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.
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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. ●
