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Clarkesworld Magazine, Issue 148, January 2019
Clarkesworld is a Hugo and World Fantasy Award-winning science fiction and fantasy magazine. Each month we bring you a mix of fiction (new and classic works), articles, interviews and art.Our January 2019 issue (#148) contains:* Original fiction by Jamie Wahls ("Eater of Worlds"), Natalia Theodoridou ("One's Burden, Again"), Ray Nayler ("Fire in the Bone"), Derek Kunsken ("The Ghosts of Ganymede"), and Lavie Tidhar ("Venus in Bloom").* Reprints by Marissa Lingen ("Left to Take the Lead") and Karl Bunker ("They Have All One Breath").* Non-fiction by Carrie Sessarego, an interview with Wesley Chu, an Another Word column by Kelly Robson, and an editorial by Neil Clarke.
145 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 2019
About the author
Neil Clarke
293 books372 followersNeil Clarke is best known as the editor and publisher of the Hugo and World Fantasy Award-winning
Clarkesworld Magazine.
Launched in October 2006, the online magazine has been a finalist for the Hugo Award for Best Semiprozine four times (winning three times), the World Fantasy Award four times (winning once), and the British Fantasy Award once (winning once). Neil is also a ten-time finalist for the Hugo Award for Best Editor Short Form (winning once in 2022), three-time winner of the Chesley Award for Best Art Director, and a recipient of the Kate Wilhelm Solstice Award. In the fifteen years since Clarkesworld Magazine launched, numerous stories that he has published have been nominated for or won the Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, Sturgeon, Locus, BSFA, Shirley Jackson, WSFA Small Press, and Stoker Awards.
Additionally, Neil edits Forever —a digital-only, reprint science fiction magazine he launched in 2015. His anthologies include: Upgraded, Galactic Empires, Touchable Unreality, More Human than Human, The Final Frontier, Not One of Us, The Eagle has Landed, , and the Best Science Fiction of the Year series. His next anthology, The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume Seven will published in early 2023.
He currently lives in New Jersey with his wife and two sons.
Additionally, Neil edits Forever —a digital-only, reprint science fiction magazine he launched in 2015. His anthologies include: Upgraded, Galactic Empires, Touchable Unreality, More Human than Human, The Final Frontier, Not One of Us, The Eagle has Landed, , and the Best Science Fiction of the Year series. His next anthology, The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume Seven will published in early 2023.
He currently lives in New Jersey with his wife and two sons.
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
January 22, 2019
3.5 star average for the two stories I've read in this issue so far, which are both free online here at Clarkesworld magazine. Reviews first posted on Fantasy Literature:
3 stars for "Fire in the Bone" by Ray Nayler, a humans-vs.-robots tale: While robots work in the field harvesting pakata for the great harvest ship that looms overhead, the unnamed narrator watches them. He somewhat impatiently listens to the philosophical musings of an acquaintance, Albert, who obliquely warns him of youthful desires that should be put away. But the narrator isn’t listening; he’s much more interested in his upcoming clandestine meeting with his forbidden lover … a robot. She meets him in the hallway, and they make arrangements to meet after the upcoming “ritual meal.”
The little church where they meet has stained glass windows that tell a story of his ancestors’ landing on this planet and their dealing with an uprising of the robots. (Some strange Christian symbolism here, BTW.) Despite his love for the robot, the narrator is uneasy about the future. But there are more reasons to be uneasy than he realizes.
It’s an interesting story, but relies too heavily on the surprise factor of an event toward the end, building up to that climactic point. It wasn’t a particularly successful build-up for me, because several events in the story seemed either highly improbable in light of the final reveal or simply innately unlikely.
4 stars for "They Have All One Breath" by Karl Bunker. It's a reprint from the Dec. 2016 issue of Asimov's Science Fiction and I've posted my review there, but I'll copy it here for convenience:
James is walking down the street late one night when he meets an old friend, Ivan. They walk together toward their apartment building, talking about the huge changes that have occurred ever since the AIs started taking over. It began with weapons falling apart in soldiers’ hands and missiles and tanks fizzling out and dying, averting a war in the Middle East. At the same time, flying bots were dropping tons of food and other necessities on refugee camps to alleviate the suffering.
