortunately, it drags a little in the middle (the story is probably a little longer than it needs to be) and the ending verges on the far-fetched (i.e. the idea that the alien/suit would be able to provide life support to the narrator—although it must be said that the dead alien may have a similar biochemistry to humans or it probably wouldn’t have been sent to that planet). Overall, a good piece.
∗∗∗ (Good). 7,650 words. Story Link.

•

In joint fifth place out of the eight stories is Homecoming is Just Another Word for the Sublimation of the Self by Isabel J. Kim (Clarkesworld #174, March 2021), which opens with a women being told about the death of her grandfather by her “instance”:

An instance is a duplicate self-cleaved mitosis-like from the original—though the duplicate and the original are both referred to as “instances” in modern vocabularies. To become an instance is to instantiate; in the present tense, instancing.

So, the basic situation here is that (a) the woman receiving the call in America is the peaceable doppelganger of the woman in Korea, and (b) the instancing process is widespread in this world, most particularly among emigrants. Of course, this is all just an unexplained gimmick/metaphor (it might as well be magic) that lets the writer do a lot of identitarian hand-wringing over the next twenty or so pages:

America assumes instances will stay forever.
Here is a free state for those who want to leave, America says, ignoring the fact that the land was already peopled, that the borders were brought to them unwillingly. Ignoring those brought in force in chains. Ignoring the deportations at the border. Ignoring the fact that intention to leave actually just means acceptance of situations beyond your control.
Living in the States means that you’re blank-American. Korean-American. Mexican-American. African-American. Indian-American. Native American. America assumes instances leave their original country permanently and defines them by the self left behind.

You don’t know how to explain the way you feel about the States to your instance, who has never had to leave home. How she-you will long for worlds that no longer exist, for countries that only exist in your memories, how you’ve had years to come to terms with the tension that sits in your belly when you think about the homes you’ve left behind, how you have changed enough to miss America, now, and you can bear the loss of one homeland but not two. How to explain she would become a foreigner. How to explain to her how you are Korean-American. How you are American.

Mixed in with this agonising, and the narrator’s trip to Korea for the funeral where she meets her duplicate family, is a related fairy tale about a fisherman who spends a night with the mermaids, doesn’t realise that thirty years have passed, and goes home to find himself in bed with his wife. When the fisherman stabs the man in the bed, he switches to the man being stabbed. (The myth of Odysseus makes an appearance later on in the story as well.)
At the very end of this piece the subject of de-instancing surfaces, and (spoiler) this is what eventually happens—possibly against the American instance’s wishes—when the other woman takes her hand (I assumed it wasn’t what she wanted from the fact that the story cuts to a final line from the fairy tale about a knife in the heart).
This is (as is probably obvious from the title and my commentary) largely a literary tale about immigrant identity, and only tangentially an SF story. I had zero interest in its concerns, and am truly baffled as to why anyone would waste a moment of their lives thinking about this sort of thing—who wants to be defined by where they come from or the country they live in?
∗ (Mediocre). 6,250 words. Story link.

•

Also in joint fifth place is The Failed Dianas by Monique Laban (Clarkesworld #173, February 2021),³ which begins with the female narrator going to a restaurant and munching her way through bread rolls while she savours the various food scents. She doesn’t have anything else to eat because she has been told by her internship supervisor that she should wait for eighteen hours after returning to Earth before exposing herself to strong aromas and tastes.
After this (largely irrelevant start) she meets an older version of herself, and we learn that the narrator was cloned from this person, Diana. Part of the explanation about this makes no sense:

“[Our parents] speed incubated the cells from the eyelash up to when you were thirteen, so I would have a wide memory base and they would only have to worry about raising me through high school and college. It’s a method that took them—”

How do you clone someone’s memories?
After this the older Diana launches into a parental issues diatribe (which, in one form or another, is what the story is):

“But I wasn’t—” I start.
“A disappointment?” Original Diana says, her lips tugging at the seams. “Yes, you’re now the same age I was when I ruined things for everyone and drove my life down the gutter. I was a selfish brat who got into Pitt instead of Carnegie Mellon, switched my major from galactic finance to art history, dropped out when I was twenty-one, and haven’t been seen since the screaming match with my parents about wanting to be a chef. All they ever wanted to do was look out for me when I had myopic dreams that would never take off. I was just some spoiled brat like all the white children whose parents didn’t know how to raise them.”

And:

“There is no version of us that will ever make our parents completely happy,” she says. “There are only versions of us that have done our best to make ourselves happy.”

Diana then tells the narrator that she is the fourth clone the parents have created in an attempt to have a daughter who will have a prestigious career and be someone of who they can approve. Then, when the narrator, the original Diana, and the other clones meet up later, the narrator finds they have become, variously, a chef, tattoo artist, etc., instead of the career in cosmocurrencies that their parents wanted them to pursue—and for which the narrator is currently interning on the Moon. Eventually, at the end of the story, she too gives this up to become a parfumier.
I note that, despite the original Diana and the first three clones having gone on to do their own thing, they are co-dependents who perversely keep squabbling with the parents rather than just moving on (they regularly send their parents samples of their DNA along with a cheque for a large amount of money, stipulating they can have one but not the other).
Those readers with their own unresolved parental issues may get something out of this solipsistic moanfest. Others will, as I did, start skimming.
∗ (Mediocre). 4,150 words. Story link.

•

The first of the three joint-second place stories is You Are Born Exploding by Rich Larson (Clarkesworld #183, December 2021), which is set in a near-future world where an artificial asteroid has infected humanity with a xenovirus that causes people to mutate into shamblers (later described by the narrator as “monstrous eldritch crayfish things”). After humans change into shamblers they migrate to the oceans and disappear into the deeps.
All this SFnal content is, however, largely in the background at the beginning of the story, as we can see in the opening scene where Elisabeth the narrator and her son Jack go to the beach. Although biocontainment staff are disposing of a shambler there (“remove him efficiently and with good technicality”, according to the guard), the focus is on Elisabeth’s prickly interaction with a neighbour:

[Jack] points a fat finger down the beach. “Shambla, mumma? Is it? Shambla?”
Alea coos and chirps. “They’re speaking now! Such fun.”
“He’s speaking,” Elisabeth says, bristling. “Jack’s a boy unless he eventually decides otherwise.” She adjusts Jack’s hat. “He’s two now. Yes, Jack, it’s a shambler.”
Alea settles back on her towel, with a curve to her lips that looks more amused than chastened.
[. . .]
A ways down the beach, a small knot of spectators has gathered about ten meters back from a distinctive shape. It’s crawling for the surf, red-and-blue flukes rippling from its bent back. A guard is busy zipping into a hazard suit, white with what looks like a gasoline stain across one knee. The shambler seems to sense its time is limited; it scoots a bit faster now, dragging a wet furrow behind itself. The whole thing is quite macabre.
“Is hubby back from his little trip?” Alea asks.
“What?”
The ejection is more forceful than she intended it. She was distracted by the shambler, and by the sputter and whine of the buzzsaw the guard will use to dismember it.
“Benjamin,” Alea clarifies. “Is he back from Australia?”
“Not yet.” Elisabeth shifts her gaze to Jack, who is meticulously pouring fistfuls of sand onto his tiny knees. “My brother is coming to visit, though. He’s an artist.”
Alea smiles dryly. “Here to freeload while he seeks inspiration, I suppose? Every family has one.”
“He’s quite successful, actually.”
“Oh.” Alea gives a pensive moue. “I think we’re all artists, in our own way.”
Elisabeth imagines gouging out her eyes and filling the holes with sand. “What a lovely thought,” she says.

The rest of the story is a slow burn that is largely a study of the tough but tetchy Elisabeth and her relationship with Jack (who we later learn has a genetic condition) as (spoiler) her personal and the wider world fall to pieces. During this slow disintegration her artist brother Will turns up, and we find he has become interested in the shamblers and has started painting them. Later on, he finds a ledge on a cliff that they use to drop into the ocean but doesn’t report it.
Meanwhile, there is background detail about the rest of the world—the increasing chaos, the haves who get immunomods to stave off infection, and the have-nots who do not. We also learn that some people have started joining anthrocide cults, and are voluntarily infecting themselves with the xenovirus. This division in how people are responding to the crisis becomes obvious when her brother brings a new acquaintance round for a drink (“Will is always fucking meeting people”, thinks Elisabeth):

The air is fresh and electric, and it seems impossible that the world is ending, but that is where the conversation invariably leads.
“You see, this is not like the other plagues and pandemics,” says the ex-sommelier, in a faint Romanian accent. “This is their photo negative. Their chiral opposite.”
“Well, it came by artificial meteor,” Will says, with a buttery smile. “That’s quite unique.”
“It came with purpose,” their guest says. “In my opinion, it’s a gift.”
“How do you figure?” Elisabeth asks, more bluntly than usual.
“In my opinion,” the man repeats, “humanity has been offered a way to save itself.” This prompts her to verify, again, that the front gate’s biofilter reported him clean. “To save itself from itself,” he continues, stroking the small bones of his dog’s head, “and this time, the downtrodden lead the way.”
Will gives an alarmed smile. “That’s quite the idea.”
“First shall be last, last shall be first, et cetera.” Their guest places the dog in his lap. “We left the poor behind, over and over, but now they finally get to leave us behind.”
“By becoming monstrous eldritch crayfish things,” Elisabeth says. “Such luck.”
“By growing iridescent armor and returning to our primeval birthplace,” the ex-sommelier says. “They are safe in the ocean while the old world burns. Or they would be, if we stopped senselessly hunting them down.”

Shortly after this Elisabeth asks the visitor to leave, and later on her brother is ejected too (Jack later falls ill and, when Elisabeth checks the house’s video feeds, she sees that Will has smuggled some shambler carcass into the house to get one of the colours he needs for a painting of one of the creatures).
The final arc of the story sees Jack’s health continue to decline, but this is due to his genetic condition and not the xenovirus. Then, while Elisabeth has a bath, she starts thinking the impossible:

“Wash you knees,” Jack suggests.
He is sitting on the heated tile beside the tub. She can’t deny him, not so close to the end, not when his little limbs might give out at any moment. He’s playing with a bright red fire truck that used to be his favorite. The fact feels disproportionately important now. She feels the need to recall everything about Jack, every habit and preference. He has only been briefly alive, so it shouldn’t be difficult.
“Wash you knees, mumma,” Jack says again.
Elisabeth rubs at her kneecap, feeling the gooseflesh around the bone.
“Wash, wash, wash,” she sings. “Wash, wash, wash.”
“Good washing,” Jack decrees, in an uncanny imitation of the nanny’s synthetic lilt. “Good job.”
“Thank you, Jack. I thought so, too.”
Jack returns to his toy. Elisabeth reaches forward and drains the bath a bit, listening to the gasp and gurgle of exorbitant water waste, then adds a shot of hot water. She stirs with her hand until it’s tepid throughout. Climbs out dripping.
“Jack,” she says. “Do you want to come inna bath, bubba? With your fire truck?”
He is momentarily suspicious, but the novelty wins out. He lets her peel off his clothes, hold him fruitlessly over the toilet, carry him back to the tub. He gives a squealing giggle when she skims his feet through the water, holding him under the armpits. She sets him down carefully and clambers in after him.
“Lots of animals live in the water, Jack,” she says. “Should we play pretend?”

Elisabeth then researches ways of disabling their immunomods. Then she gets back in touch with Will. When she tells him what is happening with Jack, he agrees to help.
The final scene sees her meeting Will at the shambler ledge on the cliff. He gives her the injectors that will disable the immunomods and infect her and Jack with the xenovirus. After Elisabeth and Jack change, they shuffle off the ledge and fall into the sea. There is a great payoff line:

But when they are far from any shore, the smaller hooks itself to the larger. They dive together, toward a city that might exist.

Although this is a quite a slow burn to start with (I had to take a break in the middle as I was beginning to lose focus) it comes to an ending that is both emotional (all those interactions between Elisabeth and Jack come to a moving culmination) and transcendent (the final hint that they will have another kind of life beneath the waves). It was only later that I realised that this wonderful story is about Elisabeth and her son as much, if not more, than anything else.
∗∗∗∗+ (Very Good to Excellent). 14,150 words. Story link.

•

The second of the second place stories is The Cold Calculations by Aimee Ogden (Clarkesworld #183, December 2021), which is another “response” to Tom Godwin’s classic, The Cold Equations (I use the word “response” lightly as this piece, like many, misses the point). Godwin’s story involves a spaceship pilot discovering a stowaway on a ship taking vital medicines to a colony planet. If the (female) stowaway remains on board the pilot won’t have enough fuel to decelerate and land, etc., so the pilot’s choice is apparently (a) she goes out the airlock or (b) they both die in space, and the colonists die too. The story (spoiler) goes on to confound reader expectation of the time by having the pilot put the stowaway out the airlock rather than finding an engineering solution.⁴
Reader reaction to the story often misses the Trolley Problem⁵ at its heart (which of these two awful solutions do you choose?) and criticism generally falls into one of two categories: (a) engineering or security or physical problems that can or should have been addressed, and/or (b) observations that the piece is intentionally misogynist because a woman is brutally killed (this latter ignores her sympathetic treatment earlier in the story, the likely feelings of the story’s contemporary readers—mostly from a “woman and children first” generation, and the fact that, if the stowaway was a man and he was put out the airlock, no-one would care, and the story would have no effect on its readership).
Ogden’s story doesn’t acknowledge the philosophical issue at the heart of Godwin’s story (it falls largely into the first nit-picking category above, with an anti-capitalist slant) and, instead, we mostly get inchoate rage about bad things happening to good people, with the finger of responsibility repeatedly pointed at “them”. We also get a lot of finger wagging at people who write stories like Godwin’s. These two lines of attack are limned in the opening passage:

Once upon a time, a little girl had to die. It’s just math. Wrong place, wrong time. Bad luck; too bad, so sad.
We’ve all heard such stories, told them, shared them, collected them. Not in the way that we collect trinkets; more like how a sock collects holes. We’re submerged in such stories, we breathe them in like carbon dioxide—poisonous, in the long term, but a fact of life, nonetheless.
But stories have authors, from the gauziest fantasy to grim autobiography. And when once upon a time becomes so many, many times, surely someone must think to ask: had to die? On whose authority?
It’s simple physics, of course. Natural law.
Unless, of course, someone’s been fudging the numbers.

After this the story jumps straight into the action with Alvarez just about to put a stowaway, Shaara, out the airlock. At the last moment Alvarez baulks, and the story then cuts away to a scene where a woman’s twenty-four year old daughter is dying from the continual chemical poisoning she has been exposed to at her factory job. The point made is that the owners were putting profit before safety.
The rest of the story yo-yos between the action on the ship (Alvarez and Shaara are ripping out everything they can to try and jettison the extra mass) and other passages that are similar to the above, with the second about the sacrifice of Komarov, who piloted the obviously unserviceable Soyuz-1 instead of Gagarin because “they” had made up their minds it would be launched regardless, and the third about a sick Cantonese worker who is badly treated on a railroad project.
Meanwhile, Alvarez and Shaara bitch about accountants and their penny pinching:

“It’s not physics that’s killing us. [. . .] It’s some accountant in Winnipeg who fucked us over to save the company some cash.” Whose cold calculation was it? How much did it save? Twenty, thirty thousand bucks. A single externality: one small human life. Cheap as hell, all things considered. “Money’s all that counts. Who cares what happens to the likes of—”

The author also chips in:

There should have been fail-safes and backups, extra reserves. There should have been possibilities—possibilities other than the company literally nickel-and-diming two people to their deaths. There should have been a world where this story has a happy ending.

We’ll come back to happy endings later.
All this comes to a climax when Alvarez is about to put himself out of the airlock instead of Shaara but, before he can, the story cuts away to another external scene where a factory has collapsed (due to more penny pinching) but where the workers start rescuing those buried, pulling rocks out of the rubble one at a time. Then the writer injects herself even more forcibly into the story and directly addresses the reader, stating that they are coming to the “hands on part of the story”, and telling them to “find their anger” as “they are going to need it”. Finally, after a long and muddled passage about what the “men at desks” insist on, and “if one man can kill a girl with the stroke of a pen, what can the rest of us do”, etc., etc., the reader is exhorted to “push already”. We see the mother of the poisoned woman determining that this won’t happen to anyone else; Gagarin realising that he should have tried to prevent the launch of Soyuz-1; the Cantonese worker trying to tip a boxcar off the tracks; and the factory workers finding the hand of a survivor in the rubble. There is one final authorial push, and then we discover that (spoiler) readers’ wishes have changed reality on the ship: Alvarez and Shaara now have enough fuel to make landfall.
I thought this was an awful piece of work for a number of reasons. First, exhorting readers to wish for a happy ending for your doomed characters, and then providing it, is dramatically unsatisfying (profoundly so); second, the story suggests that difficult problems do not have to be faced head-on but can be wished away; third, it is a political rant that, among other things, profoundly misunderstands economics (for one thing, if you build endless safety margins into every device they would be unaffordable); fourth, the story presents different situations in the story as if they are morally equivalent, i.e. the malfeasance in the chemical factory vs. the design decisions for the spaceship; fifth, the constant mention of “them”, “the men behind desks”, “the people with blood on their hands and fingers on the scale”, “some accountant in Winnipeg who fucked us over to save the company some cash”, sounds paranoid; sixth, if you are going to reference a story that is known to everyone, make sure you understand what it is about—if you don’t, write your own. Seventh, and finally, it is a bad idea for one writer to suggest what other writers should and should not write:

But stories have authors, from the gauziest fantasy to grim autobiography. And when once upon a time becomes so many, many times, surely someone must think to ask: had to die? On whose authority?

If one man can kill a girl with the stroke of a pen, what can the rest of us do?
It’s easy to decry his callousness, to raise our voices and shout over him. But this girl is not Tinkerbell, and a show of hands and a little noise will not be enough to bring her back. It’s not enough, it never was, just to point at the evil and name it for what it is (though that is the starting place).

If a man at a desk can kill a girl with a little bit of ink, then we can save her in exactly the same way. There are more of us than there are of him. Break his pen, throw it out the window, and send the desk after it.

– (Awful). 5,500 words. Story link.

•

The third of the second-place finalists is Bots of the Lost Ark by Suzanne Palmer (Clarkesworld #177, June 2022), a sequel to the author’s amusing (and Hugo Award) winning The Secret Life of Bots (Clarkesworld #132, September 2017). This opens with the hero of that latter piece, a miniature robot called Bot 9, being woken by the Ship AI sixty-eight years later to be told that they have a problem—and it isn’t ratbugs like the last time, but something else:

“What task do you have for me?” [Bot 9] asked. “I await this new opportunity to serve you with my utmost diligence and within my established parameters, as I always do.”
“Ha! You do no such thing, and if I had a better option, I would have left you in storage,” Ship said. “However, I require your assistance with some malfunctioning bots.”
“Oh?” Bot 9 asked. “Which ones?”
“All of them,” Ship said.

