Clarkesworld is a monthly on-line magazine edited by Neil Clarke.
Everything is available in HTML from
the magazine's site, and
it can be bought in various other formats.
"Entangled", by Beston Barnett, has an interstellar society where
people of various species live on each other's planets… permanently,
via telepresence but with no exposure to their home culture because
they're put in the telepresence pods at birth or equivalent. (Issues
of consent are ignored.) Lovely ideas, and it seems to be building up
to a surprise, but not only does the ending not resolve anything, it
wasn't in the least surprising.
"Onyx Woods and the Grains of Deception", by D.A. Xiaolin Spires, is
very obviously a Moral Story about the foreigners coming to rape the
land and someone's decision to rebel against them… but how is she
going to rebel? What about the omnipresent secret police who have
prevented rebellion thus far? Eh, who cares about that, this is a
story about one person making up her mind. Except she mostly seems to
have made it up before the story starts.
"Your Face", by Rachel Swirsky, is a dialogue-only piece that's so
busy bludgeoning you over the head with the Subtle Hints that someone
is talking to an imperfect personality recording of her dead daughter
that it forgets to have a plot, or characters.
"The Yorkshire Mammoth", by Harry Turtledove, is a story of a young
vet and a domesticated mammoth with a broken tusk (because Yorkshire
is right on the edge of the Ice)… but that's all it is. There's no
exploration of the background. It's just a slice-of-life.
"In This Moment, We Are Happy", by Chen Qiufan, translated by Rebecca
Kuang, is a really weird story. It starts off exploring the
implications of surrogate pregnancies, DNA combination from same-sex
couples, and so on, in a way that might have been daring in the 1980s
and readable in the 1990s but now just seems tired (why yes, many of
us have moved beyond the idea that the only value of women is their
ability to bear children); then all of a sudden apparently everyone
has become infertile but a guerilla gene-lab has produced the next
model of human. Maybe it makes more sense in its original cultural
context.
"The Second Nanny", by Djuna, translated by Sophie Bowman, has a
post-AI-apocalypse colony round Neptune, and starts off well… but oh
dear, the "bad" AIs are the Fathers and they rage and make war, and
the "good" AIs are the Mothers and they nurture life, so what the hell
was the point of wiping out a large chunk of the human race if you
can't even get away from this kind of primitive gender essentialism?
Also very non-idiomatic translation, with phrases like "the cylinder of
the interior of the colony remained a vacuum".
"It Came From the Garage! Technology, Film and the Guy Next Door", by
Marc Cole, mostly name-checks a few microbudget filmmakers without
saying much about what makes them special.
"Carbon Planets", by Tomas Petrasek, speculates on the existence of
planets with a preponderance of carbon in their makeup, and tries to
make them sound exciting even though the possibilities of life are
fairly minimal. But I'm odd; I'd rather read the papers that were
Petrasek's source material than the sexed-up summary.
"Mission Critical: A Conversation with Jonathan Strahan", by Neil
Clarke is unabashedly laudatory. But I've read several anthologies
edited by Strahan and not yet enjoyed one.
"Editor's Desk: One Hundred Thousand Titles", by Neil Clarke looks at
which titles have been used most often in submissions to
Clarkesworld. (Most popular: "Home".)
Nothing here that inspired me to anything positive. If the next issue
is similarly lacking in interest to me I'll probably stop reading.
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