“They Have All One Breath” is strongly reminiscent of Jack Williamson’s well-known classic 1947 novelette With Folded Hands..., but takes a somewhat more ambivalent, nuanced approach to the takeover of society by robots. Karl Bunker effectively uses flashbacks to relate the details of the takeover by the AIs, with the division of opinion about the benefits of the takeover being represented by James and his former partner Lisa. Though Bunker owes a major conceptual debt to Williamson, his story is a thought-provoking and well-written one that’s worth reading.
Content note: several F-bombs.
3 stars for "Fire in the Bone" by Ray Nayler, a humans-vs.-robots tale: While robots work in the field harvesting pakata for the great harvest ship that looms overhead, the unnamed narrator watches them. He somewhat impatiently listens to the philosophical musings of an acquaintance, Albert, who obliquely warns him of youthful desires that should be put away. But the narrator isn’t listening; he’s much more interested in his upcoming clandestine meeting with his forbidden lover … a robot. She meets him in the hallway, and they make arrangements to meet after the upcoming “ritual meal.”
The little church where they meet has stained glass windows that tell a story of his ancestors’ landing on this planet and their dealing with an uprising of the robots. (Some strange Christian symbolism here, BTW.) Despite his love for the robot, the narrator is uneasy about the future. But there are more reasons to be uneasy than he realizes.
It’s an interesting story, but relies too heavily on the surprise factor of an event toward the end, building up to that climactic point. It wasn’t a particularly successful build-up for me, because several events in the story seemed either highly improbable in light of the final reveal or simply innately unlikely.
4 stars for "They Have All One Breath" by Karl Bunker. It's a reprint from the Dec. 2016 issue of Asimov's Science Fiction and I've posted my review there, but I'll copy it here for convenience:
James is walking down the street late one night when he meets an old friend, Ivan. They walk together toward their apartment building, talking about the huge changes that have occurred ever since the AIs started taking over. It began with weapons falling apart in soldiers’ hands and missiles and tanks fizzling out and dying, averting a war in the Middle East. At the same time, flying bots were dropping tons of food and other necessities on refugee camps to alleviate the suffering.
No one claimed ownership of these Good Samaritan cargo-bots, nor of the gremlinesque nanoes that were screwing up the mechanisms of war. It soon became known that these were machines built and run by other machines. It was becoming undeniably evident that something new was moving upon the face of the land. Indeed, that the world was being rebuilt around us, disassembled and reassembled under our feet. The AIs were taking over, and they were changing the rules.Over the next months and years the AIs continue changing our world in ways that seem clearly benevolent, or at least intended to improve society. They create nano-bots that cure disease, they solve worldwide problems of hunger and needs, and resolve other problems … often in surprising ways. But not everyone is fully on board with the actions of “the Machine.”
“They Have All One Breath” is strongly reminiscent of Jack Williamson’s well-known classic 1947 novelette With Folded Hands..., but takes a somewhat more ambivalent, nuanced approach to the takeover of society by robots. Karl Bunker effectively uses flashbacks to relate the details of the takeover by the AIs, with the division of opinion about the benefits of the takeover being represented by James and his former partner Lisa. Though Bunker owes a major conceptual debt to Williamson, his story is a thought-provoking and well-written one that’s worth reading.
Content note: several F-bombs.
August 21, 2023
EATER OF WORLDS BY JAMIE WAHLS
4830 WORDS, SHORT STORY 🦠🦠🦠
“The tiny missile is as long as a rose’s thorn and orders of magnitude more durable. It streaks through the blackness, and its current journey has been long enough, from an external frame, for a particularly self-destructive species to rise out of their primordial slime, invent atomic weapons, and start the whole damn thing anew.“
Odd little story about some kind of mini-AI looking for dissidents across the galaxy to destroy… At first I had no clue what was going on. Made me think of panspermia, although it doesn‘t really fit the definition, see the story‘s title. Not bad.
ONE’S BURDEN, AGAIN BY NATALIA THEODORIDOU
5170 WORDS, SHORT STORY, 🚀🚀🚀
“It’s freezing today,” Ionna said, although she knew the temperature in the ship was always the same. It didn’t make her feel any warmer. As if the cold of space had settled into her bones.
“Won’t be long now.” Niko finished securing the cargo area and initiated a routine maintenance check of the entire ship. “That was a good haul,” he said. “One more and we’ll be going home.”
Ionna and Niko are running a space hauler, looking for platinum. Their search leads them to a strange planetoid and they learn a lesson about futility.
