There’s always a bit of lag in genre discussion—at least on the short fiction side—such that it feels like people don’t really start digging into the current year’s offerings until summer. But it’s spring, and new things are being released. As always, I’ve taken a look at this month’s Clarkesworld and GigaNotoSaurus.
Clarkesworld
Clarkesworld typically puts its longest stories in the middle, starting and ending with shorter fare. That trend continues in April’s issue, but the balance is shifted a bit toward the front, with two tales over 10,000 words in the first three slots, followed by four stories that decrease in length all the way to the borderline-flash finale.
It opens with Macaroni Art in the Age of Filtration by Ryan Cole, who has been developing a bit of a niche writing short stories featuring underprivileged leads trying to either survive or escape a dying Earth. This one is no different, with a toxic atmosphere pushing humanity deeper and deeper underground and forcing everyone to rely on expensive filtration devices to survive. The lead’s brother can’t afford one and is confined to a small chamber with enough air scrubbers to keep him alive. But she wants more for him, and so she and a friend undertake a dangerous journey nearer the surface to acquire a keepsake valuable enough to trade for a new mask. It’s a well-written tale that’s a solid example in the subgenre, though it may not be the first I recommend of this type, even among Cole’s own work.
Next up is the novelette D0G by Tania Fordwalker. I tend to be underwhelmed by sci-fi dog stories, so I wasn’t expecting much from this, but what I got was the tensest tale in the entire issue. It’s another one set in the scarred remains of Earth, this time because of the canine robots programmed to kill everything in their path and unleashed as weapons of war. The lead has managed to survive on a small island and reprogram her D0G to only attack those deemed threats, but the incursion of a runaway teen in her territory suddenly makes her life much more complicated. It’s a dark tale—perhaps a bit too much for my taste—but it’s harrowing enough to keep me on the edge of my seat and digs wonderfully into the regret over the paths not taken.
By far the longest story in the issue is the novella The Trajectory of Memory is Forward by Rajeev Prasad, which opens in a way that offers both a compelling hook and a red flag for a reader of my particular taste. The hook is the way it plays with memory, where the lead’s people start each day something of a blank slate—albeit with things like muscle-memory aiding specialized abilities—having to be taught anew their people’s lore and told just how they fit into society. On the other hand, there’s an action-packed heist plot and a defector from an enemy society begging the lead’s help in a dangerous quest. There’s a reason that sort of plot shows up in a lot of fiction, but it’s personally just not my style. Unfortunately for me, though perhaps not for other readers, the action plot takes center stage, and much of the novella is taken up with trying to survive encounters with strange and dangerous beings. The forgotten history elements, along with the complicated and contradictory stories the various cultures tell each other, do still play a major role, but they also don’t become the show-stopping element I might’ve hoped for.
The issue returns to short stories with Eternity in Their Hearts by K.J. Khan, told from the perspective of an android serving as both nurse and wife to a dying man. His sister doesn’t take kindly to the lead, who she views as a soulless dispenser of artificial, surface-level comforts that serve to keep him from spending his last days reconnecting with the people who care about him. Their discussion dives into big metaphysical questions about the existence of the soul or the afterlife and whether an android who will not die can adequately comfort human beings facing death. But while these discussions lean heavily into the philosophical, they also inform the ways the characters treat each other in the real world, building to an emotional climax in the inevitable death scene.
Shelter by Nadia W. Aldsen has a plot I should love—a social work specialist at an out-of-the-way spaceport must figure out how to manage the needs of an alien visitor in the face of a significant communication barrier and little documentation—but the main action is constantly interrupted by quotations from the lead’s absurdly exploitative employment contract. A lot of readers seem to enjoy that kind of over-the-top satire of corporate abuses, but I tend to find them more grating than amusing. There’s potential in the main story, and the contractual snippets do end up being plot-relevant, but I’m simply not the right reader for it.
The Forgetting Code by Malena Salazar Maciá sees a man who specializes in memory-removal growing jaded and reclusive after the disappearance of his only daughter. But he keeps at his work, and when he comes across a glimpse of her in another memory, he throws himself into seeking the rest. There are big questions of memory and identity underlying this one, but at only about 2500 words, it’s less a deep dive into the themes and more a melancholy tale of loss and remembrance.
The fiction section closes with Human Studies 401 by Abby Nicole Yee, an even shorter tale bordering on flash fiction, featuring an alien research project to hijack humanity with lab-designed love. I’m generally not the right reader for stories this short, so it may not be a huge surprise, but this one didn’t grab me. There’s a baseline level of writing quality that all Clarkesworld stories have, but it neither does much to invest the reader in the characters—admittedly a difficult task at this length—nor offers something particularly novel.
On the non-fiction side, Neil Clarke’s editorial takes on a hopeful tone, comparing the resistance to science fiction in general literary spaces to past resistance to digital magazines and SFF in translation. I am personally thrilled that Clarkesworld insisted on publishing online and publishing translated stories, as it has led directly to a lot of fantastic reading for me and many others in the genre community. I can only hope that attempts to build bridges outside of genre space will be similarly successful, and Clarke’s account of a recent convention experience provides some cautious optimism on that score.
The science article digs into cryosleep, the two distinct concepts that tend to get conflated in sci-fi explorations of the technology, and the current status of scientific research on the topic. The interviews are with a pair of decorated short fiction authors who are releasing longer works this year, as John Chu and Suzanne Palmer reflect on their careers and share what’s exciting them about their upcoming novels.
GigaNotoSaurus
This month’s longish short fiction in GigaNotoSaurus is the novelette House of Honeyed Soil by Natalie Wollenweber, which sees the last of a line of farmers renowned for their magical honey reluctantly hosting an estranged cousin while try to keep the house’s myriad ghosts sated. While not necessarily breaking new ground, it’s a tense tale concerned with uncovering buried secrets—one of my favorite tropes—with a satisfying ending that easily places it among my most enjoyable reads of the month.