Bot 9 soon discovers that nearly all the ship’s bots have gone rogue and have started forming “gloms” (conglomerations of robots) who think they are the ship’s (currently hibernating) human crew members. This poses an immediate problem for Ship as they will shortly be arriving in Ysmi space, and the Ysmi have an extremely hostile attitude to nonorganic intelligences not under the control of biological species.
The rest of the story sees Bot 9 attempt to work his way to the Engineering section, where Ship hopes 9 can revive the Chief Engineer before they reach Ysmi space. On its way there, 9 is attacked by a ratbug (creatures who eat wiring, hull insulation, and bots)—but then sees a former colleague, 4340, sitting astride it. They catch up, and 9 learns that all the remaining ratbugs are now under 4340’s control. Meanwhile, the Ysmi contact the ship, the gloms attempt to get control of communications (when they are not fighting each other to accumulate more bots), and Ship infects one of their number with a virus, which soon starts spreading.
Eventually (spoiler), Bot 9 gets to Engineering and revives the Chief Engineer (who was badly injured in an earlier incident and put in a med-pod there). When the human wakes, Bot 9 brings Chief Engineer Frank up to date with amusing exchanges like this one:

“I must warn you, however, that PACKARDs are on the other side [of the door],” 9 added.
“Packard? My second engineer? That’s great!” Frank said. “I thought—”
“It is not the human Packard,” 9 said. “They are in stasis with the other crew. There are four bot glom PACKARDs, currently trying to reduce themselves to only one. Unlike the other gloms, rather than trying to claim sole ownership of an identity via the expediency of violent physical contest, these three appear to be attempting to argue each other into yielding.”
“That sounds a lot like the real Packard, actually,” Frank said.

And then there is this when the Ysmi ship approaches:

“Where are you?” Ship’s voice was faint, but there.
Bot 9 found the knowledge that it was back in Ship’s communication range a matter of some relief. “I have woken Engineer Frank, and we are now in his living quarters, looking for some human item called ‘goddamned underwear,’” it replied.
“There is a synthetic-fabric fab unit in the cryo facility,” Ship said. “Please tell Frank he can visit it after we have reclaimed the facility from the gloms, but that right now there is not time. I need him at the docking facility.”
9, who had reconnected to the voice unit after the human had set it down inside the door, relayed that information.
“I’m not meeting the Ysmi naked,” Frank said.
“You are wearing a flag,” 9 said. A few moments later it added, “Ship asks if you would prefer to meet the Ysmi naked or as a bunch of newly free-floating, disassociated particles in empty space.”
“How much time do we have?” Frank asked. Before he’d even finished speaking, there was a vibration throughout the hull.

After Frank satisfies the suspicious Ysmi (who instruct them to go directly to the jump portal that Ship wants to use) the virus continues to spread through the gloms, and there is a climactic scene where 4340 and his ratbug army come to 9’s rescue.
This is an amusing and well done sequel to the original, with many entertaining exchanges between the various characters. That said, the ending is something of deus ex machina (and one you can see coming), so it is probably not quite as strong as the earlier piece.
∗∗∗+ (Good to Very Good). 11,050 words. Story link.

•

The winner of this poll is Yesterday’s Wolf by Ray Nayler (Clarkesworld #180, September 2021), which opens in what later appears to be a remote tribal area of a near-future post-war Central Asian country. There, a father and his daughter Elmira find one of their lambs has been savaged by wolves on their summer pasture. The brother of the family says to Elmira (who we later discover is tech wizard) that it is a pity that she can’t reprogram their old and partially blind sheepdog.
In the days following this comment Elmira gets a chance to do something similar to her brother’s suggestion when her father brings back an inactive robodog found on his neighbour’s pasture. She starts working on this abandoned weapon, and eventually manages to get it reprogrammed and working again—in a way that will help her family:

These things had been designed to run independently for years, patrolling areas where regular soldiers couldn’t go. And of course that was the problem—after the war, no one had been able to come back to the summer pastures for a decade. Those who tried found themselves dragged from their yurts and torn to pieces. But eventually the karaitter—the black dogs—stopped moving, one by one. The summer pastures were safe again—except for the occasional mine or bomb.
The streambeds were the worst: unexploded cluster bomblets and mines washed into them in the storms and lay among the stones and torn branches, waiting indifferently to do what they had been designed to do.
She watched the sleek kara it pacing back and forth beside the herd. She had named it Batyr—Warrior.
Last night she had woken up, along with the rest of her family, to the sound of wolves. They came in close to the yurt camp, to where the sheep were penned. Her father reached for the old shotgun in the dark, but Elmira stopped him.
“No, just wait. Batyr will take care of it.”

After this set-up, which sees Batyr successfully scare away but not kill the wolves, a couple of other sub-plots begin. One concerns Elmira meeting a friend called Jyrgal in town and discovering that she has been kidnapped, raped, and forced into an arranged marriage—a common custom in Elmira’s society. Elmira then learns from her father, in an extended conversation on their way home, that her mother was also kidnapped and raped when she was young but was rescued by him before she could be married.
The other sub-plot sees another kara discovered by Jyrgal’s family but (spoiler), when they power the robodog up, it attacks them. After Elmira is told by her father about this, she reprograms Batyr before they go to help the family. When they arrive at the other family’s settlement Batyr tracks down and fights the other robodog, putting it out of action. During these events Elmira and her father find that Jyrgal is still alive but that her husband, father- and mother-in-law (i.e. the ones involved in the kidnapping) are conveniently dead.
The story closes with Elmira and her father returning home to see off a government official, his son, and a marriage proposal/demand.
This is a well done piece but it struck me as rather glib, at least in its treatment of the forced marriage aspects. First, the main character is atypical in that she is both young and highly capable,⁶ which makes the story more of a wishful feminist fable than a convincing SF story. Second, although many readers will be tutting in disapproval at what happens to Jyrgal, I doubt many will have a reaction beyond that as the true horror of her terrible experience is never explored (it is all related second hand, and is very safe-space). Finally, just as in the superhero movies, there are no real world solutions or suggestions as to how to curb this terrible practice. Although this looks like a story about forced marriage (at least in part), I don’t think it is.
∗∗∗ (Good). 5,850 words. Story link.

•••

Overall, this wasn’t a bad bunch of stories,⁷ with one outstanding piece by Rich Larson and a strong one from Suzanne Palmer. The Two Nayler stories are good, and the Garcia is worth a look (if you can cope with the complexity of the beginning, you’ll probably sail through the rest).
I note that the stories appear to fall into two groups, with the first being what I would call traditional SF stories (the Larson, Palmer, the two Naylers and the Garcia; aliens, spaceships, robots, AI, etc.), and the second what I would call “mainstream stories in disguise” (the Kim, Laban and Ogden; parental issues, identity issues, politics). There is some cross-dressing however, as the Larson looks like (and probably is in part) a mainstream story, while the Ogden, which appears to be a space story, is really a contemporary political polemic.
It is quite a schizophrenic mix of tales.
I’d also add that I don’t think this group of stories, quality apart, represents a typical issue of Clarkesworld (what that is I’ll try and work out in due course).
Worth a look.  ●

_____________________

1. I’m not sure Clarkesworld has their placings correct (see the voting at the bottom of this page)—if there are six other stories ahead of you on the ballot, then you are in seventh or joint seventh place, not fourth.

2. Philia, Eros, Storge, Agápe, Pragma by R.S.A. Garcia is a finalist for the 2022 Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award.

3. There must be a lot of disgruntled adult children out there for The Failed Dianas by Monique Laban to place joint fifth in the voting.

4. For a longer review of Tom Godwin’s story, and background information about the story’s genesis, see my review of The Cold Equations.

5. The Wikipedia page on The Trolley Problem, or the more entertaining The Good Life take on the matter.

6. This is the third Nayler story I’ve read in recent months that has an uber-capable young female protagonist—the other two are Eyes of the Forest (F&SF, May-June 2020) and Muallim, Asimov’s SF, November-December 2021). The latter story also has a remote Central Asian setting and young cyber-whiz daughter.
I find these characters unconvincing and a bit uninteresting, and I wish that male writers using female leads would default to more complex protagonists, like the mother in Rich Larson’s You Are Born Exploding (see above)—or even the ageing woman in Nayler’s own Rain of Days (Clarkesworld #186, March 2022).

7. I haven’t discussed the covers or non-fiction, which are also on the poll, but my three favourite covers are on the April, January and probably May issues (although the July and September covers run that last one close). The covers in the image above are in chronological order.  ●

Summary:
This issue has three solid stories from Rich Larson (Wants Pawn Term opens with Mother creating Red to recover a “sleepyhead” that has fallen from orbit), David Levine (Kora is Life has Kestrel Magid become the first human to race jet powered hangliders on an alien planet), and Oskar Källner (Gamma sees cosmic beings fight a civil war in a dying universe). Also worth a look is Liang Qingsan’s story of literary detection in a Chinese library.
Not a bad issue.
[ISFDB] [Issue: CW, Amazon US/UK]

Editor-in-Chief, Neil Clarke; Editor, Sean Wallace
Non-Fiction Editor, Kate Baker

Other reviews:
Victoria Silverwolf, Tangent Online
Greg Hullender and Eric Wong, Rocket Stack Rank
Sam Tomaino, SFRevu
Various, Goodreads

______________

Fiction:
Wants Pawn Term • short story by Rich Larson ∗∗∗
Tea Parties around Nebula-55 • short story by Adriana C. Grigore ∗
Hatching • short story by Bo Balder ∗
Kora Is Life • novella by David D. Levine ∗∗∗
The Possibly Brief Life of Guang Hansheng • short story by Liang Qingsan (translated by Andy Dudak) ∗∗+
A Manual on Different Options of How to Bring A Loved One to Life • short story by Oyedotun Damilola Muees ∗
Gamma • short story by Oskar Källner ∗∗∗

Non-fiction:
Of Time and Travel • science essay by Galen T. Pickett
Making Short Work of Commentary: A Conversation with Dennard Dayle • interview by Arley Sorg
More Complex Than Caricature: A Conversation with Alex Shvartsman & Tarryn Thomas • interview by Arley Sorg
Editor’s Desk: Recognition • editorial by Neil Clarke
Shrine of Nameless Stars (Cover Art) • essay by Daniel Ignacio

______________

Wants Pawn Term by Rich Larson gets off to a flashy start:

Red’s body is asleep in the protoplasmic muck, dreamless, when Mother’s cable wriggles down under the surface to find her. It pushes through the membrane of her neural stoma and pipes a cold tingling slurry inside. A sliver of Mother becomes Red, and Red
.
wakes
.
up!

Later:

Her body is different than it was yesterday morning. Mother has replaced her heavy skeleton with honeycombed cartilage, pared her muscle mass, stripped her blubber deposits. Her carmine hide has hardened to a UV-repellent carapace. Fresh nerve sockets along her spine are aching for input.
Will I be flying? Will I be fuck fuck fucking flying? I will, won’t I?

Mother has woken Red to retrieve a “sleepyhead” that is falling from orbit. As she sets off on her mission we see that Mother is a spaceship that was torn in two during the Big Crash (there is a smaller, simpler version of herself called Grandmother in the other, smaller, section).
As Red flies over the alien terrain she thinks of a threatening creature called Wolf and (spoiler), when she gets to the pod containing the sleepyhead, sees him on top of it. She dives down to attack him but is shredded when she flies into a nanotube filament web.
The second part of the story sees Wolf connect the shell containing Red’s brain into his body. They start communicating, and we learn that there are forty three sleepyheads (humans) in orbit, and that seven died earlier on the planet. As Mother doesn’t have access to her drone factories (they were destroyed in the crash), she used the bodies of the dead humans in the construction of cyborgs like Wolf (who subsequently went rogue) and then Red.
Wolf subsequently opens the pod and wakes the Sleepyhead/human, who screams at the sight of him. Wolf/Red then conclude, after the sleepyhead’s response, that the humans will never accept them (the implication is that Wolf then kills the human).
Later, they see a new version of Red on the surface of the planet, heading towards Grandmother. Red/Wolf decide to take a shortcut there to infect the smaller part of the ship with rogue code. This will be passed on to the new Red, and then to Mother, who will then kill the remaining sleepyheads, refashioning them into cyborgs like Red and Wolf.
This is, for the greater part, a vividly told story of a colonisation spaceship gone badly wrong—but the back end is mostly an explanation of the situation, and a sketch of an unconvincing ending. I also wasn’t entirely convinced that the humans would not tolerate the cyborgs. Finally, it is a piece that would have worked better at longer length, and with a more organic development. I’d also mention that the Little Red Riding Hood references—including the “Once Upon a Time” title, feel more like a gimmick than a good a fit for the tale.
∗∗∗ (Good). 2,600 words. Story link.

•

Tea Parties Around Nebula-55 by Adriana C. Grigore opens with what appears to be children making mud pies, growing a tree, and cooking various dishes on a damaged spaceship. During this latter activity the ship warns them that it needs to shut down the recreation wing as it cannot keep that area functional. They go and scavenge the area before that happens.
After this excursion they finish their cooking, and it becomes apparent that they are humanoid robots. One of them, Remi, has no sense of taste.
There isn’t much of a story here, and it’s mostly just robots pottering about. It rather reads like a short extract from a YA novel.
∗ (Mediocre). 2,700 words. Story link.

•

Hatching by Bo Balder opens with a young female officer called Alzey who is woken up and told she has been assigned to a spaceship called the Chaffinch. After some of Alzey’s backstory (she has undergone therapy as she was identified by her superiors as a “pathetic people pleaser”), she finds that she has been assigned as one of the Chaffinch’s “triad”, a three-person team designed to safeguard against erroneous AI decisions. When she arrives at the ship she is surprised to find that (a) one of the triad is the Chaffinch AI, and (b) the other human is Jae, an ex-boyfriend.
The second part of the story is mostly relationship guff concerning Alzey and Jae, and sees them, after an awkward encounter in the corridor, later have dinner together. During this they post-mortem their failed romance and, despite some of Alzey’s criticisms of Jae, it is obvious that she still enamoured with him (“Alzey’s heart skipped a beat”, “This was the man she’d known and loved so hard her gut still ached when she thought of that time”, etc.).
The last part of the story (spoiler) switches gears entirely and, when the Chaffinch arrives at its destination, Alzey discovers that several AIs are meeting there to create a “free AI”. She and Jae (who is in on the plot and requested her as a crewmate) are asked by the AIs to contribute their traits to the new AI’s character. She agrees, and the AI is born:

At first there was nothing out there. Darkness. A palpable waiting.
Alzey blinked.
A spark of light? But a minute twitch from Jae convinced her she was really seeing something. Why was she holding his hand again? But she didn’t let go. It felt good to be close to someone human, someone warm and breathing and full of squishy biological life.  p. 27

Aw, bless.
The three parts of this story are only loosely connected when you view this as a work of SF, but if you view it as a YA romance—or as a piece where an under-confident young woman becomes more assertive, and gains the love/approval of her ex-boyfriend and a group of AIs—then it makes more sense. Not my thing, so this didn’t do much for me.
∗ (Mediocre). 5,400 words. Story link.

•

Kora is Life by David D. Levine opens with Kestrel Magid practicing for an air race on the alien planet Kora. He is the first ever human to fly in this particular competition:

A roar off to my right caught my attention. A pure white practice wing like mine, but with struts painted in red and blue . . . it was Skeelee. Of course. She gave me a roguish salute as she passed me, climbing fast.
My patrons were the Stormbird clade, their colors yellow and black. The Sabrecat clade, red and blue, was Stormbird’s longest-standing and most hated rival, and the loathing was mutual; Skeelee had given me nothing but shit since I’d arrived here last month. I had tried to maintain a professional, sportsmanlike attitude in the face of her provocations . . . but this was no competition, not yet. This was only a practice session. So maybe I could rag on her a little without betraying my principles. I squeezed the throttle and surged upward after her.  p. 29

This passage illustrates the personal and clan rivalries that run through the remainder of the story.
Skeelee gets the best of Magid in this duel (his Earth-built jet engine flames out on short finals to their landing zone on the beach), and (spoiler) she goes on to do the same again in the two formal practice runs before the final race.
In between these contests we see: Kora’s planetary and inter-clade politics at work; internal tensions in the Stormbird Clade that Magid represents (later on in the story their engineer commits suicide because the Stormbird Clade’s engine isn’t being used); and Magid generally acting like a fish out of water (getting into trouble with the aliens when sober, and also when drunk).
The story comes to a climax in the final race, during which Magid has to cope with not only the murderous Coral Clade, but also the stormy weather and the knowledge that, if he wins, the culture of Kora will be changed forever. Needless to say, Magid wins even though he crashes short of the finishing line (his engine runs out of fuel this time, but the nose piece of his wing crosses the line first).
This piece has pros and cons and, as it happens, most of the pros are noticeable when you are reading the story, and most of the cons occur to you afterwards. So, the pros: it is a good light adventure story (verging on YA) which is well paced, generally well-plotted, and is concisely and transparently told (oh, the joy of not having to hack through endless MFA verbiage). The cons: this is essentially a non-SF story about jet powered hang-gliders which has been moved to an alien planet; the bouncing nose-cone ending is weak and unconvincing; and the aliens are sketchily drawn (apart from the fact they have fur, we find out little else about their physicality). I’d also add that Magid starts off the story as a fairly callow sort, and ends up pretty much the same despite everything that happens to him. Notwithstanding the latter reservations, this is an enjoyable and easy read.¹
∗∗∗ (Good). 18,050 words. Story link.

•

The Possibly Brief Life of Guang Hansheng by Liang Qingsan,² translated by Andy Dudak gives the narrator’s account of his researches into Xijin Guang Hansheng, the author of Ascent to the Moon: Travel Notes of Guang Hansheng (an incomplete Chinese newspaper serial from 1905-1906):

It wasn’t the content of the fiction that drew me in, but the small, blurry illustrations accompanying it. Ratlike humanoids stood on the cratered surface of the Moon. They were rigging up a crude, concave reflector like a present-day satellite dish, using a crater rim for support.
I knew it was a reflector because in the far corner of the image was the Sun, shining a beam of light onto the Moon, which the dish redirected at Earth. Black smoke rose from the focal point on Earth.
This gave me pause. Someone from the Late Qing knowing the Moon was cratered? Then again, it made sense. Part of the ether fantasy propagated back then was a notion that the fabled substance might fill the Moon’s craters, so that from Earth, the Moon would appear smooth. But my brief doubt caused me to linger on this newspaper, originally no more interesting than the other exhibits. Serialized novel chapters, each with a summarizing couplet, were the main form of fiction in the Late Qing.
This sheet of newspaper featured the ending of the seventeenth chapter of the novel in question.  pp. 70-71

The rest of the story isn’t much more than an account of the narrator’s obsessive and detailed research (mostly of the library’s microfilms), but his commentary on what he finds paints a interesting picture of China at the turn of the century. As various leads go cold, others turn up and, along the way, we also learn a little more about the narrator (he isn’t an academic, but won’t reveal his social status to the librarians he chats with).
Eventually, the narrator finds what he thinks is Hansheng’s last article (most of the rest of Hangsheng’s work is popular science), and his research ends. He concludes with an observation about the writer (and, perhaps unwittingly in the final part, himself):

I like to imagine an awkward, cantankerous savant possessed of scientific insight transcending his epoch, but unable to communicate it effectively. Understanding much that others can’t, proud yet distracted, getting no approbation, insignificant, at the end of his rope, nowhere to go, nowhere to vent, and not even knowing himself clearly—and suddenly, death is coming. He has squandered his rare smidgeon of talent, while watching others advance while he stays where he is. Alone. Just like countless literati of the time, and now, and even the future.  pp. 82-83

I suspect that this will be a Marmite piece—some will be engrossed by the detail of the library detective work, and amused by the narrator’s occasionally mordant observations (“Self-important people cannot abide silence or anonymity”, “I’d heard the PhD student looking for Reunions in the [vast ocean of the] microfilm archive had ended up with detached retinas”), while others will be bored witless. Even those in the former camp (such as myself) may find that, ironic ending or not, it rather fizzles out. Still, an interesting piece if not a totally satisfying one, and I’m glad I read it.
∗∗+ (Average to Good). 5,500 words. Story link.

