With GigaNotoSaurus on hiatus for one last month, I’m closing out 2025 with a review of the December 2025 issue of Clarkesworld.
Clarkesworld
The final Clarkesworld of the year features five short stories interrupted by a pair of extended novelettes. It opens with a trim sci-fi parenting story, Tomorrow. Today. by R.T. Ester, in which a father tries his best to advise a child going through an existential crisis with big changes ahead. Those changes are science-fictional rather than the usual puberty, but the story is less about the specific tech and more about helping someone process it all.
Next, Imperfect Simulations by Michelle Z. Jin features the rare survivor of an ill-fated augmentation experiment designed to provide abilities beyond the natural to aid the human colony on a hostile world far from Earth. Alone, the lead has little power to affect the settlement writ large, but he proves remarkably adept at maneuvering himself into advantageous positions. This one reminds me a bit of M V Melcer’s “The Falling”–one of my favorite Clarkesworld stories from a few years ago—in the way it builds a compelling scarcity tale without resorting to the sort of infamous engineering nonsense seen in “The Cold Equations.” The spotlight is on the character and what decisions he’ll make as the stakes climb.
The Cold Burns by Anne Wilkins is an environmentalist dystopia in which the poor are forced to keep their footprint score under a certain threshold or face compulsory cryogenic freezing—theoretically to be thawed once extraterrestrial human settlements have established sufficient technology, if that ever happens. I’ve read enough of these stories to have had a decent idea where this was going, but the tale deftly pulls the reader into the lead’s perspective to make for a gripping, emotionally intense read.
Unfortunately, the two longest stories in the issue were my least favorite, making the cover-to-cover read feel sloggy in a way that you wouldn’t expect from mean story quality. The Hole by Ferenc Samsa was the more intriguing of the two novelettes, throwing the reader into a world full of automated entertainment portioned out in precise time blocks. It’s a story that’s engaging mostly for the world, as the reader tries to grasp just how different this society is from our own. But the revelation that the lead is working on a long-term investigation into a potentially dangerous enemy brings in a plot that feels in some ways anticlimactic, with the pieces that might lend emotional gravity not becoming clear until it’s all over.
Robert Reed’s Between Here and Everywhere, on the other hand, was a complete miss. This is only my second Greatships story, so my opinion shouldn’t dissuade those who have enjoyed the series in the past, but I’ve bounced hard off of both of them. This one is long and intricate and left me wondering why I was meant to care about any of it. The revelation of the main character’s name, for instance, might mean something to those who have seen him in other works, but for me, it’s utterly empty. It’s hard for me to judge whether the writing style doesn’t work for me or whether the novelette just doesn’t stand alone as effectively as the author and editor hope, but I struggled hard with this one.
The issue returns to short stories with This Sepulchral Aegis by Rob Gillham, in which the sickly human steward of an aging generation ship is woken by the ship’s AI to address a chance contact with another vessel. To some extent, it’s a story of culture clash, but more than that, it’s the portrait of a lead doing everything they can–even when those things are morally questionable–to keep themselves afloat in a situation they’re woefully underequipped to handle.
The fiction section closes with a meditative grief story, Home Grown by Madeleine Vigneron. It’s another generation ship story, but this one spotlights the sister who got a ticket off a dying Earth while her own sister was forced to stay behind. Episodes aboard the ship are punctuated by vivid dreams about the imagined life of the Earthbound sister, expertly folding the reader into the lead’s survivor’s guilt and fears for the life of the sister left behind. I wanted a little more from the ending to tie this one together, but the emotional element is tremendous.
The nonfiction includes a message from the editor reflecting on making it through another challenging year and wishing all the readers the best. There’s a fascinating science article on animal language and how the research on the subject has been progressing after working past some incorrect assumptions that had long held it back. As usual, there are two interviews, one with narrative artist Simon Stålenhag and the second with editors Ed Finn and Joey Eschrich. The latter are releasing an anthology of optimistic climate futures, interspersing short fiction and nonfiction essays. It sounds fascinating, and I immediately asked my library to buy a copy. I’ll keep my fingers crossed.
December Favorites
- Imperfect Simulations by Michelle Z. Jin (short story)