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.
"Outer" by Hollis Joel Henry: after a big mutation event, the
September children have superpowers and everyone else hates them… and
that's it, that's all this story has to say. And it says it in
Caribbean style ("They go hate you too. They go come for you too. You
have to get hard, Toozen. They go mash you up.") If that were my voice
I might welcome this story as something written in it. But it isn't,
and it doesn't add anything for me.
"Eyes of the Crocodile" by Malena Salazar Maciá, translated by Toshiya
Kamei: in a dying world with plot-driven rogue nanotech, bad things
happen to people. Several of the stories in this issue have the same
problem: there's no life of the mind, nothing that these people (human
or otherwise, though in this case they're human) think about beyond
a basic idea or two.
"Mandorla" by Cooper Shrivastava has two species of sapient plants
failing to understand each other. Again, they don't have any culture
so everything they say is straightforward telling. Has a point, but
takes 6,000 words to get to it.
"The Host" by Neal Asher has a criminal with holes in his memory going
to a strange planet… the writing quality has taken a sharp uptick
compared with the rest of this issue because Asher's been at this game
for a while, though the story's still rather longer than it needs to
be.
"Jigsaw Children" by Grace Chan has the great biotech revolution: in
order to prevent cancer, children are produced by gene-splicing four
or more parents, and in China at least this means the family has been
abolished (um, right). Chan assumes that the reader will share her
revulsion at this.
"Generation Gap" by Thoraiya Dyer is some kind of post-human
post-apocalyptic bare survival and pointless conflict, and again
there's nothing these people think about.
"Jules Verne and a Journey Through Genre" by Carrie Sessarego has a
quick examination of how scientific romance turned into science
fiction, and tries to make a claim that Twenty Thousand Leagues was
much closer to reality than we generally see it. After all, there were
submarines in 1871! Well, just about.
"Nanobots and Braincases: A Conversation with Tochi Onyebuchi" and
"Faith in Vision: A Conversation with Ken Liu" by Arley Sorg both fail
to interest me in these authors' works. I'm probably unreasonably put
off Ken Liu because of his translation of The Three-Body Problem.
"Editor's Desk: 2019 Reader's Poll Finalists" by Neil Clarke: it's now
too late to vote.
The Asher was all right. The rest of the fiction left me cold. Some
issues definitely have moods, and this was one that didn't suit me.
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