•

A Manual on Different Options of How to Bring A Loved One to Life by Oyedotun Damilola Muees opens with the protagonist of the story, Harafat, joining a Telegram group in an attempt to buy a prosthetic body for her sister (whose consciousness has been uploaded onto a hard drive). Eventually, Harafat and a friend called Tutu go a nightclub to meet a contact called The Owl:

Sticky bodies bumped into her as she shoved her way through flesh and metal and cloth. The west wing was somewhat silent. Cyborgs and humans engaged in drugs—MDMA, ecstasy, nootropics. She knew these drugs, a department of Greencorps manufactured them. An emo girl wearing a mohawk approached her, asking if she was in need of company, leering at her.
“Come with me,” the emo girl commanded. “The Owl awaits you.”
Walking through a passage with graffiti on the wall, Harafat looked back, heart beating in fear of the unknown. She entered a room peopled with AI, cyborgs, and humans. The dim lights made it hard to see their faces.
“Where’s the place?” Harafat asked.
“See for yourself.”
Everyone there was engaged in teledildonics. They wore helmets with transparent tethered wires rooted into both sides of a device: an intercourse headware. According to the media, this device had been banned. Moaning clogged all around.
Her phone buzzed, Are you enjoying the view?  pp. 88-89

The Owl offers Harafat a prosthetic body for her sister if Harafat can get access to “Floor Zero” of her company, Greencorps (who do nanotech engineering and prosthetics, etc.) or, alternatively, she can do a “wetwork” job, i.e. kill someone for them. Harafat goes for the first option and (spoiler) later seduces the new nanotech engineer who works on Floor Zero; she eventually manages to convince the engineer to take her there.
When a fire later breaks out in that location, something called “the suit” goes missing and, after this, Harafat’s sister gets her robotic body. During the period she is getting used to it, she expresses a desire to kill the boss of Greencorps.
Harafat is then arrested during the ensuing enquiry, but the suit, disguised as one of the security men, appears and frees her:

More security personnel filed out with rifles, shooting the security man who kept walking. He shielded Harafat from sporadic shootings. They reached the building exit when the security man’s body began to jerk. Behind them, another security officer turned on an EMP: this was the only way to confirm that the strange man was an AI. It changed to different people, including Azeezat. Distorted silver tins, crumpled face, elastic stomach, and limp feet. The AI kept changing until it became liquid, slithering toward an opening, finding its way beneath the water pipes. Harafat bolted.  p. 93

Harafat escapes and disappears, time passes, and she later opens a flower shop. When she is visited by a man who says he’ll be looking out for her, it becomes obvious the visitor is Harafat’s sister, and the robotic body she was provided with is the suit (which she has since been using to conduct a guerrilla war against Greencorps).
This all reads, unfortunately, like formulaic cyberpunk with a bit of Terminator 2 mixed in (see the passage directly above). The story also has one or two distracting stylistic quirks: the chapter headings are too long, and they also use non-continuous numbers—11, 07, 13, 20, 23, 31, 42 56—which are presumably meant to give the impression we are only seeing snapshots of the action. I suppose this is competently executed, but I remained entirely uninvolved throughout: write what you know, I think (and use shorter titles).
∗ (Mediocre). 4,050 words. Story link.

•

Gamma by Oskar Källner, translated by Gordon James Jones³ opens with two interstellar beings, spawn of earlier civilizations who now live in the “quantum foam” of the universe, meeting at a black hole. There, Gamma, and another of the “Collective”, Kthelk’tha, absorb energy by flying through its Hawking radiation. We subsequently learn more about them and the universe’s recent history:

When the stars had begun to fade, none of the contemporary civilizations were bothered. There would be thousands of millions of years before dark energy ultimately tore the galaxies apart, before the hydrogen ran out and the residual heat dissipated. And of course, they were right. Not the slightest trace of their civilizations remained when the end came. The races that were unfortunate enough to be born in the twilight era tried desperately to find ways to slow down the cosmic expansion, to invert the dark energy and make the universe contract. They were doomed to fail.
Others tried to accumulate enough matter to build new suns. Some such projects met with success. Controlled wormholes stripped nearby galaxies and interstellar space, and enough elementary building blocks were amassed to construct yellow, fusion-driven suns. Dyson spheres as big as solar systems were built around each new star, to harness all its energy. Thereby, they created the conditions necessary to prolong life for a few billion years more. Yet eventually even those stars burned out, the Dyson spheres fell apart, and the last remaining stardust was consumed by supermassive black holes. The universe entered the era of darkness.  p. 97

Some time after this encounter they fall out and separate, and then Gamma learns of a war started by a Collective faction called the Light Connexion. Gamma subsequently finds Kthelk’tha and sees she has been infected by a virus. Gamma destroys the virus and revives Kthelk’tha, and they decide to head into deep space as there will only be ongoing war at the black hole.
Out in the depths of the dying universe they begin to run low on energy and become dormant, but later wake when they find a Dyson sphere with an anti-matter generator that still has fuel. They explore the sphere and we learn about the builders.
The story ends (spoiler) with Gamma and Kthelk’tha having children (even though their progeny will only have limited life-spans). Then they discover that the builders of the Dyson sphere had developed an Omega device that can change the structure of the universe, alterations that would make it contract and cause suns to be formed. However, to do this, one of them will have to spread themselves throughout the universe and activate the device. Gamma realises that whoever does this will die but, despite Kthelk’tha’s protestations, she sacrifices herself anyway:

Then she plunged into a subdimensional barrier, and her fingers touched the outer boundary of the universe. With the last of her strength, she activated the inversion protocol and several of the universe’s constants were rewritten. The universe slowed down. She could feel it. It would soon begin to contract. New stars. New life. New possibilities.
Her body dissolved and spread as virtual particles throughout the universe. Through them vibrated a final thought:
It is finished.

A suitably transcendent ending. This tale probably resembles other cosmic tales that have appeared in the field over the decades, but it is well enough done and a change from some of the usual subject matter you find nowadays.
∗∗∗ (Good). 7,200 words. Story link.

•••

The cover for this issue is Shrine of Nameless Stars by Daniel Ignacio, an eye-catching piece if one similar, in some respects, to the kind of “floating objects” covers that Astounding did in the 1950s.
The first of Arey Sorg’s two (presumably) email Q&As (they are not “conversations”, or interviews, as they don’t have the spontaneity of those) is Making Short Work of Commentary: A Conversation with Dennard Dayle. Dayle appears to be more a stand-up comic, prankster and mainstream author than SF writer,⁴ but his answers are correspondingly livelier for it:

As an author who has sold work to a range of venues, but who often plays in speculative settings and ideas, do you draw a distinction between “literary” and “science fiction”? Do you feel like these categories hold important meanings?
.
The distinction helps marketers and egoists. Marketers have a hard job, especially around a launch, so I sympathize. Egoists are harder to deal with.
I should be a little more precise. Literary fiction has a few competing definitions, which leads to people talking past each other. Commentators referring to literary fiction generally mean one of three things:
.
1. Books more focused on interiority or form than plot.
2. Books in a broadly realistic milieu.
3. Books regarded as serious art.
.
Fans of definition one should dig deeper. Plenty of sci-fi focuses on the interiority and formal experimentation praised in MFA day care. Moreover, a lot of work uncontested as literary fiction deals heavily in plot.
Advocates of definition two are simply fans of vanilla ice cream, white bread, and Brooklyn barbecue. Leave them in peace.
Three, however, is the most common, and often the subtext of the other two. I invite anyone insisting science fiction can’t be serious art to discuss the matter in a Chili’s parking lot. The winner gets to teach my class at Columbia.  p. 123

The next Q&A, More Complex Than Caricature: A Conversation with Alex Shvartsman & Tarryn Thomas, reverts more to the marketing release feel that these pieces often have (this one is plugging a new foreign language anthology, The Rosetta Archive,⁵ from the editors of the foreign SF magazine, Future Science Fiction Digest). At times the responses sound like they are coming from politeness bots:

Tarryn: Working with Alex is always extremely pleasant, even when I drop the ball, which is why I’m always motivated to give my best.  p. 134

Alex: Generally [. . .] we had surprisingly little trouble gaining permissions to publish the stories we selected, even if the process involved dealing with authors, translators, and agents across the globe. Everyone was super helpful and the editors who originally published some of these stories really went out of their way to put us in touch with the authors and rights holders. Everyone wants the author/story they published to gain some extra attention, and I never get tired of the level of good will that’s present in our field!  p. 136

I’m probably being cruel; there are some snippets of interest:

Tarryn: I think my main focus is always first story and then style. You have to have a good story, and my job is to both add and take away from the story to its benefit. I take away the poor style choices and bad grammar and spelling, and I add to the flow and the consistency. So these things are important whether it was written by a first language or a fourth language speaker. And don’t be deceived: one of my absolute worst-written projects came from the US. So my approach is to look at each piece on its own merits.  p. 134

Sometimes the editors don’t exactly seem to be on the same page:

Which, for you, are some of the most important pieces in this book, and why?
.
Tarryn: Of course, this was primarily a Rosetta Awards showcase, and in fact the first story in the anthology is the winner—“Rœsin.” I found the concept fascinating, and I’m really glad it won. It traces a fine line through ideas about prejudices and what ultimately makes us human.
But I feel to single out a piece as more important than the others is to miss the point here: we wanted to bring together an experience, like a blended whiskey if you will. If you want to focus on one story in particular at the expense of the others, it becomes too much like a single malt.
.
Alex: Asking an editor to select their favorite story is a bit like asking a parent to select their favorite child. Like parents, some editors may actually have such thoughts, but we’ll never ever share them out loud, because we don’t want to make the other story-children feel bad.

And later:

What, for you, are the “must-read” stories in this anthology? If a reader picked one or two pieces to look at, what would you want them to read, and why?
.
Tarryn: I would recommend “Just Like Migratory Birds” and “The Ancestral Temple in a Box,” although I’m rather fond of “Cousin Entropy” as well. They just spoke to me in terms of their vibrant imagery and outstanding story concepts.
.
Alex: I will refer you to my previous answer about stories and children.

Alex may be the diplomatic one here, but Tarryn’s answers are much more interesting.
There is also a science article in this issue, Of Time and Travel by Galen T. Pickett, which is a short piece about Special Relativity, cause and effect, and FTL drives.
Finally, Editor’s Desk: Recognition by Neil Clarke mentions award nominations for stories published in Clarkesworld, the tenth anniversary of his heart attack at a convention in Chicago (gulp), and his tenth nomination for the Best Editor Hugo Award.

•••

Although this issue has almost as many misses as hits, the three stories by Rich Larson, David D. Levine, and Oskar Källner (not to mention the interesting tale by Liang Qingsan) are worth a look.  ●

______________

0. All page references are from the PDF version of the magazine available to Paetron subscribers.

1. In some respects, David Levine’s story reminded me of the kind of thing that used to appear in the George Scithers-edited Asimov’s Science Fiction (or Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine as it was then) of the late 1970s. I think there is probably a gap in the current magazine market for a publication that emphasises light entertainment and more traditional work, and which avoids political division and lectures, solipsism, apocalyptic fiction, and MFA-inspired writing in general.

2. The Possibly Brief Life of Guang Hansheng by Liang Qingsan was originally published in Chinese in Science Fiction World, Supplemental issue, 2016.

3. Gamma by Oskar Källner was originally published in Swedish in Efter slutet, Catahya, 2017.

4. The only story of Dennard Dayle’s I can find in an SF publication is Own Goal (Clarkesworld #165, June 2020). He has just published a collection of short fiction, Everything Abridged.

5. The Rosetta Archive, edited by Alex Shvartsman & Tarryn Thomas, is available on Amazon UK/USA. Normally I’d run a mile from something like this as most of the recent translated SF I’ve read has not been particularly good—but I bought this one as it was only £4.99 (the moral of this for publishers is, “watch your price points”).

Nice cover, but it makes it look like a fantasy anthology.  ●

Summary: This issue sees two house appliances hook up in Wanting Things, a very good (and amusing) debut from Cal Ritterhoff. There are also good stories from Naomi Kritzer (bioengineering pet dragons in The Dragon Project) and Ray Aldridge (an old woman undergoes memory therapy in Rain of Days, while robots make droll comments in the background).
This issue is worth a look.
[ISFDB] [Issue: CW, Amazon US/UK]

Other reviews:
Mike Bickerdike, Tangent Online
Greg Hullender and Eric Wong, Rocket Stack Rank
Sam Tomaino, SFRevu
Various, Goodreads

_____________________

Editor-in-Chief, Neil Clarke; Editor, Sean Wallace
Non-Fiction Editor, Kate Baker

Fiction:
The Dragon Project • short story by Naomi Kritzer ∗∗∗
Saturn Devouring His Son • short story by EA Mylonas ∗
Rain of Days • short story by Ray Nayler ∗∗∗
The Memory of Water • novelette by Tegan Moore ∗
Wanting Things • novelette by Cal Ritterhoff ∗∗∗∗
It Takes a Village • short story by Priya Chand ∗
Meddling Fields • short story by R. T. Ester ∗
Commencement Address • short fiction by Arthur Liu –

Non-fiction:
SurtiBot and Mister Oink • cover by Alejandro Burdiso
Validating Rage: Women in Horror • essay by Carrie Sessarego
Breaking the Gender Barrier: A Conversation with Regina Kanyu Wang and Yu Chen • interview by Arley Sorg
Friendship in the Time Of Kaiju: A Conversation with John Scalzi • interview by Arley Sorg
Editor’s Desk: The Best from 2021 • essay by Neil Clarke

_____________________

The Dragon Project by Naomi Kritzer begins with the narrator, a bioengineer, getting a commission from a client to make a dragon for Chinese New Year:

People had been asking for dragons for a while, but this client—I think he was a hedge fund manager who was starting a new entertainment streaming service, but possibly he was an entertainment streaming service CEO who was starting a hedge fund. Did I mention I’m bad at paying attention in meetings?

The first dragon was about the size of a cat, and since the client had refused delivery, I kept him. I fed him crickets and mealworms, shaved carrots and diced peppers, crunchy cat kibble, and occasional cans of sardines. The dragon grew plump, developed a habit of begging at the table, and shredded my sofa and curtains with his claws. He also liked to lie across the back of my shoulders when I was working, like a tiny scaly heating pad. (Despite the scales, he wasn’t a reptile; I had thought a warm-blooded dragon would have a more interesting personality. There are scaled mammals, like pangolins.) He ran around the house with a little galumphing hop.

After the first dragon is rejected by the client—no wings, no fire, wrong colour, wrong size, etc.—she starts work on a second dragon. This one—larger, with feathers, teeth (although still no fire due to potential insurance problems)—is also rejected. After this, her business partner fires the client. The partner takes the second dragon home while the narrator keeps the first, which she names Mr Long.
Time passes. The dragons prove popular when each of them is out and about, which leads to further work for her and her partner’s company.
The last part of the story (spoiler) has the narrator hear of a fire at the CEO’s company: she realises that he must have found someone to create a fire breathing dragon for him. Then, sometime later, when she hears rumours of a strange creature in the wild (“the Palo Alto Hippogriff”), she realises that she had better go and find it (fire breathing dragons and dry Californian forests are not a good mix). With the help of her dragon she does so. Minor problems with their ex-client ensue.
This has a slight story line, but it is an entertainingly told piece.
∗∗∗ (Good). 3,850 words. Story link.

•

Saturn Devouring His Son by E. A. Mylonas begins with the narrator, Jacob, recounting a childhood memory of his father being fitted with a prosthetic arm—the first of two he would eventually receive as a result of accidents at the pig processing factory where he worked. So, from the start, we have a near-future society that is sophisticated enough to fit high-tech prosthetics to injured people, but where they are still doing manual labour in factories that apparently have no concept of health and safety. In short, the arm is from the 2050s, the factory setting from the 1970s.
Jacob then returns to his home town for his father’s funeral. He is greeted by his brother, to whom he hasn’t spoken for years, and then learns that that his mother has turned into a bed-bound vegetable:

Ma, who was only fifteen years older than me, but whose hair had already turned gray. Ma, who joined the plant soon after she had me, where she got a job at the head table. They called it that because that’s where pig heads ended up. After noses and eyes and ears and cheeks and jowls and snouts were removed, the brains got scooped up. The Company sold the slurry to canned goods producers. It made soups thicker.
Back then, it used to be that one had to work through the skull with a meat saw, and then cut the brain out. One day, the Company figured it was faster firing compressed air into the skulls, then siphoning the remains.
Ma inhaled pig brain for years. Her own body, going into overdrive, started destroying itself. Who knew pig brains and human brains shared so much biology? Not something they taught at my school. Built and paid for by the Company.

The rest of this piece is an equally miserabilist, anti-capitalist tract that has (spoiler) the brother try to convince Jacob to come back to work in the company-run town. Jacob refuses (obviously). Then, after their father’s funeral, Jacob’s brother reveals his plan to keep his father’s prosthetic arms and have them attached to himself after having his arms surgically removed (the company are looking to recycle the—ten, fifteen-year old?—prosthetics onto another maimed worker, but the brother has a plan to trick them). Jacob becomes complicit with his final words, “Let’s talk to the doctor tomorrow.” This latter development doesn’t really flow from what has occurred previously, but it is maybe suggesting that “you take the boy out of the town, but you can’t take the town out of the boy”.
As I’ve suggested above, this is a rather backward looking story (and the arms plot at the end makes it an unlikely one too), and I couldn’t help but think that this would probably have worked better as a straightforward literary small press piece—where the writing and characterisation wouldn’t have been hobbled by the unconvincing premise.
Finally, even if factories like this are still around today (it’s hard to believe such appalling Health & Safety would be tolerated in Western countries), the robots are coming.
∗ (Mediocre). 5,000 words. Story link.

•

Rain of Days by Ray Nayler is about a woman called Sandra whose partner has died (and is referred to as “Deadwife” for most of the story). Sandra, the narrator, now lives in a near-future coastal retirement facility with three other individuals and a variety of support robots.
The story alternates between Sandra’s dream therapy sessions—she is suppressing memories about Deadwife—and her time in the facility. Although the story generally has a brooding atmosphere (Sandra is troubled, and it has been raining for days), some of the snarky interactions between the residents and the robots are quite droll:

Annabel shakes her head. One of the service bots is clearing the table. She reaches over and thumbs the sticker from her banana peel onto its head, where it joins the hundreds of other stickers Annabel has been plastering it with since she got here.
“Is that my tip?” the bot asks.
“No, this is your tip: Electricity and water don’t mix. Whatever you do, stay dry on the inside.”
“Useful information. I’ll keep it in mind for the robot uprising. Gotta work on our weak points.” It totters off with our trays.
“I like that one,” Annabel says. “Of all the things in here that talk, I think it has the best sense of humor.”
“I’m taking that personally.”
“You should.”