FIRE IN THE BONE BY RAY NAYLER
5600 WORDS, SHORT STORY 🤖🤖🤖🤖
We are in an equivalent of the Old South, with a cash crop similar to cotton. Instead of human slaves the harvest is brought in by robots and then transported off planet by ships.
“The harvest ship, low in its geosynchronous orbit, was so enormous it could eclipse the sun. Late in the harvest season, this eclipse would occur a quarter hour or so before true sunset. The descending sun’s orb would warp and flicker in the opalescent haze of the ship’s shielding as the hull blotted out its lower edge, then more and more of its globe, and shadow bands wavered across the landscape.“
There was a revolt in the past by robots. The story goes in an interesting, if somewhat predictable direction. Pretty good, well told.
THE GHOSTS OF GANYMEDE BY DEREK KÜNSKEN
7840 WORDS, NOVELETTE 🐛🐛🐛
“The cracked, blasted surface of Ganymede came into focus outside the portholes, assuming three-dimensional texture and relief. Jupiter’s yellow-orange planet-shine gave way to the white glare of the lander’s spotlights and the scatter of light within cold jets blowing dust and pebbles and chunks of ice away. Even in the low gravity, the landing jarred, bouncing once, before they came to rest.“
Our arrivals on Ganymede are colonists and refugees. They find unexpected structures on the moon. And then something else.
I have to confess that the talk about quantum events and collapsing probability waves went over my head and I was too lazy to read about it and refresh my memory. I got the gist of it though. Difficult hard SF. I did like the backstory, about Ethiopia and Eritrea.
Künsken writes well. I liked the first part of this novelette a lot, but the last part with the ghosts fell flat for me.
VENUS IN BLOOM BY LAVIE TIDHAR
2520 WORDS, SHORT STORY 🤖🤖
Whoosh… that was the sound of that story going over my head. What? Why? Nice imagery… 🤷♀️
LEFT TO TAKE THE LEAD BY MARISSA LINGEN
11420 WORDS, NOVELETTE 🌳🌳🌳🌳🌳
Holly is an indentured servant on a Canadian farm. Near-future, in a Canada wrecked by storms and blights. Holly is from the Oort Cloud, where a past disaster has pretty much ended her world. Some family lives on Mars, some is lost or in the unknown. She waits for one of her uncles to get the family back together. In the meantime there is her daily life, spraying fungicides, working large farm machines and trying to figure out the weird Earthers.
About family—the one you grow up with, the one you make. About trees and about feeling at home.
THEY HAVE ALL ONE BREATH BY KARL BUNKER
12420 words, ~28pages, novelette 🤖🤖🤖
“… a post-singularity story in which AIs have taken the business of running the world out of human hands.“ (from the author‘s blog)
Seriously, don‘t put ice into your single malt Scotch! That is just a horrible waste of good Scotch. Besides that irrelevant comment, this story doesn‘t appear to be creepy, but gave me the willies. What happens when all of your needs are met, there is no hunger or war or violence anymore, but in turn any motivation to do something new or creative goes away and stagnation is all that is left?
All the stories of this magazine issue can be read for free here: https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/prio...
The non-fiction in this issue was good as well. I did skip the author interview though, just in case I ever read the mentioned book by the author.
And another magazine from my shelf finally read! Onwards to the next one…
4830 WORDS, SHORT STORY 🦠🦠🦠
“The tiny missile is as long as a rose’s thorn and orders of magnitude more durable. It streaks through the blackness, and its current journey has been long enough, from an external frame, for a particularly self-destructive species to rise out of their primordial slime, invent atomic weapons, and start the whole damn thing anew.“
Odd little story about some kind of mini-AI looking for dissidents across the galaxy to destroy… At first I had no clue what was going on. Made me think of panspermia, although it doesn‘t really fit the definition, see the story‘s title. Not bad.
ONE’S BURDEN, AGAIN BY NATALIA THEODORIDOU
5170 WORDS, SHORT STORY, 🚀🚀🚀
“It’s freezing today,” Ionna said, although she knew the temperature in the ship was always the same. It didn’t make her feel any warmer. As if the cold of space had settled into her bones.
“Won’t be long now.” Niko finished securing the cargo area and initiated a routine maintenance check of the entire ship. “That was a good haul,” he said. “One more and we’ll be going home.”
