I review Clarkesworld and GigaNotoSaurus each month. If you’re a regular reader, you know that. If you’re new here, those are a couple monthly magazines publishing sci-fi and fantasy short fiction. Did I say this exact thing last month? Please respect my privacy. Anyways, let’s get to it.
Clarkesworld
A glance at the table of contents had me very excited for the September issue of Clarkesworld, with plenty of known-and-enjoyed authors like Beth Goder, A.D. Sui, Rich Larson, and R.P. Sand. It opens with three short stories and a shortish novelette before a novella that makes up nearly half of the issue’s word count, then closing with a pair of much shorter stories.
The first story I ever read by Beth Goder was an excellent first contact tale in Clarkesworld, and Water-Eaters is very much in the same mold, even if it opens closer to the end than the beginning of negotiations between humans and the titular aliens over settlement rights. At only 2,500 words, this story focuses on a tiny slice of the negotiations, but it’s a dramatic slice, with the lead being asked the unthinkable and having no time or ability to truly understand the alien request before making her response. It’s a tense story that dives deep and fast into an encounter with the truly alien but still delivers enough closure to create a satisfying finish.
When Humans Are No Longer Born Human by Zhu Yixuan considers a world populated in significant part by clones and AIs but where only natural-born humans have full political rights—and even then, only if they can prove their provenance. There’s a personal story here that motivates the larger questions, but this is in significant part an exploration of the inevitable political questions that would follow the development of cloning and AI, diving both into the ways that law could be manipulated by the powerful and into those who would be hurt by the backlash.
To Walk This Distant Shore With You by A.D. Sui features the most eye-catching opening in the issue, and the story pays it off in spades. It opens in a laundromat, with the ten year-old lead’s best friend confidently declaring they’d one day travel together to a colony on a distant world. But the lead already knows there’s little hope of a ticket off Earth, and so sets off a journey of finding another way to be part of the program, merging remotely to suits lightyears away, risking psychological breakdown to prepare a home for a friend who won’t arrive for decades. The blend of first-person, second-person, and epistolary segments creates an engaging style, and the story itself is excellent, a heart-wrenching tale of friends trying to do right by each other, even when separated by vast reaches of space and time.
The issue’s sole novelette, And So I Open My Fists by Rachel Sobel, details an alien society with an experience of gender vastly different than human standard, with children being universally male before pregnancy sets off a shift into womanhood and the development of an ability to in turn impregnate young men. The actual narrative here is a solid but unmemorable tale of people trying to find their places in society, even when they don’t quite fit with the social expectations. But the fascinating culture is the true star of the show in a tale that explores strange conceptions of gender that feel very much inspired by genre classics like The Left Hand of Darkness.
By far the longest piece in the issue is the novella Fistful of Antimatter by Rich Larson, a slow-building tale of robbery and revolution that opens with a heist and proceeds to detail plans for a yet bigger job, all intertwined with resistance against the imperial overlords who had destroyed the planet’s ecology. As I’ve said in past reviews, I’m not a particular fan of heist stories, but this is well-written and offers plenty beyond mere planning of a robbery, even if it does lose a bit of momentum in the third quarter.
The issue returns to short stories with an understated piece that somehow manages to land as one of my very favorites in the issue. Country Music by Madeleine Vigneron is primarily the story of someone fleeing the wreckage of a lost job, lost home, and lost relationship, finally finding their footing as a driver amidst the sparsely-populated farmlands of Saskatchewan. Threaded into the tale are a series of mysterious broadcasts from outer space, but despite being the only truly science-fictional elements, they are not the star but only a backdrop to the portrait of a life and a place to belong. Despite being a quiet tale without much driving plot or resolution to the mystery, there’s something about this one that resonates on a deeper level. It reminds me in some ways of another excellent “portrait of a life with space-travel in the background” story from a couple years ago, T.L. Huchu’s “Egoli” (and for those who have not read the latter, this comparison is very much a compliment).
The last story in the issue, Skin and Glass by R.P. Sand, is a very short story that borders on flash fiction and feels in many ways more like a prose poem than a genuine narrative. It details a world in which people’s life forces are drained through eye contact, with short paragraphs—sometimes as short as a single word—detailing the feeling of the world as much as anything, all leading up to a stream-of-consciousness ramble that delivers one hell of a closing punch. I’m not much of a poetry guy (and perhaps this is not even technically poetry, I don’t know), but I want the poetry people to give this one a read, because I suspect it’s excellent. At any rate, it’s a wonderful capstone to my favorite fiction section of any magazine issue this year.
Taking the non-fiction side in reverse order, we’ll start with Clarke announcing the return of his The Best Science Fiction of the Year anthology, along with a table of contents that includes a whole lot of fantastic stories. Meanwhile, in one of the interviews, Peter Watts (on that table of contents!) laments that he cannot share his most exciting project because of a morass of NDAs. The rest of the interview includes a good bit of talk about his short fiction and a whole lot of justified anger at the state of environmental politics. The other interview sees Cadwell Turnbull talk about his inspirations, his writing journey, and what excites him from his debut collection, All the Hidden Places. Finally, the science article considers both science and fiction around humanity’s treatment of whales and the possibility for inter-species communication.
GigaNotoSaurus
This month’s entry from GigaNotoSaurus is the longish short story Knots of Red and Black by Victoria Brun, which follows a blood mage investigating a potential conspiracy with the help of an erstwhile lover whose own magic was burned out the last time they worked together. If you’re here for the awkward interpersonal dynamics, we’ve got plenty, all alongside a robust main plot featuring no shortage of external threats. With an engaging storytelling style, quality characterization, and a solid main plot, this is a quality story with lots to recommend it.
September Favorites
- Water-Eaters by Beth Goder (short story, Clarkesworld)
- Skin and Glass by R.P. Sand (short story? flash fiction? prose poem? Clarkesworld)
- To Walk This Distant Shore with You by A.D. Sui (short story, Clarkesworld)
- Country Music by Madeleine Vigneron (short story, Clarkesworld)