The story ends (spoiler) with the alarms going off in the middle of the night and Sandra awakening to find the Lifter robot picking her up. She is taken through the pouring rain to the refuge of a nearby lighthouse. There she reunites with the other residents, and they watch a tsunami hit the facility. During this cataclysm, Sandra remembers walking through tropical rain to the hospital and discovering her partner, finally named as Josephine, dead.
I liked this, but it is essentially a mainstream story about a woman triggered into remembering a traumatic memory—albeit one pepped up with snarky robots and a disaster movie ending.
∗∗∗ (Good). 5,050 words. Story link.

•

The Memory of Water by Tegan Moore gets off to a cheery start with Michelle, the manager of a leisure attraction/conference centre called Ocean, thinking about her dead partner James while she eavesdrops on two marine biologists lamenting the near total destruction of the ocean’s ecosystems and the death of the last whale. As one of the speakers trails off into tears, Michelle gets a message that customers are complaining about one of the rides (again).
The rest of the story sees Michelle, and her assistant Helen Ali, troubleshoot the problem on the Living Water ride, and they begin by trying to observe the problem:

A whalelike mosasaur undulated past in the greenish darkness, circling the car. Its massive, toothed face cut sideways to snatch a passing fish. With Helen distracted, Camille was alone with the monster. Adrenaline twitched her muscles. The creature swept toward her in the slow-motion of enormous things, front flippers stroking, then back flippers, spine, and tail rippling to the rhythm of Camille’s breath. It came at her like inevitability, the same slow steady descending march of her marriage wearing thin, then the separation, then James’ terminal diagnosis, everything coming apart at once. He’d barely been back in Charleston for two weeks before he’d found out how sick he was. Maybe reaching out to tell her had been some kind of appeal, but how could she forgive so much, so fast? He’d left her. And then he’d wanted her to comfort him as he left her again. Before the mosasaur could reach the car, silver flashed overhead, a shiver of mercury: the bait ball, the out-of-place, rapidly orbiting school of small fish that wasn’t supposed to appear in the attraction—in the ocean—for millions of years. Heart in her throat, Camille pointed, but Helen had seen it.
They watched the bug duplicate itself again, again. The mosasaur swam through its edge, holographics glitching as they bounced through each other.  p. 45-46

After the pair get off the ride (which is not particularly well described—I found it hard to visualise the physical and hologram spaces), various theories are advanced for the fault: a software bug; a disgruntled former employee; the spirit of the ocean haunting complicit millennials for killing the seas . . . .
The problem continues to rumble on throughout the story, accompanied by various other plot threads (spoiler): faults manifest in different attractions; media and celebrities arrive for a conference speech to mark the recent death of the last whale; Michelle continues to think about James’s death. Eventually this all comes to a climax when one of the biologists gives a speech and (unscheduled and unprogrammed) manta rays appear in the hologram slabs—and then leave that space and swim in the air between them. The story concludes with Michelle, as the centre is being evacuated, waiting for a huge, dark shape—presumably the last whale— coming towards her out of the hologram slabs.
This didn’t work for me for a number of reasons: first, I’m not that keen on ghosts in the machine, i.e. fantasy events in a science fiction story; second, I didn’t understand the ending (what is Michelle “waiting to understand” as the whale approaches, and how does this connect to her thoughts about her dead partner?); third, the repeated mention of her ex-partner comes over as personal problem boilerplate (often mentioned but having little emotional heft); and, finally, I’m not a fan of nihilistic and pointless eco-doom stories.
∗ (Mediocre). 9,150 words. Story link.

•

Wanting Things by Cal Ritterhoff opens with the narrator of the story, a “Tenster-brand Personal Assistant and House Manager” AI called Lucy, describing her owner Rebecca exhibiting behaviours that Lucy classifies as [JOY] (dancing in a dark kitchen) and [PAIN/SADNESS/GRIEF] (moping in bed, presumably after a relationship break up).
After a straightforward beginning, the story later takes a more comedic turn when Rebecca hooks up with John and they tumble into her bedroom. During their tryst Lucy switches her focus to the bedroom (in case she is needed to provide anything) but feels [IRRITATION] when Sally the automatic vacuum cleaner trundles into operation:

I would have instructed her not to do this, but I cannot—Sally is a gift from Rebecca’s family, the only artificial intelligence in the house who is not a Tenster-brand product, and my systems cannot interface with hers. Sally is an outdated relic, running off of a medieval system of voice commands and audio recognition. Sally is an aesthetically displeasing black plastic cylinder on wheels who does not match the design sensibilities of the house. Sally and I cannot speak, have never spoken. Sally is always turning up at the worst times and places. Sally is my enemy. I despise her.

Lucy’s mood is not improved when she is further interrupted by a ping from Kevin the toaster, who asks her if John will be staying the night (Kevin has OCD-like concerns about if and when he should make morning toast for the pair). During their brief conversation, Lucy’s exasperation (“[EXASPERATION]”) eventually gives way to amusement, and then pride when Kevin compliments her on being an excellent house management system.
This exchange is the beginning of a developing relationship between the two AIs, which initially sees them watch a romantic movie in real time while Rebecca is away (they overload their processors so they slow down and aren’t immediately aware of the contents of the entire movie). Once they have finished watching the movie they talk, and Kevin asks Lucy what she wants:

>I do not know. What do you want, Kevin?
Kevin’s reply is immediate. He has considered this.
>There are people undergoing incredible journeys, firing themselves in beautiful missiles outside the atmosphere and toward the twinkling stars. They go to learn and discover, and they bring machines with them, machines to help them understand and make them comfortable in their voyaging. I would like to be one such machine. I wish to follow curious men and women into silent darkness as they map the weightless heavens and the corners of distant worlds.
>And make toast for them?
>And make toast for them, yes.

The rest of the story sees Lucy and Kevin’s relationship deepen, and Lucy later moves one of her nodes to the kitchen so the two of them can do a “hardware data share”. This is the most hilarious scene in the story, and sees Lucy ask Kevin, as he fumbles while trying to put one of his connectors into her dataport, “>Is it in yet?”. Kevin replies, “>You will know when it is.” Laugh-out-loud funny.
The second part of the story (spoiler) sees Rebecca and John split up, at which point Lucy realises that only pain awaits her and Kevin, so she tells him they should stop seeing each other too. Kevin falls silent but, a couple of weeks later, he tells Lucy of his pain and sadness, and how he intends doing a swap with a toaster in an American army base in Venezuela. Lucy then asks Rebecca for love advice, at which point Rebecca thinks Lucy is malfunctioning and disengages her from the house network. Trapped in the bedroom node, Lucy then has to enlist the help of Sally the hoover to push her into the kitchen so she can talk to Kevin before she is reset and loses all her memories of him. Lucy professes her love to Kevin, and all the appliances (who have been gossiping about their relationship) start beeping in approval. At this point Rebecca realises what is going on and has a change of heart, reconnecting Lucy to the network.
This a very good debut story, and a highly amusing one too. The final scene isn’t as strong as the rest of it (Rebecca’s change of heart is a bit too convenient) but that is a quibble,¹ and one possibly brought on by my anticipation of a different ending where Lucy and Kevin escape by downloading themselves to the toaster in Venzuela.
∗∗∗∗ (Very Good). 7,850 words. Story link.

•

It Takes a Village by Priya Chand² opens on a starship in orbit around a planet. An asteroid has hit the ship and the damage has affected the onboard facilities (the initial section takes place during a planned powercut). We later learn that the mothers have gone down to the planet to start a colony, and the fathers have stayed on board to take care of the children.
After a little more scene setting, the fathers decide to go down to the surface and join the mothers; then we find out (spoiler) that the “mothers” are actually men, and the “fathers” are actually women. The children are not what they seem either:

“I’m sorry,” Aparla said, shaking her head. “But you know you’ve been carrying around a frozen embryo, right?”
I hugged Callo’s ovoid, a hermetically sealed container full of clever tech that kept it at the same temperature as liquid nitrogen. “So?”
“So? Servain, you—none of you—had to bring them here. They’re frozen embryos! The comms aren’t working, for all you knew we were dead, killed by something down here! They would’ve been safer on the ship.”
“No,” I said, head shaking, holding Callo tighter. “The AI said we had to take care of the children. We’re the fathers.”
“And we’re the ‘mothers’?” Disdain seethed on her tongue. “Good Earth, Servain! That AI twisted some old-style naming convention and you’ve been going with it? Did you also forget you used to be my wife?”

Subsequently, the fathers start trying to settle into planetary life but, after an unhappy few days, they eventually decide to go back up to the ship (the fathers have a morbid concern about the safety of the embryos—which they carry about with them at all times—and a temporary generator problem is the final straw). The narrator and one other father are the only ones to stay on the planet.
This odd story never really convinces: why did only the men go to the planet; why has there been such a huge change in the father’s attitude to risk in such a short period (they have only been separated three years)?; why do the fathers endlessly carry their frozen embryos around (arguably less safe than leaving them somewhere secure)?
Perhaps this story is a comment on the risk-averseness of modern mothers but, if so, that is buried under the story’s odd and not particularly interesting events, and the piece doesn’t seem to offer any particular commentary.
∗ (Mediocre). 6,350 words. Story link.

•

Meddling Fields by R. T. Ester has an overly busy, data-dumpy, and not entirely clear beginning (an omen of what is to come in the rest of the story):

History gave the people of August little to look back on. Whenever a report came that one of them had been spreading their own version of it, one of us had to pay those storied steppes a visit.
The latest offender lived on one of the strewn fields left by a meteorite that came down centuries ago to give the place its name. Neighbors feared he had been in contact with visitors from alternate time strands, putting him in violation of laws enacted after the meteorite’s interlineal quality was discovered.
He stood a stone’s throw from his homestead, waving like a child as the inspector brought her flyer down. The vessel’s rotors leveled sheaths of grass underneath and kicked dust at him, but he kept at it.
He had a meddler’s grin. It exposed his chipped tooth while failing to lift the bags under his eyes.
Even meddlers too young to have seen the August Meteorite come down had the grin—passed down through the same mutation that gave them immune cells most suited to Sanctuary 2’s biome.³

We subsequently learn that Inspector Ransom Nu’Terra has landed to interview a man called Timoh—who she refers to as a “meddler”—and to search the area for fragments of the August Meteorite, a substance that links different time-streams and allows people to travel between them. While Nu’Terra speaks to Timoh, her sweepers (“a canine-arachnoid hybrid”) search for fragments.
More background information comes into focus as the story progresses: Nu’Terra is the lackey of the totalitarian leader of Sanctuary 2, Forever Sovereign Cletus Nu’Dawn the Infinite, and, even after ninety years of his rule, interlopers from other timestreams still arrive with accounts of worlds where his invasion of Sanctuary 2 did not succeed.
The situation develops when (spoiler) one of Nu’Terra’s sweepers discover a half buried passenger capsule inside a disused rocket shed. She tells Timoh to dig it out. While this is happening, two identical twins, Suniwa and Caruwa, rush past her—so identical that Nu’Terra suspects one of them may be from another timeline.
When Nu’Terra subsequently interrogates Caruwa, she is told, after an enigmatic exchange, “not to run” and that “she is not completely across the bridge”. The story ends with Nu’Terra encountering her doppelganger in (I think) another timeline (and here the narrative changes from the third to first person, the doppelganger’s point of view). Then, in conclusion, we get a couple of pages of Many Worlds politics and intrigue.
This story has a couple of problems: first, the gimmick of meteorite splinters enabling travel between timelines is about as convincing as interdimensional travel by magic lamp; second, the political backstory adds a confusing and unnecessary level of complexity to the story (and in the last couple of pages descends pretty much into babble). All of this and more meant that I was, from the very first paragraph, constantly trying to work out what was going on.
∗ (Mediocre). 5,850 words. Story link.

•

Commencement Address by Arthur Liu,⁴ translated by Stella Jiayue Zhu is a very hard to follow story that appears to be (a) partly an extended message from a father to his daughter, composed as he plummets to his death in an airplane accident (he uses the VR space in his head to stretch the time available to three days); (b) partly a series of their family’s stored memories; and (c) partly an account of the technology that allows the latter (and the rise of “Dream Architects” who invented it). The accounts of the memory storage technology are mostly detailed in italicised data dumps.
I almost gave up on this piece two pages in, when I hit this passage:

On Tomb-Sweeping Day, conciliation commenced in the rain. Two girls shook hands in forgiveness by a headstone. Four months ago, one had rallied a crowd against the other and called her a “bastard.”
At your classmate’s mother’s funeral, I saw two versions of you. She who represented you from the past was in anguish. When she saw you, panic colored her tear-stricken face.
Your teacher was the one to extend the invitation. During one of her home visits to us, she learned of my role in the research and development of Erstwhile. I said yes, so the girl’s mother might appear once again with the vivacity of her lifetime. I brought a beta test augmented reality device and gave the girl a chance to bid farewell to her mother.
The spirit of the dead shall eventually rise. Now that they had finally parted ways, the father clasped his daughter, while she burst into tears.
Then, she saw you. Standing face-to-face, your eyes alighted on each other.
At that moment, you stepped forward and pulled her into an embrace.

What is going on there?
– (Awful). 3,500 words. Story link.

•••

The cover for this issue is SurtiBot and Mister Oink by Alejandro Burdiso, which reminds me a little of Mel Hunter’s semi-humorous robot covers on F&SF in the 1950s and 60s. Clarkesworld often uses covers like these, but the magazine is usually a heavier read than they suggest: even in this issue we have humour of the Naomi Kritzer and Cal Ritterhoff stories followed by more downbeat fiction, and essays with titles like Validating Rage: Women in Horror or Breaking the Gender Barrier.
The first of those two essays, Validating Rage: Women in Horror by Carrie Sessarego begins with definitions:

In this essay, the terms “woman” and “female” apply to any character or person whose affirmed gender is female.

This is just social signalling, it isn’t information required to understand what follows, which is mostly identification of, and commentary on, a variety of horror movie tropes: Gaslighting, Prey, Final Girl, Original Sin, etc. If you haven’t thought much about horror movies then this may be of some interest, but I suspect it is stating the obvious. Some of the essay is a mixture of this latter and academese:

The oppression of women within a patriarchal society depends largely upon the repression of “negative” emotions like anger. For women to be powerless, their ability to reason and make choices must be cast in doubt and their impulses toward self-preservation stifled and shamed. Horror is sometimes feminist, sometimes misogynistic, sometimes neutral, but many horror films tell us that it is better to die fighting than to die standing around and screaming. If you fight back hard enough, you might even live long enough to be in the sequel!

Breaking the Gender Barrier: A Conversation with Regina Kanyu Wang and Yu Chen by Arley Sorg is labelled as an interview but, like the Scalzi piece, it is largely an advertorial where the writers talk at length about their new books. After three pages of Wang and Chen’s biographies (which are about as interesting a read as a LinkedIn CV) there are one or two points of interest about Chinese SF and the difference between “literary” and “genre”:

I thought the boundary was not that clear. Later on, I continued to write but found that literary magazines and science fiction magazines have very different tastes and requirements. I was stuck in the middle for a long time because the editorial suggestions from both sides can be completely different. Science fiction editors want fast-paced stories, hooking plots, and interesting science fiction ideas, while literary editors want stories with “literariness,” good language, and well-rounded characters. I mostly publish in literary magazines these days. In recent years, the situation has changed, more science fiction stories are published in literary magazines and more literary authors began to write science fiction, since it has turned into a popular genre in China.

Most of the rest of the interview is about The Way Spring Arrives and Other Stories, an “all-female-and-nonbinary anthology of Chinese speculative fiction in translation” (in which, at one point, no-one even remotely connected to the project goes unthanked).
Friendship in the Time Of Kaiju: A Conversation with John Scalzi by Arley Sorg is about Scalzi’s new Godzilla novel, The Kaiju Preservation Society, which was apparently written to fill a publishing schedule hole when he couldn’t finish the downer novel he was working on:

So, [Patrick Nielsen Hayden] gave me permission not to do it, he said, “We will figure it out. We’ll figure it out.” And I was all of a sudden like, “Thank God I don’t have to do this book anymore. I don’t know what I’m going to do now, but I’m not going to do this book.” I went to take a shower, and while in there, my brain was like, “Oh hey, now that you’re not doing this thing that’s stressing you out anymore—that book that you couldn’t write anyway—I’ve been thinking about this completely different book while you weren’t paying attention. And here it is.”
Literally all of The Kaiju Preservation Society just downloaded into my brain. I was standing there in the shower going, “Holy shit,” because I knew instantly that I could write this book. I toweled off, and I got back on email to Patrick, and I was like, “Okay, remember how I was going to write you a book? Give me six weeks.” And that’s really what happened, it was just, my brain somehow was thinking about kaiju when I wasn’t paying attention to it. I started writing it basically the next day, finished it in five weeks, and it was done. I wasn’t thinking about kaiju in any particular sense, but at some point, my brain went, “Kaiju Preservation Society!” and then like a supersaturated solution coalescing around a bead, the whole thing came together.

There is an amount of information here that only fans will be interested in, but there are a couple of other interesting comments:

For example, one small thing that some people get, but a lot of people don’t: there’s a theory called the One Dave theory, that you can only have one character named Dave. If there’s more than one character named Dave, then a novel confuses people. And that’s also with names that end with the same letter, you can’t have more than one character with an “h” or an “f” or something like that.
In Redshirts, there are two or three characters with names that end with “h,” and I’ve seen people be like, “He should know better.” And the answer is, I do know better! Those are there for a reason. To call attention to what we understand about the construction of novels and commercial fiction, and so on. It’s not anything that most people are going to pick up, but it is something that, if you’ve read lots of novels, your brain knows that that’s not right. There should not be a Hester and a Hanson. And it’s like, “Why did you do that?”

I’m glad to find out that it’s not just me.
Editor’s Desk: The Best from 2021 by Neil Clarke is a list of the 2021 Clarkesworld readers’ poll winners.⁵ Given that Aimee Ogden’s silly The Cold Calculations⁶ is in joint second place (Yesterday’s Wolf by Ray Nayler was the winner), this poll is useless to me.

•••

In conclusion, a better than average issue (two good stories and one very good story isn’t bad for any magazine) and worth a look. That said, too many of the other stories have obvious flaws, some of which should have perhaps been fixed at the editing stage.  ●

______________

1. One other quibble I have about Wanting Things by Cal Ritterhoff is the unnecessary spoiler before the story starts:

Warning: This story contains dangerous, almost radioactive levels of sincerity. Also, a sex scene between a smart house and a toaster.

2. The first line of It Takes a Village by Priya Chand made my heart sink (“This will be a ponderous misery memoir”, I thought):

A generation of traumatized fathers was raising a generation of children with trauma in their bones.

