Everyone (myself included) is distracted by award shortlists, but there’s still new fiction being published, and there’s plenty to talk about in my review of the March issues of Clarkesworld and GigaNotoSaurus. 

Clarkesworld

This month’s Clarkesworld features six short stories surrounding a novella-length centerpiece from Thomas Ha. The issue opens with Bend Like the Palm by David D. Levine, which sees a tiny island nation trying to pull together to protect themselves from mighty Pacific storms. It can be a hair didactic, with the lead detailing her thought process to a young grandchild, but it remains an encouraging vision of community-building in the face of environmental peril. 

Next up, First Human Ghost on Mars by R.L. Meza tells. . . well, of the first human ghost on Mars, straining at memory and the vagaries of interaction between the material and the ghostly in order to aid their living crew in a time of need. The main story is solid, albeit not especially new, but the background establishment of character and setting don’t do enough to inject depth and vivacity. The result isn’t bad, but rather a tad too familiar. 

After a pair of straightforward shorts, Crosstalk, Elysium by Carolyn Zhao is wildly disorienting, told in a non-linear style by a narrator with the uncanny ability to find the right combination of riddles and stories to motivate a living spaceship into action. But the musings on how to talk to the ship are set against the background of war and attempts to untangle a messy knot of dying ships. It can be difficult for the reader to tell the shape of the broader plot, but it’s clear that things aren’t quite what they seem, and the engrossing style keeps the reader on tenterhooks waiting for the final revelation. 

For me, the biggest eye-catcher in the table of contents was Scion, the first novella by Thomas Ha, one of my favorite active short fiction writers. While this novella delivers the complicated family dynamics and uncanny atmosphere I expect of Ha, it also has more than a whiff of Gene Wolfe, with archaic language and a powerful heir trying to understand his own legacy that very much put me in the mindset of The Fifth Head of Cerberus. Throw in an extraterrestrial mansion full of statues and storms, and my initial pitch was “sci-fi/horror Piranesi in the voice of Gene Wolfe.” On reflection, the mansion’s feuding family members and live-in servant class don’t exactly find parallels in Clarke, and there are textual Easter eggs suggesting the better comparison is Mervyn Peake, though I have not read Gormenghast and cannot say for sure. 

At any rate, the style creates a bit of distance from the characters in a way that I associate with my experience of Wolfe and doesn’t immerse me quite like Ha’s typical style. That said, it remains a fascinating story with complicated family dynamics and strong thematic work. I suspect this could be a true favorite for fans of Wolfe or Peake (or perhaps Koji, who I do not know at all but who is also name-checked). 

We return to the short stories with the strange, high-concept Those Who Left History by Wanxiang Fengnian, translated by Stella Jiayue Zhu. This introduces the concept of exclusive residences, places that provide indefinitely for one’s physical needs while divorcing them almost entirely from the rest of the world, leaving only a (metaphorical?) one-way window trained on a single location. It’s an epistolary story that mixes diary entries by one who had left history with investigative reports spanning the centuries, detailing the initial abuses of the system, its later popularity as an emergency measure, and finally an attempt to reconstruct whether the system had ever existed or was mere technological myth. It all comes together in a surprisingly poignant way, cutting through the big conceptual questions and into the experiences of those simply looking for something to hang onto. 

The final two stories in the issue are both first contact tales from the alien perspective. You Are Invited to Our SPRING CELEBRATION by Thoraiya Dyer employs capitalization in a way that is initially distracting but ultimately provides a clear marker of the human concepts unfamiliar to the vast, utterly-alien lead. From the start, there’s a sense that the relationship is bound to go wrong, but when it comes time to twist the knife, it doesn’t come through those well-worn genre tracks, and the attempts at bridge-building never cease. 

While Dyer tells a good first contact, I’m personally more taken with Marissa Lingen’s Person, Place, Thing, featuring a colony entity fruitlessly attempting to explain their nature to a human interlocutor. Again, the failure of humanity to understand a hivemind isn’t exactly new in the genre, but it’s wonderfully executed here, drawing the reader from the start and building to a finish that’s neither too neat nor too open. 

The non-fiction side opens with a fascinating science article on the neuroscientific understanding of handedness—genuinely my favorite popular science piece in some time—followed by interviews with authors J.M. Sidorova and Rebecca Roanhorse. The issue closes with an editorial announcing the winners of the Clarkesworld reader award, with both fiction titles going to authors who have truly burst onto the scene in the past several years. 

GigaNotoSaurus 

This month’s longish short story in GigaNotoSaurus is Teresa Milbrodt’s About Face, a tale of grief, queerness, and found family. It sets the scene with a lead who had grown up seeing ghosts, later progressing to her and her husband joining a thespian group dedicated in large part to playing with gender expectations in their performances. In doing so, it covers the social stigma surrounding HIV, the loss of family members (both though death and rejection), and the finding of places where people can be their authentic selves. It’s not a story that will hammer the reader with an arresting central plot, but for fans of vibe-heavy queer found families, it’s bound to be an excellent read. 

March Favorites

• “Person, Place, Thing” by Marissa Lingen (short story, Clarkesworld)
• “Those Who Left History” by Wanxiang Fengnian, translated by Stella Jiayue Zhu (short story, Clarkesworld)