GigaNotoSaurus has announced a two-month hiatus—and my best wishes go to the staff as they navigate whatever it is that is demanding their attention—so in August and September, my monthly read of two magazines will be reduced to just one. So let’s take a look at Clarkesworld.
Clarkesworld
This month’s issue includes seven stories: five short stories and two novelettes, including an extended centerpiece that comes very near novella length. It opens with A Shaky Bridge by Marissa Lingen, featuring an unethical tech company that may have given me pause if it had not come from an author whom I expect to deal carefully with difficult subjects. Indeed, this is no triumphant revolution but a grounded, realistic window into dealing with technology that one depends on but that is simultaneously making unwelcome intrusions into the most personal parts of life. There are times it feels so grounded that there’s not much uncertainty about where the narrative is going, but the story remains a breath of fresh air in a landscape with so many simplified rage tales.
L Chan invariably writes stories that are ambitious and beautiful but that leave me feeling mostly positive but slightly unsure what to hold onto in the end, and And the Planet Loved Him is no exception. It’s a first contact story on a planet presumed to be devoid of life but that sees the lead’s deceased husband mysteriously return as an intercessor for a strange, unknown being. It’s a compelling tale that balances grief, discovery, and the necessity of working around the demands of a powerful, profit-hungry corporation.
Sleeper by R.T. Ester involves an assassination attempt on a mysterious, godlike Envoy who has inexplicably thwarted every previous effort. It’s a tangled story in a strange world that offers the reader plenty to chew on but perhaps tries to do a little too much in a limited word count.
Memories Are Only Valuable if They Can Be Lost by Ai Jiang features a lead on an isolated island that lures people with the promise of work and extracts memory, all while forcing them to pinch pennies to afford the exorbitant rates for an annual return visit to the mainland. There’s an appealing sense of melancholy here, but I tend to like corporate dystopias a bit less than genre fandom writ large, and that’s still the biggest piece here.
Sea of Fertility by Bella Han takes up more than a quarter of the issue’s word count by itself, featuring a lead whose brother is a famous virtual reality musician and game-designer but whose sudden disappearance sees her following a trail of digital breadcrumbs to try to get him back. It takes on the rhythm of a quest narrative—which, like corporate dystopias, is something I tend to like less than the genre community as a whole—with themes that are perhaps predictable but valuable nonetheless.
The issue’s second novelette, Heart of Thunder by Raahem Alvi, hooked me in faster than anything else in the issue. Yes, there’s another powerful corporation extracting everything it can, but there’s also a mentally unstable protagonist imprisoned for a horrific crime which he probably wasn’t responsible for and only barely remembers. What follows is a disorienting whirlwind through the past and present that still manages to come together for a satisfying conclusion.
A Dream of Twin Sunsets by Ryan Cole is another story that takes place in a repressive society, one that tries to survive on a hostile planet by building a regimented society with no tolerance for deviation. Years ago, the lead had a brief but meaningful encounter with a hidden rebel, and now he’s being asked to execute justice on that same rebel. There’s not much question about where his biggest loyalties lie, but there are enough competing obligations to make for some interesting complications in the journey.
Finally, the fiction section closes with the near-flash Vwooom! by Uchechukwu Nwaka. At nearly 1400 words, it clears the industry standard definition for flash, but I rarely find anything under 1500 truly sticking with me. That’s true here as well, but it still exceeds my expectations for tales of this length. There’s a story about war with a lot of complicated family dynamics to make this an interesting read with a whole lot to chew on.
On the nonfiction side, there’s an article about the portrayals of dystopia in 1984 and The Handmaid’s Tale and their uses in real-world cultural and political discourse. The editorial returns to the long-burning issue of AI submissions, specifically focusing on the difficulty of detecting deceitful AI coauthorship. The first interview is with author Brenda Cooper, who has been publishing short fiction for decades but that I haven’t encountered over the last few years, with most of her work outside the magazines in my rotation. The second interview is with Fran Wilde, covering a bit of her novels, short fiction, and editorial work.