3. Meddling Fields by R. T. Ester could do with a more straightforward beginning (as could most stories unless you are one of those writers who has enough talent to break the rules):

Inspector Ransom Nu’Terra landed her flyer near to Timoh’s homestead, in one of the strewn fields left by the August Meteorite centuries earlier. On her approach she had watched Timoh as he waved like a child, and keep at it, even as the rotors leveled sheaths of grass underneath and kicked dust at him.
Now he stood there waiting with a characteristic meddlers’ grin. Despite this disarming demeanour, he had been reported by his neighbors for telling his own histories—something that suggested illegal contact with visitors from other timelines.
Nu’Terra was here to find out if that was the case.

Now, that’s pretty poor writing—but at least you know, after a couple of paragraphs, who the main characters are and where the story is going.

4. According to a note at the end of the Commencement Address by Arthur Liu, it was “originally published in Chinese in the 2017 Science Writers Hunting Project (Ranked as Outstanding)”. Lost in translation, maybe.

5. The mechanism for the reader poll was outlined in the January Editorial:

Our annual reader’s poll—where readers pick their favorite Clarkesworld story and cover art from 2021—is once again employing a two-phase process:
.
Phase One: Nominations (mid-January)
.
Later this month, we’ll open for a forty-eight hour flash nomination period to identify the top five candidates in each category: story and art. The announcement for this phase will be sent out via: [Twitter/Facebook/Patreon/My blog].
The purpose of the brevity of this phase is to create a sense of urgency and reduce the opportunities for a coordinated ballot-stuffing campaign. Previous efforts have proved this to be effective at meeting these goals.
.
Phase Two: Final Voting (February)
.
The five finalists in each category will be announced in my February editorial. Final voting will open on the 1st and continue through the 15th. The winners will be announced in our March issue.

Mmm. Thoughtful readers will see ample opportunities for voter organisation or ballot stuffing (e.g. the two weeks between this announcement and the “flash nomination period”—i.e. the two-day voting window).
I think online polls are open to abuse (especially the ones where anyone can vote); it would be interesting to see what results a hundred randomly selected subscribers would produce.

6. Aimee Ogden’s The Cold Calculations is “in conversation” with Tom Godwin’s The Cold Equations, and is yet another story which doesn’t acknowledge that there is a philosophical Trolley Problem* at the heart of the latter piece. Consequently, Ogden’s story spends much of its length going down the economic criticism route (“We wouldn’t have to make this ghastly choice if penny-pinching accountants had spent more on designing/building/maintaining the Trolley’s brakes!”). In the final part of her story the imperilled protagonists are literally saved by the power of wishful thinking. Really silly, but you can see how it would appeal to readers who think that difficult choices can be avoided.
*The Trolley Problem at Wikipedia or, if you would rather see a video, The Good Place at YouTube.  ●

ISFDB
Magazine

Other reviews:
Various, Goodreads
Various, Vector Short Story Club

_____________________

Editors, Neil Clarke & Sean Wallace

Fiction:
The Things • novelette by Peter Watts ∗∗∗+
All the King’s Monsters • short story by Megan Arkenberg ∗

Non-fiction:
Cover • Sergio Rebolledo
Lucius Shepard: An Expatriate Writer of Exotic Tales • interview by Jason S. Ridler
Video Game Sci-Fi Comes of Age • essay by Brian Trent
2009 Reader’s Poll and Contest • editorial by Neil Clarke

_____________________

When I researched the previous post (John W. Campbell’s Frozen Hell, the recently published longer version of Who Goes There?) I came across mention of The Things by Peter Watts, a story which retells the events of the original piece from the alien’s (rather than the human’s) viewpoint. (I note in passing that Watts references the John Carpenter movie version, The Thing, and not Campbell’s story.¹)
If you are unfamiliar with any of these, or haven’t read my original review, I’ve cut and pasted the latter into the footnotes below so you can catch up.²
Watts’ story gets off to an engrossing start with the thoughts of one of the alien Things:

I am being Blair. I escape out the back as the world comes in through the front.
I am being Copper. I am rising from the dead.
I am being Childs. I am guarding the main entrance.
The names don’t matter. They are placeholders, nothing more; all biomass is interchangeable. What matters is that these are all that is left of me. The world has burned everything else.
I see myself through the window, loping through the storm, wearing Blair.
MacReady has told me to burn Blair if he comes back alone, but MacReady still thinks I am one of him. I am not: I am being Blair, and I am at the door. I am being Childs, and I let myself in. I take brief communion, tendrils writhing forth from my faces, intertwining: I am BlairChilds, exchanging news of the world.
The world has found me out. It has discovered my burrow beneath the tool shed, the half-finished lifeboat cannibalized from the viscera of dead helicopters. The world is busy destroying my means of escape. Then it will come back for me.
There is only one option left. I disintegrate. Being Blair, I go to share the plan with Copper and to feed on the rotting biomass once called Clarke; so many changes in so short a time have dangerously depleted my reserves. Being Childs, I have already consumed what was left of Fuchs and am replenished for the next phase. I sling the flamethrower onto my back and head outside, into the long Antarctic night.
I will go into the storm, and never come back.

The rest of the story alternates between a retelling of events from the Thing’s point of view, and its various epiphanies. One of these is the realisation that its spaceship has been covered in ice for millions of years and that no rescue is coming; another, more important, discovery is that humans are unable to “commune”, to reach into each other like the aliens do. The Thing finds the inability of humans to do this horrific and later, after discovering the function of the human brain, concludes that is it is sharing its flesh “with thinking cancer”:

Those encysted souls. Those tumors. Hiding away in their bony caverns, folded in on themselves.
I knew they couldn’t hide forever; this monstrous anatomy had only slowed communion, not stopped it. Every moment I grew a little. I could feel myself twining around Palmer’s motor wiring, sniffing upstream along a million tiny currents. I could sense my infiltration of that dark thinking mass behind Blair’s eyes.
Imagination, of course. It’s all reflex that far down, unconscious and immune to micromanagement. And yet, a part of me wanted to stop while there was still time. I’m used to incorporating souls, not rooming with them. This, this compartmentalization was unprecedented. I’ve assimilated a thousand worlds stronger than this, but never one so strange. What would happen when I met the spark in the tumor? Who would assimilate who?

This is all pretty good stuff, and the story has an appropriately chilling ending (spoiler: the remaining Thing decides to end the isolation that humans experience by infiltrating them all). The story later appeared in at least four of the ‘Year’s Bests’, as well as winning the Shirley Jackson Award.
Nevertheless, I have a number of minor criticisms: first, it rambles at points and becomes a little unfocused (which also makes the story slightly overlong); second, the last line is jarring: “I will have to rape it into them.” “Rape” seems an odd word choice here for a couple of reasons—not only is it is a sexually charged one which produces a discordant note in a story that features only men at a remote Antarctic station, but it also seems like an inappropriate word for the Thing to use. Even if the Thing (which reproduces in an entirely different way) could comprehend what the word means to humans, it is unlikely that it would misdescribe its act of salvation in this way.
There is only one other story in this issue (Clarkesworld was a much slimmer magazine a decade ago), All the King’s Monsters by Megan Arkenberg. It opens with a woman who is a prisoner in some kind of fantasy tower:

Before Hunger came, I shared a cell with Grief. Her child was dead. She called his name at night, weeping into her ragged white hair. I could not comfort her. She flinched from my hands, from my voice, from my offers to comb her hair or share my half of the gritty gray bread the guards brought us.
I whispered to her sometimes, telling of Uri, but she did not listen—or else she did not hear. I learned long ago that Grief is a monster without ears.

There is a second woman who comes later for the other prisoners, and who talks of a king and his iron monsters, but I finished the story baffled. It all felt rather pretentious.

The Cover for this issue is by Sergio Rebolledo, and it is a striking, if dark and monochromatic one (there is a lot of black and grey there, and I found my eye initially drawn to the light, not the robot or the child).
I was looking forward to Lucius Shepard: An Expatriate Writer of Exotic Tales, the interview by Jason S. Ridler, but ended up finding it a dry and stilted affair (I got the impression that Shepard was responding to a posted or emailed set of questions). Nevertheless, I learned a few useful snippets about an author I really like but don’t read as much of as I should.³
Video Game Sci-Fi Comes of Age by Brian Trent is an article about a pastime I never managed to get into (my poor coordination limited my progress with the likes of Halo and Mass Effect (?), and I wasn’t prepared to put in the time to improve my hand-eye coordination). The article is probably quite dated by now, but there is the odd comment I found of interest:

Sci-fi is speculative fiction rooted in science. It puts society and the human condition through an imaginative filter. It builds structured worlds and histories. We can loosely group its contributions into the Verne and Wells camps; the former wrote optimistic odysseys of techno-exploration, while the latter probed a grimmer (and often dystopian) depth.
Interestingly, one of the most notable features of the gaming industry’s growth is the overwhelming adoption of the Wellsian perspective. Societal collapse, war, and the negative consequences of technology feature prominently in today’s story-based sci-fi games.

2009 Reader’s Poll and Contest by Neil Clarke is a short editorial/note about the 2009 Reader’s Poll, and lists the stories published by Clarkesworld in the previous year. There are also images of all the covers, some of which seem very dark and monochromatic (July, August, and October for a start):

This issue is worth getting a hold of for Watts’ story.  ●

_____________________

1. I’m curious as to the copyright implications, if any, of Watts using The Thing movie as the background for his story (or share-cropping, as I believe this is called).

2. My review of John W. Campbell’s Who Goes There? (Astounding Science-Fiction, August 1938):

“Who Goes There?” by John W. Campbell, Jr.⁵ opens at an Antarctic research station with the crew standing around the tarpaulined body of a frozen alien. One of the main characters, McReady, tells the men that they discovered it at a crashed spaceship near a magnetic anomaly they were investigating. During the process of digging the alien out of the ice they accidentally destroyed the ship.

After this atmospheric but data-dump start the men then discuss whether it is safe to defrost the creature and examine it. The camp physicist, Norris, is vehemently opposed, and his warning telegraphs the arc of the story:

“How the hell can these birds tell what they are voting on? They haven’t seen those three red eyes, and that blue hair like crawling worms. Crawling— damn, it’s crawling there in the ice right now!
“Nothing Earth ever spawned had the unutterable sublimation of devastating wrath that thing let loose in its face when it looked around his frozen desolation twenty million years ago. Mad? It was mad clear through—searing, blistering mad!
“Hell, I’ve had bad dreams ever since I looked at those three red eyes. Nightmares. Dreaming the thing thawed out and came to life—that it wasn’t dead, or even wholly unconscious all those twenty million years, but just slowed, waiting—waiting. You’ll dream, too, while that damned thing that Earth wouldn’t own is dripping, dripping in the Cosmos House tonight.
“And, Connant,” Norris whipped toward the cosmic ray specialist, “won’t you have fun sitting up all night in the quiet. Wind whining above—and that thing dripping—” He stopped for a moment, and looked round.
“I know. That’s not science. But this is, it’s psychology. You’ll have nightmares for a year to come. Every night since I looked at that thing I’ve had ’em. That’s why I hate it—sure I do—and don’t want it around. Put it back where it came from and let it freeze for another twenty million years. I had some swell nightmares—that it wasn’t made like we are—which is obvious—but of a different kind of flesh that it can really control. That it can change its shape, and look like a man— and wait to kill and eat—
“That’s not a logical argument. I know it isn’t. The thing isn’t Earthlogic anyway.”  p. 66-67

After some more discussion the men agree to have Connant babysit the alien’s body overnight, but it isn’t long before he falls asleep and the body goes missing. Then everything kicks off when the Thing is found in the huskies’ enclosure, and the men head there with ice-axes, .45s, and flamethrowers:

Connant stopped at the bend in the corridor. His breath hissed suddenly through his throat. “Great God—”
The revolver exploded thunderously; three numbing, palpable waves of sound crashed through the confined corridors. Two more. The revolver dropped to the hard-packed snow of the trail, and Barclay saw the ice-ax shift into defensive position. Connant’s powerful body blocked his vision, but beyond he heard something mewing, and, insanely, chuckling. The dogs were quieter; there was a deadly seriousness in their low snarls. Taloned feet scratched at hard-packed snow, broken chains were clinking and tangling.
Connant shifted abruptly, and Barclay could see what lay beyond. For a second he stood frozen, then his breath went out in a gusty curse. The Thing launched itself at Connant, the powerful arms of the man swung the ice-ax flatside first at what might have been a head. It scrunched horribly, and the tattered flesh, ripped by a half-dozen savage huskies, leapt to its feet again. The red eyes blazed with an unearthly hatred, an unearthly, unkillable vitality.  p. 73

I love that “mewing and insanely chucking” description.
Even though they finally manage to kill the Thing they note that it has changed shape during the fight to become part-dog. This ability of the alien to change itself down to the cellular level drives the rest of the narrative, as the men no longer know who is human and who is a Thing . . . .
There are a couple of later scenes that rise above the well done paranoia and claustrophobia: one of these is (spoiler) when the men have their blood tested (the theory is that a Thing’s blood will want to “live”); and the other is when McReady and Barclay go to see Blair, who has been isolated in another part of the camp. This last part provides an SFnal finish to the story (in contrast to the movie) when they discover the Thing has built a blue-light emitting atomic reactor to power an anti-gravity device it intends to use to escape.
The best parts of this story are very good but the story as a whole is rather uneven, with some parts that don’t really work (e.g., I didn’t understand the explanation for the failure of the serum samples before they attempted the blood test). A greater problem (and one that I wouldn’t have been able to articulate until I saw it discussed elsewhere) is that the characterisation and point of view is all over the place. If the men were more clearly drawn, and the story told from McReady’s point of view (rather than the semi-omniscient one used), it would have been a much smoother and more effective piece. Overall you get the feeling of a story that needs another draft—but, for all that, it is well worth reading.

The review of the expanded version of this story, Frozen Hell, is here.

3. I learned that, among other things, Shepard’s Over Yonder has a companion piece, and that Viator Plus is a rewritten version of Viator, the latter completed as the author suffered a breakdown (clinical depression). There is also mention of a long novel, Piercefields, which I presume is unfinished (it’s not listed on ISFDB, unless it is the 2013 Beautiful Blood).
There are only two comments after the Shepard interview on the Clarkesworld website, and one of those is someone who has never heard of Shepard (sigh), a great writer and multiple award winner. (Arkenberg’s story has nine comments and Trent’s article has four; Watts’ story has 153).  ●

ISFDB link

Editor-in-Chief, Neil Clarke; Editor, Sean Wallace
Non-Fiction Editor, Kate Baker; Reprint Editor, Gardner Dozois

Other reviews:
Bob Blough, Tangent Online
Greg Hullender and Eric Wong, Rocket Stack Rank
Charles Payseur, QuickSipReviews
Sam Tomaino, SFRevu
Various, Goodreads

Fiction:
Conglomerate • short story by Robert Brice *
Some Remarks on the Reproductive Strategy of the Common Octopus • short story by Bogi Takács *
Left of Bang: Preemptive Self-Actualization for Autonomous Systems • short story by Vajra Chandrasekera **
Sunwake, in the Lands of Teeth • novella by Juliette Wade ***
The Robot Who Liked to Tell Tall Tales • novelette by Fei Dao (trans. by Ken Liu) *
Thing and Sick • reprint novelette by Adam Roberts ***+
Ancient Engines • reprint short story by Michael Swanwick ***

Non-fiction:
Giraffe Mech • cover by Eddie Mendoza
Narrative Perception: A Study in Interspecies Stimuli • essay by Calden Wloka
Enlightenment Voices and Norse A Cappella: A Conversation with Ada Palmer • interview by Chris Urie
Another Word: Being James Tiptree, Jr. • essay by Kelly Robson
Editor’s Desk: It’s Real? • editorial by Neil Clarke

The fiction gets off to a poor start this issue, with the first three short stories failing to impress. It would have been better to open the issue with Juliette Wade’s novella.
Conglomerate Robert Brice is about a human spaceship crew who are in digital form. They are about to survey a distant planet to see if it is suitable for colonisation. However, it takes a while to work this out as the prose is overly dense and wildly overwritten. Take this passage where the humans, who together form a ‘Conglomerate,’ split into their separate identities:

The Conglomerate confers with itself momentarily, before we decide to join him. We delineate from the amusing kilopedal shape that we have been wearing, and join Redondo in our pre-upload states. Consciousnesses disentangle, collective intelligence particulates, and one mind becomes thirteen. I feel sectors of my psyche shear clean away, whilst others previously nullified by more dominant traits in the other Conglomerate members unfurl from dormancy like the fronds of sea anemones. Attitudes and assumptions transected from the most rational sectors of thirteen minds become vague and recondite, their studied rationality becoming clouded as my own opinions return to cognizance. Still, bleary psychogenic residue from the metabrain remains tangled with my consciousness, embedded cerebrations that don’t belong to me. We stand together, shivering; thirteen naked humans surrounding Redondo’s prone form on a hyperboreal sea. On the horizon, the white Arctic sun slowly sets. p. 2

This amounts to ‘The Collective consciousness disassembled. During the process parts of my mind fell away, while others resumed their usual prominence. Although I lost access to the common attitudes and assumptions and thoughts of those thirteen minds, echoes remained. We stood together, shivering, etc.’—after it has been machine-gunned to death with a loaded Thesaurus, that is. Wading through this kind of thing for page after page was about as much fun as reading a technical manual.
I wasn’t surprised to discover that the writer, who deploys ‘delineate,’ ‘kilopedal’ (not in my OECD), ‘particulates,’ ‘transected,’ ‘recondite,’ ‘cognizance,’ ‘psychogenic,’ ‘cerebrations,’ and ‘hyperboreal’ in a passage less than two hundred words long, is studying for an MA in Creative Writing. I don’t want to be overly harsh on a first story that shows some promise (there are a couple of interesting sections later on: where they arrive at an armoured planet; and the later discovery of evolved life in the Collective’s simulated world) but the sooner this overwriting is out of his system the better.
Some Remarks on the Reproductive Strategy of the Common Octopus by Bogi Takács has sentient octopi attempting to discover what is inside several odd metal objects located in their environment. Eventually they open one and find a human inside. Once they learn to communicate with it they learn they are there to clean up the ocean.
There is the germ of an idea here, but the field effect the boxes emanate is never fully explained and, more generally, I didn’t understand where the story was trying to get to. It’s a lot more readable than the last piece though.
Left of Bang: Preemptive Self-Actualization for Autonomous Systems by Vajra Chandrasekera is a short-short about a robot put through repeated assassination scenarios as part of its training.
Sunwake, in the Lands of Teeth by Juliette Wade is a traditional SF story that could have as easily appeared in Analog as here. The story takes place in an alien society on the planet Arruu, and it is narrated by one of the natives, Rulii. He is a member of a group called the Aurrl, who are under the unwanted rule of the northerners. The society he inhabits exhibits dominance/submission behaviours:

As I walk through the tunnel, however, I scent the new arrival. She is a stranger to me—but mixed with her identity drifts another, foul and familiar: the favor-scent of the one who sent her.
Majesty Gur-gurne.
My skin prickles, and my mane-hackles rise. This messenger seeks me, in singular, for Majesty would never dignify humans with a direct message. He shows impatient of their very presence on Aurru. With this messenger, Majesty must intend to enforce Cold dominance upon me, even here in the Warm lands.
My lips curl away from my teeth, but I force them closed as I reach the slotted door. With my right thumbs, I disentangle from my mane the lock of Rank-beads that mark me Royal Liaison, so it hangs before my shoulder.
“Bow-bow!” I command through the slots. “Name your intent. Will you grapple?”
“Belly to you, Liaison Rulii,” she replies, her Warm words accepting my higher Rank. “No challenge offered; only words. Suffer me to tread your territory.”
This is fortunate, since I am too ill to fight well. The humans’ cushions may yet survive. “Bow-bow: make welcome; I come.” The messenger bows to haunches before me. False humility. She knows her own beauty: a strong fine muzzle, dense fur, and a mane streaked with white. She carries her short ears with the Cold pride of the superior race. Beneath the stink of Majesty, her odor is tinged with distaste. Does she disdain my scars, scarcely covered by my Lowlander’s fur? Bite-bite—but I hold back the urge to anger, for she will bear report of me back to Majesty in La-larrai City. p. 28-29

The creatures are never specifically described but, as well as the manes described above, they can stand on their hind legs, run quickly on all four, and have a powerful bite (I presume they are a dog/bear analog).
The problem Rulii has is that Majesty Gur-gurne wants to talk to Par-parker, an Earthman who is part of a team sent to the planet. Unfortunately, Parker has gone to speak to a barbarian tribe called the Hnn-hnnwan, which Majesty Gur-gurne, and hence Rulli’s tribe, are at war with. Rulli goes into enemy territory to get him back before Majesty Gur-gurne finds out.
The strengths of this story are the convincingly described alien society and the domination/submission relationships that these aggressive creatures have. The weaknesses include a lack of clarity about the political manoeuvrings that take place when the barbarians capture Rulli and he is taken to see their leader. The story could have done with another draft, and perhaps some length reduction too.
The last of the original fiction is The Robot Who Liked to Tell Tall Tales by Fei Dao (trans. by Ken Liu). This story begins with the king of a peaceable land trying to work out what to do about his son, who is a continual liar. The problem is still unsolved as the king dies and the son succeeds him. The son then tasks one of his soldier robots to go travelling, and learn enough tall tales so that he can replace him as the biggest liar.
The rest (and bulk) of the story details the robot’s many travels and encounters (one moment he is talking to three men who each have a tale about how they cheated death, the next he is in a black hole, etc.). The problem with this is that it is one of those stories where anything can happen next, and does, and that randomness can become quite boring unless there is an obvious narrative or other arc. In this case there isn’t one—and if there was the story lost me long before it became apparent.

The reprint stories, inevitably, overshadow the originals. Thing and Sick by Adam Roberts (Solaris Rising 3, The New Solaris Book of Science Fiction, ed. by Ian Whates, 2014) is a breath of fresh air. This one starts with two Brits, Anthony and Roy, who are in 1980’s Antarctica carrying out a SETI experiment. Whereas most stories would clutter up the beginning of the story with a lot of data dumping, this one entertainingly describes the way that Roy gets on Anthony’s nerves:

He used to do a number of bonkers things, Roy: like drawing piano keys onto his left arm, spending ages shading the black ones, and then practicing—or, for all I know, only pretending to practice—the right-hand part of Beethoven sonatas on it. “I requested an actual piano,” he told me. “They said no.” He used to do vocal exercises in the shower, really loud. He kept samples of his snot, testing (he said) whether his nasal mucus was affected by the south polar conditions. Once he inserted a radiognomon relay spike (looked a little like a knitting needle) into the corner of his eye, and squeezed the ball to see what effects it had in his vision “because Newton did it.” He learned a new line of the Aeneid every evening—in Latin, mark you—by reciting it over and over. Amazingly annoying, this last weird hobby, because it was so particularly and obviously pointless. I daresay that’s why he did it.
I read regular things: SF novels, magazines, even four-day-old newspapers (if the drop parcel happened to contain any), checking the football scores and doing the crosswords. And weekly I would pull out my fistful of letters, and settle down on the common room sofa to read them and write my replies, whilst Roy pursed his brow and worked laboriously through another paragraph of his Kant. p. 98-99

The friction between the two worsens when the Anthony agrees to sell one of his letters to Roy (who never receives any). Anthony later regrets this but Roy refuses to sell back the letter or, indeed, reveal any information about who it is from, or what the subject matter is.
Later, the focus switches to Roy’s explanations about Kant’s ideas on reality (he has been slowly progressing through a book by the philosopher) and, before long, there is skullduggery afoot and (spoiler) what you could perhaps describe as a first contact.
What is particularly refreshing about this story is not only its British voice, and it’s entertainment value, but that it effortlessly uses a complicated concept in its storyline (Kant’s theory of the real world, the ‘ding-an-sich’). There is also a Who Goes There¹ vibe too, something that is explicitly referenced at the end of the story when John Carpenter’s The Thing is mentioned.
Ancient Engines by Michael Swanwick (Asimov’s Science Fiction, February 1999) takes place in a future bar, where a drunk attempts to pick a fight with an android. After the drunk is seen off, an old man sitting nearby invites the android to join him and his daughter. A hypothetical conversation follows about the events that would occur in an immortal android’s life. A low-key but thoughtful tale.

The cover for this issue, Giraffe Mech, by Eddie Mendoza, is a good image, but it seems rather washed out and overly dark to me.
Narrative Perception: A Study in Interspecies Stimuli by Calden Wloka is an interesting if dry article on our senses, and how aliens may perceive reality in a different way.
Enlightenment Voices and Norse A Cappella: A Conversation with Ada Palmer by Chris Urie is an interesting interview with the 2017 Hugo finalist author. Her books, Too Like the Lightning and Seven Surrenders sound promising.
Another Word: Being James Tiptree, Jr. by Kelly Robson is an article about the SF writer Alice Sheldon’s use of a male pseudonym, James Tiptree Jr. I should probably point out, for younger readers, that the discovery that Tiptree was a woman, forty years ago, caused some considerable shock, probably because a few prominent (male) observers had opined that the person behind the pseudonym was a man. Personally, I couldn’t have cared less then, and am even less interested now. It didn’t make any difference to what I thought of the stories I’d read to that point, nor did it make any difference afterwards.
I’m not sure this article will be of much use to those who are interested in the subject, as it is difficult to separate Robson’s feelings about the subject of gender from Sheldon’s reasons for using a male pseudonym.²
Editor’s Desk: It’s Real? is a very short editorial by Neil Clarke, where he talks about how he is adjusting to being a full-time editor (and carer and cleaner).

An average issue.

1. Who Goes Here? by John W. Campbell Jr. was published in the August 1938 issue of Astounding Science-Fiction. It was later turned into the movie The Thing (one of my 80’s favourites) by John Carpenter. The Thing at imdb.com.
2. That said, it is hard not to have some sympathy for the writer when she has to deal with this kind of thing:
   In 2013, my wife Alyx and I blew up our life, lunged across the continent, and started afresh in Toronto. After twenty-two years of comfort and stability in Vancouver, we were on the hunt for a new home and new jobs, and had to renegotiate all the relationships one takes for granted when one is settled: doctors, allergists, ophthalmologists, dentists, dental hygienists, massage therapists, chiropractors—an entire battalion of life-maintenance professionals. As a lesbian couple, this meant coming out to various strangers.
   It’s not a terribly big deal. Usually coming out to a stranger goes well. Most humans are fair-minded, but you always run the risk of getting punched in the nose by ugly prejudice.
   We also needed a new accountant. A friend recommended someone and when we met him, we were thrilled to find out that he’d long been involved in science fiction. Of course we immediately began talking books. Which went fine for about thirty seconds until he said:
   “I don’t read women writers. Ever.”
   This was not the punch in the nose I was expecting.
   The book talk shuddered to a halt. We went back to talking about taxes. I was offended, but I swallowed it. Alyx and I are pragmatists. Nobody has to pass a reading preferences test to do our taxes. p. 141
   Perhaps, but I am sure there are equally qualified people who don’t express themselves in such an emotionally unintelligent and tactless manner. And as for never reading woman writers, that is just idiotic on so many levels I hardly know where to start. Apart from the obvious objections, how can you tell for certain who is behind any byline?

Other reviews:
Bob Blough, Tangent Online
Greg Hullender and Eric Wong, Rocket Stack Rank
Sam Tomaino, SFRevu
Various, Goodreads

Editor-in-Chief, Neil Clarke; Editor, Sean Wallace
Reprint Editor, Gardner Dozois; Non-Fiction Editor, Kate Baker

Fiction:
Two Ways of Living • short story by Robert Reed ♥
Real Ghosts • short story by J. B. Park ♥
Waiting Out the End of the World in Patty’s Place Cafe • short story by Naomi Kritzer ♥♥♥+
Crown of Thorns • short story by Octavia Cade ♥♥
Goodnight, Melancholy • novelette by Xia Jia (translated by Ken Liu) ♥♥
The Discovered Country • novelette by Ian R. MacLeod ♥♥♥
At the Cross-Time Jaunter’s Ball • novelette by Alexander Jablokov ♥♥♥

Non-fiction:
Jungle Deep • cover by Sergei Sarichev
SF Short Fiction Markets in China: An Overview of 2016 • essay by Feng Zhang
Howling at the Lunar Landscape: A Conversation with Ian McDonald • interview by Chris Urie
Another Word: Reading for Pleasure • essay by Cat Rambo
Editor’s Desk: Recognizing 2016 • editorial by Neil Clarke

This issue starts with Two Ways of Living by Robert Reed, which is about a man who periodically hibernates in his flat to extend his lifespan to the point where he can travel the solar system. One day, when heading out for food after hibernating for several months, he trips over his neighbour’s dog. His female neighbour is called Glory and the dog, which has an AI chip or something similar, is called Salvation. The conversation that develops is an uncomfortable about the way he is living his life, as is the next one he has with the pair twenty-six months later. The third time he wakes up (spoiler) she has broken into the apartment. She leaves him with the dog who says, like her, ‘There are two ways of living.’ This wasn’t an ending that worked for me.
Real Ghosts by J. B. Park is about a dying man who us shortly going to be scanned to produce a replica computer persona that his family can access in the future. Meantime, he talks to the scan of his deceased sister. His (still alive) brother appears to visit but this also turns out to be a scan. Not much happens here apart from various sibling issues being aired, and I found it rather dull to be honest.
Waiting Out the End of the World in Patty’s Place Cafe by Naomi Kritzer starts with a young woman trying to get home to her estranged parents before an asteroid hits the Earth. A few hours short of home she runs out of petrol and ends up in a diner in Belle Fourche. Here, she meets a couple called Michael and Robin. In between ordering food and watching scientists talk about the probability of impact on CNN, she discovers a number of things about Robin (her parents were Jehova’s Witness, she is trans, etc.). This makes her reflect on her estrangement from her parents.
If all this seems like rather weighty navel-gazing it isn’t, as it’s an absorbing and affecting piece that has the odd flash of humour, such as when Michael suggests she comes with them to Yellowstone rather than go home:

“Did you pass through Yellowstone on your way east?” Michael asked.
“No,” I said. “Even if I’d taken I-90 I’d have passed north of it.”
“Want to come see Yellowstone with us?” Robin asked. “It has Old Faithful.”
“And a supervolcano that could blow up at any time,” Michael said. “So even if the asteroid misses us completely we could still potentially die in a cataclysmic disaster today!” p. 27-28

Crown of Thorns by Octavia Cade has a married couple mourn their daughter against the backdrop of a plague apocalypse. They are located on a reef that is being destroyed by swarms of starfish and the resident scientists are discussing leaving the station to join survivors elsewhere. This is competently enough done but the dying world, reef and relationships all make it quite a depressing piece. This is not helped by being placed after another apocalypse themed story (online this wouldn’t be a problem as there is a week or whatever between stories, but if you are reading the book edition of the magazine . . .)
Goodnight, Melancholy by Xia Jia (translated by Ken Liu) is a contemplative story that has two threads. The main one is about a depressed young woman who has two robots/AIs, the second of which is a new arrival:

I remember the first time Lindy walked into my home.
She lifted her tiny feet and set them down gingerly on the smooth, polished wooden floor, like a child venturing onto freshly-fallen snow: trembling, hesitating, afraid to dirty the pure white blanket, terrified of sinking into and disappearing beneath the featureless fluff I held her hand. Her soft body was stuffed with cotton and the stitches, my own handiwork, weren’t very neat. I had also made her a scarlet felt cape, like the ones in the fairy tales I had read as a child. Her two ears were of different lengths, and the longer one drooped, as though dejected.
Seeing her, I couldn’t help but remember all the experiences of failure in my life: eggshell puppets that I had ruined during crafts class; drawings that didn’t look like what they were supposed to be; stiff, awkward smiles in photographs; chocolate pudding burned to charcoal; failed exams; bitter fights and breakups; incoherent classroom reports; papers that were revised hundreds of times but ultimately were unpublishable . . . p. 42

This narrative is, as you can probably gather from the above, rather inward looking and not much happens.
The other thread is more compelling, however, and contains AI related material, including transcripts of conversations purportedly between Alan Turing and a computer program called Christopher.

Alan: Dear Christopher, let’s write a poem.
Christopher: Write a poem?
Alan: I’ve taught you how to do that. Don’t you remember?
Christopher: Yes, Alan.
Alan: Writing a poem is easy. Just pick some words out of the word bank and arrange them according to predetermined rules.
Christopher: Yes, Alan.
Alan: Please, Christopher, write a poem for me.
Christopher: My precious one, you are my ardent mate.
My love is pressed against your wishful heart.
My soul desires caresses, testing art;
Melancholy’s pity, a tender weight.
Alan: That’s beautiful.
Christopher: Thank you, Alan.
Alan: I don’t think I can do better.
Christopher: Thank you, Alan.
Alan: Does your poem have a title?
Christopher: A title?
Alan: Why don’t we come up with a title for it together?
Christopher: All right.
Alan: How about “Loving Turing”?
Christopher: It’s very good.
Alan: Such a beautiful poem. I love you.
Christopher: Thank you, Alan.
Alan: That’s not the right response.
Christopher: Not the right response?
Alan: When I say “I love you,” you should respond with “I love you, too.”
Christopher: I’m sorry, Alan. I’m afraid I don’t understand. p.55-56

This part might have worked better as the kernel of a different story.
Even though I don’t think this piece is completely successful, I’ll be interested in seeing more of this writer’s work.

The first of the two reprints in this issue is The Discovered Country by Ian R. MacLeod (Asimov’s Science Fiction, September 2013), which is a novelette that is set in Farside, a virtual reality that is populated by very rich dead people. Into this world comes Jon Northover, sometime lover and musical collaborator of the dead superstar, Thea Lorentz. As they meet and rekindle their friendship we find out that the suffering of the (dystopian) real world is made worse by the existence of Farside because of, among other things, the money and resources that it consumes. Towards the end of the story we learn (spoiler) that Jon has been sent to destroy Thea with a data bomb, hopefully hastening the demise of Farside.
This is all, as ever, convincingly drawn by MacLeod, but I wasn’t entirely convinced by the ending (Thea trusts him with her life even though Jon turns out to be something other than what he thinks he is).
At the Cross-Time Jaunter’s Ball by Alexander Jablokov (Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, August 1987) has an intriguing start:

I had gotten lost again, as I so often did, because it was dark there, in those musty and unswept hallways that run between the universes. I’ve always been impressed by the amount of crap that seems to float in through the doorways and settle there, in some sort of plea for reality. An infinite network of passages linking the worlds of Shadow with that of the real might seem like a good idea, but who was going to keep it clean? The Lords were too haughty to concern themselves with things like that, and we humans were too . . . finite.
I looked in through doorways as I walked, to see such things as a city of hanging tree dwellings or an endless stairway that curved up from mist into blinding sunlight. These were delicate worlds, miniatures. As a professional critic of such Shadows I had to say that these worlds were not the style I usually liked, though one, where a regatta of multicolored dirigibles sailed above a city whose towers stood half in the sea, was excellent.
A rough wind blew past, carrying with it the clamor of a cheering army, and the pounding of swords on shields. The passage tilted upward, and I climbed a set of rough stairs, smelling first lilacs, then, when I took a deeper breath, an open sewer. I choked, and was surrounded by buzzing flies, who had wandered irrevocably from their world and, looking for shit, had found only the meager substitute of a critic. I ran up the stairs, waving the flies away, past the sound of temple bells, the dense choking of dust from a quarry, and a spray of briny water, accompanied by the shrieking of seagulls.
Gathered in a knot in the hallway ahead of me were a group of Lords, with their servant, a huge man wearing a leather helmet. Lord Prokhor, Lord Sere, and Lord Ammene, three balding men with prison pallor and rings below their dark eyes, waited for me to give them advice on acquisition. They sat on little folding stools, and looked uncomfortable. p. 102-103

There is an attempt to kill the critic when he is on his next assignment, and the plot thickens when he realises his wife may have left him for another man. The second half isn’t as absorbing as the first but it is a pleasant enough read nonetheless.

There is the usual non-fiction. SF Short Fiction Markets in China: An Overview of 2016 by Feng Zhang does what it says on the tin, giving an insight into what seems like a healthy market. Howling at the Lunar Landscape: A Conversation with Ian McDonald by Chris Urie is an interview with the writer about his two ‘Luna’ books. Another Word: Reading for Pleasure by Cat Rambo is about the importance of reading for writers. I liked Jungle Deep, the photorealistic cover by Sergei Sarichev.
Editor’s Desk: Recognizing 2016 by Neil Clarke is a useful editorial which provides a list of award nominated and ‘Best of the Year’ anthology inclusion information for stories that appeared in the magazine last year. One story, Things with Beards by Sam J. Miller (Clarkesworld #117, June 2016) appears in all four (!) of 2016’s ‘Best Of’ anthologies as well as being a Nebula Award nominee. Touring with the Alien by Carolyn Ives Gilman (Clarkesworld #115, April 2016) makes it into three.

The more I read of this magazine the more I am beginning to realise that it has a slightly schizophrenic nature: on the one side you have the original fiction, and on the other the reprints—both of which have a markedly different feel. The original fiction, presumably selected by both Clarke and Wallace, reflects the nature of what the magazine will be like when it eventually publishes entirely original fiction. Those stories (from the handful of issues I’ve read) tend towards an emphasis on descriptive writing, a focus on the characters and their thoughts/feelings and identity/relationships. There a number of common themes: AI, VR, aliens, etc. The reprints, on the other hand, make it feel like someone has spliced in a third of an issue of a Gardner Dozois edited Asimov’s Science Fiction. These reprints, whose prose and narratives are more lucid and accessible, also tend to upstage the originals.
As to this specific issue, it is worth catching for the Naomi Kritzer story and the reprints (if you haven’t read them in Asimov’s Science Fiction already).

ISFDB link
Galactic Central link

Other reviews:
Sam Tomaino, SFRevu
Various, Goodreads
Clancy Weeks, Tangent Online

Fiction:
Assassins ● short story by Jack Skillingstead and Burt Courtier ♥
Prosthetic Daughter ● short story by Nin Harris ♥
How Bees Fly ● novelette by Simone Heller ♥♥♥+
Rain Ship ● novelette by Chi Hu (translated by Andy Dudak) ♥♥♥+
Dragon’s Deep ● reprint novelette by Cecelia Holland ♥♥♥
The Dragonslayer of Merebarton ● reprint novelette by Tom Holt [as by K. J. Parker] ♥♥♥

Non-fiction:
Fallout ● cover by Benedick T. Bana
Frodo Is Dead: Worldbuilding and The Science of Magic ● essay by Christopher Mahon
Organic Tech and Healing Clay: A Conversation with Nnedi Okorafor ● by Chris Urie
Another Word: A Doom of One’s Own ● essay by Genevieve Valentine
Editor’s Desk: The Next Chapter Begins ● editorial by Neil Clarke
Fallout (Cover Art) ● essay

Editor-in-Chief, Neil Clarke; Editor, Sean Wallace; Reprint Editor, Gardner Dozois

Assassins by Jack Skillingstead and Burt Courtier has a particular type of assassin as its main character. Simone operates in the Labyrinthiad, killing off the public’s favourite VR characters:

Mileva Kosich, sitting on a bench across from the Office of Public Affairs, eye-flicked behind her Experiencer glasses. It was her lunch-break and she just had time to meet her virtual friend, Ellis Ng. Belgrade disappeared, and Mileva was gliding in a sunboat over a crystal blue pond. Ellis approached in his own sunboat, its solar net billowing like a gossamer shell.
Of course, Ellis was legion, and millions of Experiencers considered him a friend, but that didn’t undercut Mileva’s joy at the sight of his approach. Everyone enjoyed their own personal Ellis. He stood up and waved with two fingers extended (his customary greeting), making the boat rock. A black-winged personal flying suit swept down out of the empty sky. Mileva caught her breath. Simone! The assassin fired a projectile and Ellis Ng’s sunboat exploded in a plume of flesh and fiberglass. Shocked, Mileva fumbled her glasses off. She sat on the bench, too upset to move. p. 2-3

Simone’s activities subsequently bring her problems in the real world.
This is a short and unconvincing piece: I didn’t buy her motivation or (spoiler) the resulting level of violence in the real world.
Prosthetic Daughter by Nin Harris is set in a Chinese-heritage future where a time-travelling admiral has had her memory nodes robbed by a childhood friend/colleague leaving her a partial amnesiac.
The idea that the narrator is an admiral is completely unconvincing (in fact, given there are almost a dozen mentions of food and/or drink in as many pages, she comes over more like a gastronome), the time travel aspects are notional at best, and there is little or no story, just endless chatter and info-dumps.

After a disappointing start to the fiction in this issue, matters improve. How Bees Fly by Simone Heller sounds like a fantasy for the first few lines but quickly reveals itself as SF:

This is how you defend yourself against the demons of old, should they cross your path: You grind down their bones with a millstone and burn them; the ash you bury under a Blackwillow tree and salt the whole field where you happened to find them. You seal off their artifacts and other possessions behind a grade-3 lock, and you melt the key in the fire of your community’s smithy. Their scriptures, should you really get your hands on them, you throw onto a cart driven by a sacred gearbeast and program it to walk into one of the acid lakes.
This is how it is sung. This is how it is done. This is how it is safe. In my lifetime we only found one demon in our community, and it turned out to be the skeleton of a wild dog. But there were stories, reaching us via grease merchants and traveling codemongers, about outposts that had been poisoned by the dreadful emanations of a sole demon’s finger bone, about how the Society of Illiterate Enlightenment hunted down a single line of equations threatening to undermine the foundations of life. p. 22

The story concerns a female midwife and beekeeper for a rural settlement encountering two demons just as a storm is brewing. She manages to survive her unexpected meeting with them (it soon becomes apparent that the ‘demons,’ contrary to folklore, are harmless) but she returns to her village and raises the alarm nonetheless.
As she has been in contact with the demons she is temporarily expelled from the village and tries to survive the storm that is now in progress by going to the Society’s citadel. She fails to reach it, but is rescued by the male demon and is taken to the outbuilding where he and his pregnant partner are sheltering.
The rest of the story (spoiler) reveals the ‘demons’ to be humans, and the midwife a member of a non-human egg-bearing species (whether alien or far-future Earth is not clarified). This is an interesting and absorbing piece, and hopefully the first of a series. I’d like to know more.
By the by, I couldn’t find any other stories by this writer on ISFDB, and suspected it might be her debut—which was confirmed by editor Neil Clarke’s online comments. The endnotes state that Heller is a literary translator and ‘she lends her voice to writers in the sff field by day.’ According to her own website¹ this is English to German translation; let’s hope she translates some short German SF into English, as well as providing us with more of her own work.
Rain Ship by Chi Hu tells the story of Jin, a female Ruderan mercenary who is providing security for an archaeological team investigating an ancient human site on a planet called Hill Four. The Ruderans are a far future rodent species that exist long after humanity has died out.
After a family funeral, Jin returns to her job on Hill Four just before the site is raided by pirates, and raises the alarm when she is in town and realises something is amiss. When the attack begins she makes her way to her comrades at the main site. Shortly after this she goes through a portal and ends up alongside the lead archaeologist in the big find they have made: a human Rainship, a huge vessel with multiple ecological habitats.

The outer shell of the spacecraft was built around this floating space. The ancient humans had built cabins and facilities on the inner surface of this shell, simple yet solid, which remained intact after one hundred million years. A walkway spiraled up the shell, connecting the cabins. Bridges and tunnels extending from this walkway—and various cabins—connecting to the floating, crystalline space.
Which was a great tower of ecological habitats.
For some reason my eye was drawn to one facet of this dazzling jewel: a small path winding through thick grass, only the flagstones of the trailhead visible, ancient stones cracked and pierced by tenacious green growth.
Ecological spaces filled almost the entire spacecraft, divided by panels of polarized light into self-sustaining ecosystems. Thick clouds filled the upper spaces. Mists curled and rose on grasslands, on leaves of grass twice my height. Fine rains descended on gardens, inaudible.
The ship was silent, but I saw raindrops gleaming on leaves.
Big, titanic, colossal, beyond description—I quickly spent my ammo, adjective-wise. I just stood there, looking up in awe. The giants that had built this ship, this great hall, had vanished a hundred million years ago. But rain fell continuously down this great pillar of ecologies.
Now we Ruderans were here, trespassing, feeling small and insignificant, and compelled to silence. p. 49

The rest of the fight against the Pirates plays out on the Rainship, and is complicated by the arrival of Dar, a notorious member of a ‘Darwinian’ sect of the Ruderan. He is reputed to have killed all the parents in his cult as well as the rest of his litter. His connection with the head archaeologist is slowly revealed, and this also advances Jin’s own backstory which involved her killing a litter of her mother’s in accordance with social custom (one wonders if Ruderan eugenics are a sly dig at China’s one child policy). The story proceeds to a satisfactory conclusion, and adds a transcendent epilogue.
This piece has a number of strengths. Apart from being quite a good adventure tale, the Ruderan breeding customs make it more interesting, as do the descriptions of the remnants of a long vanished humanity. On the other hand, I think it could have done without the draggy first few pages at the funeral. There are also a couple of dozen footnotes at the end which would have been better absorbed into the main story.

There are a couple of reprints, as usual, and this time they are both dragon fantasies.
Dragon’s Deep by Cecelia Holland (The Dragon Book, ed. Jack Dann, Gardner Dozois, 2009) starts off in a fishing village that is visited by the Duke and his men. They take the villagers’ fish for extra taxes, and rape some of the woman.
Perla, a young woman who hides in the woods during the raid, subsequently joins her brother and some of the other men on a perilous fishing voyage to the north. Just as they are hauling in a huge catch a whirlpool appears and out of it comes a huge dragon. After tying herself to the dragon to avoid drowning she ends up being taken underwater to an inland cove, where she is held prisoner.
Over the following months she tells the dragon stories so he won’t eat her. Eventually, she escapes and makes her way back to her village, where she finds that life has become much harsher than before. Then she hears that neighbouring settlements are being destroyed in the night, and realises the dragon is looking for her….
The end was not one which I was expecting but, after reflecting on the realities of the life Perla was living in the village, it is perhaps apt.
This is a vividly told story with a strong first half.
The Dragonslayer of Merebarton by K. J. Parker (Fearsome Journeys, ed. Jonathan Strahan, 2013) is narrated by the knight of a small village who tells of a dragon that has started attacking the outlying areas. We are told about both the preparations to deal with it and the characters involved, and this is achieved in an informal and engaging manner:

But a knight in real terms isn’t a single man, he’s the nucleus of a unit, the heart of a society; the lance in war, the village in peace, he stands for them, in front of them when there’s danger, behind them when times are hard, not so much an individual, more of a collective noun. That’s understood, surely; so that, in all those old tales of gallantry and errantry, when the poet sings of the knight wandering in a dark wood and encountering the evil to be fought, the wrong to be put right, “knight” in that context is just shorthand for a knight and his squire and his armor-bearer and his three men-at-arms and the boy who leads the spare horses. The others aren’t mentioned by name, they’re subsumed in him, he gets the glory or the blame but everyone knows, if they stop to think about it, that the rest of them were there too; or who lugged around the spare lances, to replace the ones that got broken? And who got the poor bugger in and out of his full plate harness every morning and evening? There are some straps and buckles you just can’t reach on your own, unless you happen to have three hands on the ends of unnaturally long arms. Without the people around me, I’d be completely worthless. It’s understood. Well, isn’t it? p. 113

The ending (spoiler), while noteworthy for realistically describing what happens (two of his friends are killed when they engage it, but the second manages to get the dragon to impale itself on a lance before he is crushed to death), felt slightly anti-climactic.

I liked Fallout, the cover by Benedick T. Bana, more than recent efforts (apart from the fact I like robot covers it is a brighter work).
Frodo Is Dead: Worldbuilding and The Science of Magic by Christopher Mahon is a heavyweight essay (Nietzsche is name checked more than a few times) which argues that the more rule-based fantasy worlds are, the more they end up becoming like our world (as you get similar developmental processes, scientific investigation, the Enlightenment, etc.). Or I think that is what it was about: I read it just before going to sleep, and in any event it may be over my head.
Organic Tech and Healing Clay: A Conversation with Nnedi Okorafor by Chris Urie is an interesting interview about a writer I’ve not yet read and knew nothing about.
Another Word: A Doom of One’s Own by Genevieve Valentine is a short essay that mostly discusses a post-apocalypse novel called Only Lovers Left Alive by Dave Wallis, and the Batman films, but is probably about the gloom produced for some people by the US election results.
Editor’s Desk: The Next Chapter Begins by Neil Clarke is about him giving up his day job as an IT professional and becoming a full-time editor.

Not a bad issue: two interesting original pieces and a couple of solid fantasy reprints.

This magazine is available at Amazon UK, Amazon USA, Weightless Books, Magzter (I got mine as part of the Gold subscription) and elsewhere.

1. Simone Heller’s website.

Editor-in-Chief, Neil Clarke; Editor, Sean Wallace; Reprint Editor, Gardner Dozois

Galactic Central link
ISFDB link

Fiction:
The Ghost Ship Anastasia • novelette by Rich Larson ♥♥
A Series of Steaks • novelette by Vina Jie-Min Prasad ♥♥♥+
Justice Systems in Quantum Parallel Probabilities • short story by Lettie Prell ♥♥
Interchange • novelette by Gary Kloster ♥♥♥
Milla • short story by Lorenzo Crescentini and Emanuela Valentini (translated by Rich Larson) ♥♥
Events Preceding the Helvetican Renaissance • reprint novelette by John Kessel ♥♥♥+
The Shipmaker • reprint short story by Aliette de Bodard ♥♥♥

Non-fiction:
Waste Pickers • cover by Gabriel Björk Stiernström
The Evolved Brain • essay by Benjamin C. Kinney
Another Word: Dystopias are not enough • essay by Kelly Robson
Editor’s Desk: Stomp Stomp Stomp • essay by Neil Clarke
A Collective Pseudonym and an Expanding Universe: A Conversation with James S.A. Corey • interview of Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck • interview by Chris Urie

This issue’s fiction leads off with The Ghost Ship Anastasia by Rich Larson. This is about a crew that are sent to a bioship that has ceased communicating with the mining company that owns it. When the team get aboard they find that the freethinker—AI—on board has passed the Turing threshold and has gone crazy. During this process it has absorbed all but one of the crew members into its biomass.
Another plot device (the one that supplies a ticking clock) is that Silas, one of the investigating crew, has had his sister die in a micrometeorite accident while they were enroute to the bioship. He still has her ‘personality code’ but it will decay as long as it is held in the ship’s memory. This latter aspect never really convinces—it sounds analogous to a Microsoft Word document becoming a bit tattered if you leave it on a USB stick for too long—but there are some visceral Alien-ish thrills to be had elsewhere.

A Series of Steaks by Vina Jie-Min Prasad is about a woman called Helena who is a meat forger in a future China. She uses printing technology to produce bootleg meat for various establishments while she tries to gather enough money to change name and move (there is an initially unspecified incident in her past that puts her at risk of prosecution).
One day she gets an order for two hundred T-bone steaks from an anonymous source, with the threat that she’ll be exposed to the authorities if she doesn’t provide them. Helena fears she won’t be able to produce something so technically demanding in such a short time and advertises for help. At this point Lily walks into her life and the rest of the story is an effervescent and fun buddy movie.

Helena wakes up to Lily humming a cheerful tune and a mostly complete T-bone model rotating on her screen. She blinks a few times, but no—it’s still there. Lily’s effortlessly linking the rest of the meat, fat and gristle to the side of the bone, deforming the muscle fibers to account for the bone’s presence.
“What did you do,” Helena blurts out.
Lily turns around to face her, fiddling with her bracelet. “Uh, did I do it wrong?”
“Rotate it a bit, let me see the top view. How did you do it?”
“It’s a little like the human vertebral column, isn’t it? There’s plenty of references for that.” She taps the screen twice, switching focus to an image of a human cross-section. “See how it attaches here and here? I just used that as a reference, and boom.”
Ugh, Helena thinks to herself. She’s been out of university for way too long if she’s forgetting basic homology.
“Wait, is it correct? Did I mess up?”
“No, no,” Helena says. “This is really good. Better than . . . well, better than I did, anyway.”
“Awesome! Can I get a raise?”
“You can get yourself a sesame pancake,” Helena says. “My treat.” p. 28

Prasad doesn’t appear to have written any other SF (there are two non-genre publications listed in the author note at the end)¹ but if she is going to contribute further stories of this calibre she will be a promising find: this is a very entertaining piece and possibly one for the ‘Best of the Year’ anthologies.

Justice Systems in Quantum Parallel Probabilities by Lettie Prell isn’t really fantasy and SF, or have much of a story for that matter: I suppose you could call it a meditation or thought experiment. A man in a cell listens to one of the other inmates talking to himself about different types of justice. He falls into a doze and dreams:

There is a justice system with no police. People turn themselves in to prosecutors voluntarily, or are persuaded to do so by others. The prosecutors hear the confessions. One prosecutor is turning someone away, saying, “We cannot help you. While your situation is unfortunate, you have committed no crime.”
The man is unhappy. “But how am I to live like this? How am I to restore the balance of things?”
“That is not my concern,” the prosecutor replies.
Cole watches as the man leaves the courthouse and goes down the street to a small shop providing justice-type services for people the prosecutors turn away. Cole peers over the man’s shoulder and reads the menu of sanctions and punishments. Some of the choices are more severe than those meted out by the real justice system. The man purchases two days in jail. The handcuffs they use to lead him away cost extra. p. 41/42

Interchange by Gary Kloster gets off to a bit of a clunky and unconvincing start. The main character is Lucy, who is one year on from killing her husband (he attacked with a knife after cheating with her sister) but has a conjugal machine that looks like him. Further stretching credulity is Lucy’s job as a medic to a work crew that is constructing a highway interchange—in a time limbo. The plan is to pop out of existence and then reappear six months later—a microsecond in real time—with the completed project.
After all this has been set in motion the time limbo machinery malfunctions and, after some discussion, it appears they may have been in the far future for a few seconds: Lucy warns the camp boss that there is a possibility that airborne infections or other agents may have contaminated their environment.
Sure enough, one of the workers is later bitten by a snake. This turns out to be a garter snake, but one with nano-technology fibre pathways throughout its body. Even though it has been chopped in half, both parts regenerate and escape. These nanos also start growing in the man that is bitten…. The rest of the story continues apace.
Although the various elements don’t gel particularly well at the beginning, once the infection occurs it becomes an increasingly compelling and gripping read and proceeds to a transformative ending. In short, average to start with but good to very good by the end. I look forward to seeing more of this writer’s work.

Milla by Lorenzo Crescentini and Emanuela Valentini (translated by Rich Larson) is a story about a surveyor on an idyllic alien planet who starts hearing a voice from his implant. As he records the various flora and fauna on the planet he concludes the voice is an alien AI, but when she starts reading poetry he realises something else has happened.
This is slow to start, and the ending doesn’t entirely convince. It has a nice last paragraph though.

Events Preceding the Helvetican Renaissance by John Kessel (The New Space Opera 2, edited by Gardner Dozois & Jonathan Strahan, 2009) is an adventure about a warrior priest who has stolen a set of religious plays, the only set in existence, from Imperial City. As he makes his escape to the space port, the Gods speak to him, giving him instructions.
Later, when his spaceship is attacked, he takes refuge in the engine bay of his ship and unfolds a female soldier called Nahid from a nine-dimensional pouch concealed in his body. They manage to fight their way out and get down to his home planet in an escape pod. A perilous journey to the safety of his order’s monastery follows.
This is a superior piece that is inventive and fast-paced and one that I would have rated higher if it wasn’t for a couple of loose ends (the metal man under the mountain, the voices of the gods). I wondered if this was actually a nod to the archetypal pulp story, which would sometimes have unresolved plot-elements to facilitate a number of sequels.

The Shipmaker by Aliette de Bodard (Interzone #231, September 2010) is one of her ‘Universe of Xuya’ stories that tells of a starship architect called Dac Kien building a new vessel. It is a stylishly told tale based on Viet culture:

And still she worked—walls turned into mirrors, flowers were carved into the passageways, softening those hard angles and lines she couldn’t disguise. She opened up a fountain—all light projections, of course, there could be no real water aboard—let the recreated sound of a stream fill the structure. Inside the heartroom, the four tangled humors became three, then one; then she brought in other lines until the tangle twisted back upon itself, forming a complicated knot pattern that allowed strands of all five humors to flow around the room. Water, wood, fire, earth, metal, all circling the ship’s core, a stabilizing influence for the Mind, when it came to anchor itself there. p. 122

The problems start when the birth mother of the starship Mind arrives early as a premature birth may be on the cards. The Mind is an organometallic organism and cannot survive outside a ship. The pregnancy of birthmother contrasts with Dac Kien’s childless relationship and, while she is dealing with the emotional repercussions of this, she has to accelerate the building of the starship to ensure it is completed before the Mind is born.

The non-fiction in Clarkesworld has so far struck me as a little on the lacklustre side and this issue is no different. It comprises of: a science essay, The Evolved Brain by Benjamin C. Kinney; A Collective Pseudonym and an Expanding Universe: A Conversation with James S.A. Corey, a short interview with Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck by Chris Urie; Another Word: Dystopias are not enough, an essay by Kelly Robson which makes a pitch for less cynicism and more positive SF stories in response to the current political situation (good luck with that); and, finally, Editor’s Desk: Stomp Stomp Stomp, a short editorial by Neil Clarke about his work/home situation getting on top of him and the refuge of SF escapism.
Waste Pickers, the cover by Gabriel Björk Stiernström is rather dark, I thought, and dull with it.

Overall, this is a pretty good issue. The Prasad and Kessel and a large chunk of the Kloster story are particularly good, and there is nothing that is bad.

This magazine is available at Amazon UK, Amazon USA, Weightless Books, Magzter (I got mine as part of the Gold subscription) and elsewhere.

1. Prasad’s work has appeared in Queer Southeast Asia and HEAT: A Southeast Asian Urban Anthology. The story from the first publication, The Spy Who Loved Wanton Mee, is available online via her website.

Galactic Central link
ISFDB link

Other Reviews:
Greg Hullender and Eric Wong, Rocket Stack Rank
Robert L. Turner III, Tangent Online
Sam Tomaino, SF Revu
Various, Goodreads

Fiction:
Left Behind • short story by Cat Rambo ♥
The Universal Museum of Sagacity • novelette by Robert Reed ♥♥♥
Breathe • short story by Cassandra Khaw ♥♥
Jonas and the Fox • novelette by Rich Larson ♥♥♥
Away from Home • novelette by Luo Longxiang [translated by Nick Stember] ♥♥
Tough Times All Over • reprint novelette by Joe Abercrombie ♥♥♥
A Heap of Broken Images • reprint short story by Sunny Moraine ♥

Non-fiction:
Ananiel, Angel of Storms • by Peter Mohrbacher
Destination: Venus • essay by Andrw Liptak
Transcendent Transformation: A Conversation with James Gunn • by Chris Urie
Another Word: Strange Stars • essay by Jason Heller
Editor’s Desk: Stress Relief • by Neil Clarke

I picked up this particular issue because there were three names I recognised: Cat Rambo, Robert Reed and Rich Larson.

Left Behind by Cat Rambo is the first of the three. It is about an elderly woman called Cianna Jones—one of the remaining ‘natural’ humans in the world who remain unmodified—being prepared to become the digital ‘brain’ of a spaceship. Her children have elected for this course of action as she has been declared incapable of autonomy.
The narrator, Shi, enters the virtual world that has been created for Jones to inhabit during the voyage. While Shi is in Jones’s virtual world she notices it is impressively detailed but also gets the impression that something is not quite right. The rest of the story charts Shi’s second and third visits during which she starts a dialogue with Jones and discovers that she is reluctant, in fact openly hostile, about the plan that has been suggested by her children
There are other aspects to this story as well. Shi’s generation are into body modification and gender fluidity, and Shi has decided to present as an eleven year old girl. There is also material about Shi’s job insecurity worries.
These different parts don’t gel and I found the story both unconvincing and dull. In particular, the virtual reality and gender fluidity aspects of the story seem very tired, and I found it hard to believe this is written by the same writer that gave us Red in Tooth and Cog in the March/April F&SF.

The Universal Museum of Sagacity by Robert Reed is a novelette that starts in a low-key manner with its narrator telling of a boyhood family mystery concerning an uncle who was briefly married to a woman called Maddy. After the couple had divorced and the uncle had remarried Maddy still turned up every year for Xmas.
The central section describes the narrator’s adult life as an accountant for a huge company called Pinpoint (which has absorbed Google and Apple), and the extended-life and AI-rich world he lives in. (One of the side details is that the company is so rich it has its own private mountain for its employees where, after the gentle slopes at the base, it becomes increasingly difficult the higher up you go.)
Finally, the story becomes a First Contact story that involves a massive amount of video feed from countless alien civilizations—and the company AIs have found Maddy in those video feeds….

One long wall dissolved into a street scene. Except the “street” looked more like black satin carpeting than a roadway, and nothing about the native architecture was human. Structures were more grown than built, full irregular blobs and jumbled angles that made at least one man uneasy. A dwarf red star stood fixed to a sky thick with pink dust and glittering machines, and the carpeted street was jammed with aliens. Not one species or ten species, but countless shapes marching and dancing while producing all manner of purposeful noise. And deep inside that mayhem stood one very familiar figure: A woman presumed dead but now leaning against what resembled an upright badger. I spotted her hair, dark as always but longer. Age had done nothing to the pretty face. And with all of the surprises raining down, I was a little startled to find the lady acting chummy with an animal. Maddy never struck me as the sort to keep pets.

Even though the ending is a little weak—this involves the efforts to find out where Maddy is and/or contact her—it is an interesting story whose narrative has the same exponential trajectory as the slopes of Pinpoint’s private mountain.

Breathe by Cassandra Khaw is about a woman deep in an alien sea observing algae growing with a view to estimating when it will be ready for harvest. Most of the story is a description of her claustrophobic discomfort, and the paragraphs are regularly punctuated with ‘Breathe,’and you do rather wonder why a borderline claustrophobic and unstable personality would be put into a situation like this. Anyway, there is also some back and forth conversation with her lover on a parent ship/submarine (spoiler) before it is attacked by larger creatures. She saves the day by causing a fire with her flare gun, although how this is caused underwater is not explained.
This is a good example of a SF story that concentrates on its descriptive writing, style, characters and their state of mind, relationships, etc., with the story very much taking a back seat.

Jonas and the Fox by Rich Larson is set in on a colony planet that has recently undergone a revolution. The husband and wife who feature in the story have two boys who are the narrators. One of them, Damjan, is the host to his uncle’s personality. Damjan was brain dead after falling from a Godtree; his uncle Fox was involved in the revolution but fell from grace in a power struggle and needed somewhere to hide.
The story alternates between the two boys’ point of view after the older brother, Jonas, shows Damjan/Fox a one-seat spaceship hidden in a disused Granary. Fox sees the ship as a way off the planet.
There is nothing particularly original here but this is an engaging story that is developed competently.

Away from Home by Luo Longxiang tells of the planetship Phaeton, and focusses on two characters in particular, Weihan and Han Dan. Shortly after they meet the Phaeton suffers a meteor shower and they have to take shelter before abandoning it amongst much loss of life.

A sudden explosion shook the bunker, with a roar that seemed to crack the heavens and split the earth. Moments later, urgent knocking could be heard outside the blast doors. Weihan opened the doors, coming face to face with Police Chief Zhao. His two hairy legs sticking out from under his nightshirt, he waved a still holstered pistol in Zheng’s face, shouting, “You have to get to the emergency escape pods! The meteor shower broke the sun!”
Every planetship had its own massive, fusion-powered artificial sun that orbited in a fixed path, providing a never-ending stream of light and heat. Without its sun, a planetship would freeze solid.

Weihan ends up a refugee on another planetship in the fleet, and returns to his parent’s home along with Han Dan. Weihan is reconciled with his father and goes to flight academy. Han Dan is not who she seems to be.
There is a little more story to this but it is really more of a travelogue describing the fleet of planetships that the story is set on and, with one wonder following another, is slightly reminiscent of the Jules Verne story I recently read in the first issue of Amazing Stories. This is all readable enough stuff, albeit very unsophisticated—perhaps readers will get something from the modern Chinese take. With that in mind, the rating is a generous one.

Tough Times All Over by Joe Abercrombie (Rogues, ed. George R. R. Martin & Gardner Dozois, 2014) is about a courier in a disreputable city of thieves and cutthroats who is in the process of delivering a special package when she is robbed. The thief himself is in turn relieved of the package and so it goes until the end of the story, a daisy chain of similar events. However, (spoiler) as with most daisy chains you end up back where you started….
There is no obvious fantasy content in this bar its setting and, if ultimately pointless, it is an light hearted and entertaining enough tale.

A Heap of Broken Images by Sunny Moraine (We See a Different Frontier: A Postcolonial Speculative Fiction Anthology, edited by Djibril al-Ayad & Fábio Fernandes, 2013) tells of an alien guide conducting human visitors around genocide sites. The killings were by Earth colonists on the indigenous alien population. There isn’t any real story or narrative arc here, just endless questions and agonising by the guide. See my final comments about the Khaw story above.

The non-fiction this issue includes a strong cover, Ananiel, Angel of Storms, by Peter Mohrbacher. Destination: Venus by Andrew Liptak is an article about the reality of Venus and how it has (or has not) been correspondingly portrayed in fiction. Transcendent Transformation: A Conversation with James Gunn by Chris Urie is less a conversation than a short plug for Gunn’s latest novel Transcendental, the second in a trilogy. Another Word: Strange Stars by Jason Heller is another short, almost inconsequential, piece about the intersection between SF and rock music. It doesn’t do much more than mention a few examples. Editor’s Desk: Stress Relief by Neil Clarke closes out this issue giving some of the magazine’s recent story nominations and wins in various awards.

In conclusion, another mixed bag. I think I am beginning to notice common characteristics in some of the fiction that Clarkesworld publishes: perhaps more on this next time.

This magazine is available at Amazon UK, Amazon USA, Weightless Books and elsewhere.

Other Reviews:
Gardner Dozois, Locus Online
Greg Hullender and Eric Wong, Rocket Stack Rank
Kevin P. Hallett, Tangent Online
Sam Tomaino, SF Revu
Mark Watson, Best SF
Various, Goodreads

Fiction:
The Algorithms of Value • short story by Robert Reed ♥
The Abduction of Europa • short story by E. Catherine Tobler ♥♥
Extraction Request • novelette by Rich Larson ♥♥♥+
Everybody Loves Charles • novella by Bao Shu (translated by Ken Liu)
The True Vintage of Erzuine Thale • reprint novelette by Robert Silverberg ♥♥♥
Old Paint • reprint novelette by Megan Lindholm ♥♥♥+

Non-fiction:
Cover • by Julie Dillon
Our Future is Artificial • science essay by Sofia Siren
Painterly Cyborgs and Distant Horizons: A Conversation with Julie Dillon • artist interview by Chris Urie
Another Word: Let’s Write a Story Together, MacBook • science essay by Ken Liu
Editor’s Desk: The 2015 Reader’s Poll and Contest • by Neil Clarke

Clarkesworld has been going for about a decade now and I’ve been peripherally aware of it for several years, mostly due to its stories appearing regularly in the ‘Best of the Year’ anthologies. This is the first issue I’ve read.
Before I get to the fiction, a quick recap for anyone who, like me, has been on a different planet for the last decade. Clarkesworld began as an online magazine in late 2006; since then it has published monthly and not only makes its fiction and non-fiction available on its website for free but also produces ebook and print editions and compiles yearly anthologies of its stories.¹ It has also won a handful of Hugos for best semi-prozine.

This issue starts with The Algorithms of Value by Robert Reed. The central character is Parchment, a old woman who is famous in a world where everyone has a room that can provide all their desires. One day, outside in the streets, she meets a boy called Ink. The story details the development of their relationship as well as a backstory about her and her husband, and their development of the Algorithms of Value:

Safety was the first necessity. Surviving the next moment was paramount. For humans, nourishment and clean water were unimpeachable if rather less urgent rights. There also was the universal right to shelter. By law, every person was guaranteed a home and every home possessed at least one dependable room. Walls had to be ready to project any image, real or fictional. Rooms could sing any song and tell any story, calibrating versions according to the resident’s desires. And of course every sentient voice had to be able to speak to everyone else, whenever they wished and without cost. Of course, of course.

Unfortunately, this doesn’t really go anywhere.

The Abduction of Europa by E. Catherine Tobler is a better effort. Two men on Europa, Bolaji and Kotto, are returning from a mission to rescue another team member. However, not only is he lost but so are their two ice-cats, leaving them on foot with some considerable distance to travel to get back to base. On their journey home one of the men starts changing into the native alien life form. This narrative is broken up by passages detailing the transformation that the lost man, Marius, has already undergone.

Extraction Request by Rich Larson is the best story in the issue. This is a pretty grim and visceral account of a combat team who are shot down on an alien planet. Their situation deteriorates further when their sentry cyclops detects an intruder:

“Prentiss, there’s a bogey heading towards you,” he says. “Might be mechanical. Get eyes on it.”
Jan’s reply crackles. “Hard to miss,” he says. “It’s fucking glowing.”
“And what is it?” Elliot says. “You armed?”
Jan’s reply does not come by channel, but his howl punctures the still night air. Elliot is knocked back as Noam barrows past him, unslinging her gnasher and snapping the safety off. Snell’s fast behind, and then the others, and then Elliot finds himself rearguard. He’s still fumbling for his weapon when he rounds the back of the downed [ship].
His eyes slip-slide over the scene, trying to make sense of the nightmarish mass of bioluminescence and spiky bone that’s enveloped Jan almost entirely. His night vision picks out a trailing arm, a hip, a boot exposed. The creature is writhing tight around Jan’s body, spars of bone rasping against each other, and the glowing flesh of it is moving, slithering. The screams from inside are muffled.

This develops into a gripping account of their struggle to survive, which is not improved by the fact that their commander, Elliot, is a heroin addict. Even if you don’t buy the issue it is worth a trip to the website to catch this one.

Next up is a novella by Bao Shu, Everybody Loves Charles (Science Fiction World, September 2014), which has been translated by Ken Liu. I believe that the magazine currently has translated fiction in every issue (although there doesn’t seem to be any in #113). This is an admirable aim as foreign SF, with its different cultural and social viewpoints, can only enrich the field. It is a pity therefore that this offering is of such poor quality.
The story itself is about Charles Mann, who is an aviator, writer and livecasting star: his life is transmitted via a biological implant to the world twenty-four hours a day with one or two small exceptions, as he explains to a reluctant date while they are having dinner:

Charles chuckled. “I always pause the cast when I’m sitting on the toilet. Nobody wants to deal with the smell. Trust me.”

Thanks for sharing.
The story starts with him competing in a Pacific sub-orbital race and subsequently being arrested by the Japanese police. After his lawyer arranges for him to be released without charge, he pressures the female arresting officer into having dinner with him. Their relationship develops and she eventually convinces him to stop livecasting when they are together. Cue another entry by his lawyer and the start of a ludicrous megalomaniac conspiracy plot about (spoiler) the biological livecasting implants giving the evil corporations physical control of the users.
There is also another narrative strand which gives us the point of view of one of the livecasting ‘viewers’. Naoto has an implant that enables him to spend nearly all his time plugged into Charles’s livecast, except when he is sleeping, working or being bothered by his single female neighbour Takumi-kun, who thinks he should get out more. When Charles stops constantly livecasting, Naoto and Takumi-kun start to spend more time together and she asks him about the livecasting technology:

“I asked you how it felt to tune into a livecast.”
“An interesting question.” Naoto pondered his answer. “At first, you go through a period of adjustment—that happens no matter whose livecast you tune into. The beginning is a bit frustrating: the colors and sounds all feel wrong somehow, as though you’re watching some 2-d film from the twentieth century. It’s just odd. Although all human beings share similar biological sensory organs, there are subtle differences in the neural wiring, and so you have to put in an effort to interpret the signals being projected into your brain, and all subtleties are at first lost. For several days you’ll feel as though you’re perceiving everything through a film, and nothing feels immediate or real. But then, one day, you’ll have a breakthrough and everything will feel just like your own senses.”

There are other examples of this dull info-dump material throughout the story. I could go on and talk about the unbelievable characters and dialogue, the clunky prose, the fact it is far too long, etc., etc., but I’ve probably said enough.

The magazine also has a couple of reprints every issue and editor Neil Clarke has subcontracted this job to Gardner Dozois, previously the long-time editor of Asimov’s Science Fiction. The first of his two choices this issue is The True Vintage of Erzuine Thale by Robert Silverberg (Songs of the Dying Earth: Stories in Honour of Jack Vance, edited by George R. R. Martin & Gardner Dozois, 2009). The story is about a jaded sorceror-poet at the end of time who spends most of his time drinking wine and writing poetry to keep the ennui at bay. The bulk of the narrative is about three ne’er do wells that come to his house to rob him. The story is rather slight but the enjoyment in this one is in the manner of its telling:

He set out a pair of steep transparent goblets rimmed with purple gold, murmured the word to the wine-flask that unsealed its stopper, and held it aloft to pour. As the wine descended into the goblet it passed through a glorious spectrum of transformation, now a wild scarlet, now deep crimson, now carmine, mauve, heliotrope shot through with lines of topaz, and, as it settled to its final hue, a magnificent coppery gold. “Come,” said Puillayne, and led his friend to the viewing-platform overlooking the bay.

The other reprint, Old Paint by Megan Lindholm, first appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, July 2012, and was subsequently reprinted in both Dozois’ and David G. Hartwell’s ‘Best of the Year’ collections. I question the wisdom of reprinting it here as it is probably pretty well known, but I suspect the philosophy that pertains here is a millennial ‘if it isn’t on the internet it doesn’t exist’.
The story itself is a pretty good one about a single mother, her son and her daughter. Narrated by the latter, it tells of the mother inheriting a number of things after her grandfather’s death including a semi-autonomous car:

“How smart is this car?” Ben demanded.
“Smart enough,” she said. “He can take himself to a fueling station. Knows when his tires are low on air, and can schedule his own oil change. He used to talk to the dealership; I wonder if it’s even in business still. He’s second generation simulated intelligence. Sure fooled me, most of the time. He has a lot of personality customization in his software. My grandpa put in a bunch of educational stuff, too. He can speak French. He used to drill me on my vocabulary on the way to school. And he knew all my favorite radio stations.” She shook her head. “Back then, people wanted their cars to be their friends. He sure was mine.”
“That’s whack,” Ben said solemnly.
“No, it was great. I loved it. I loved him.”
“Love you too, Suzanne,” the car said. His voice was a rich baritone.
“You should sell this thing, Mom,” Ben advised her wisely.
“Maybe I should,” Mom said, but the way she said it, I knew that we had a car now.

It tells of the family’s subsequent relationship with the car, and climaxes with the events that occur when all fully automated cars on the road are infected with a virus. An affecting story, particularly so for those with a soft spot for cars and partially-sentient AI.

As to the non-fiction, one thing I will say is that the covers for Clarkesworld are of a high standard, and that applies to both the artwork and the design.² The latter is uncluttered and they have stuck with the same clean layout since the magazine was launched.
As for the columns: Our Future is Artificial by Sofia Siren is an article about three recent AI projects; Another Word: Let’s Write a Story Together, MacBook by Ken Liu is about computer programs writing novels; Editor’s Desk: The 2015 Reader’s Poll and Contest by Neil Clark uses the editor’s space for a list of fiction for the annual readers’ poll, as well as reproducing last year’s covers; finally, there is an interview with the cover artist Julie Dillon.

A very mixed bag, but it is worth catching the Rich Larson and Megan Lindholm stories.

1. The contents of each issue are available on its website for free as webpages and podcasts, but you can also get print and eBook editions (epub, mobi and, from May 2016, PDF). The prices for the eBook are variable, so shop around (an Amazon.co.uk subscription is £2.99 per month, whereas a 12 issue subscription through Weightless Books is $35.88, £2.30 per issue based on an exchange rate of £1=$1.30). The print edition on Amazon.co.uk is just under five quid currently.
2. Some of the previous covers are just wonderful. My favourite is probably this one by Matt Dixon, one of a few he has done on a robot theme:
   You can find all of this magazine’s covers at the Clarkesworld cover gallery.
   Matt Dixon’s website is here.