Ionna and Niko are running a space hauler, looking for platinum. Their search leads them to a strange planetoid and they learn a lesson about futility.
FIRE IN THE BONE BY RAY NAYLER
5600 WORDS, SHORT STORY 🤖🤖🤖🤖
We are in an equivalent of the Old South, with a cash crop similar to cotton. Instead of human slaves the harvest is brought in by robots and then transported off planet by ships.
“The harvest ship, low in its geosynchronous orbit, was so enormous it could eclipse the sun. Late in the harvest season, this eclipse would occur a quarter hour or so before true sunset. The descending sun’s orb would warp and flicker in the opalescent haze of the ship’s shielding as the hull blotted out its lower edge, then more and more of its globe, and shadow bands wavered across the landscape.“
There was a revolt in the past by robots. The story goes in an interesting, if somewhat predictable direction. Pretty good, well told.
THE GHOSTS OF GANYMEDE BY DEREK KÜNSKEN
7840 WORDS, NOVELETTE 🐛🐛🐛
“The cracked, blasted surface of Ganymede came into focus outside the portholes, assuming three-dimensional texture and relief. Jupiter’s yellow-orange planet-shine gave way to the white glare of the lander’s spotlights and the scatter of light within cold jets blowing dust and pebbles and chunks of ice away. Even in the low gravity, the landing jarred, bouncing once, before they came to rest.“
Our arrivals on Ganymede are colonists and refugees. They find unexpected structures on the moon. And then something else.
I have to confess that the talk about quantum events and collapsing probability waves went over my head and I was too lazy to read about it and refresh my memory. I got the gist of it though. Difficult hard SF. I did like the backstory, about Ethiopia and Eritrea.
Künsken writes well. I liked the first part of this novelette a lot, but the last part with the ghosts fell flat for me.
VENUS IN BLOOM BY LAVIE TIDHAR
2520 WORDS, SHORT STORY 🤖🤖
Whoosh… that was the sound of that story going over my head. What? Why? Nice imagery… 🤷♀️
LEFT TO TAKE THE LEAD BY MARISSA LINGEN
11420 WORDS, NOVELETTE 🌳🌳🌳🌳🌳
Holly is an indentured servant on a Canadian farm. Near-future, in a Canada wrecked by storms and blights. Holly is from the Oort Cloud, where a past disaster has pretty much ended her world. Some family lives on Mars, some is lost or in the unknown. She waits for one of her uncles to get the family back together. In the meantime there is her daily life, spraying fungicides, working large farm machines and trying to figure out the weird Earthers.
About family—the one you grow up with, the one you make. About trees and about feeling at home.
THEY HAVE ALL ONE BREATH BY KARL BUNKER
12420 words, ~28pages, novelette 🤖🤖🤖
“… a post-singularity story in which AIs have taken the business of running the world out of human hands.“ (from the author‘s blog)
Seriously, don‘t put ice into your single malt Scotch! That is just a horrible waste of good Scotch. Besides that irrelevant comment, this story doesn‘t appear to be creepy, but gave me the willies. What happens when all of your needs are met, there is no hunger or war or violence anymore, but in turn any motivation to do something new or creative goes away and stagnation is all that is left?
All the stories of this magazine issue can be read for free here: https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/prio...
The non-fiction in this issue was good as well. I did skip the author interview though, just in case I ever read the mentioned book by the author.
And another magazine from my shelf finally read! Onwards to the next one…
January 31, 2019
A tiny weapon “as long as a rose’s thorn” calling itself Kali rockets toward earth in Jamie Wahls’ “Eater of Worlds”. When it strikes the moon, it gives birth to Kali 2, who then begets Kali 3 when it kills and inhabits a human on Earth named Zephyr Vargas. And that’s when Payload takes over, intent on fulfilling its mission to devour the planet. But Kali 2 stars to question their mission. It’s a neat idea, and the bickering between Kali 2, Kali 3, and Payload is entertaining for a time. Without a clear-cut protagonist (Kali 2, maybe?) it was difficult to get invested in the outcome which required a long-winded info dump at the end to explain.
While hunting down a rich store of platinum, asteroid miners Niko and Ionna crash land and find something impossible in Natalia Theodoridou’s “One’s Burden, Again”. The asteroid has a breathable atmosphere and a settlement, and a man calling himself King Siphos is pushing a boulder up a hill. While fixing the machine that processes the boulders, Ionna learns the somber truth about the debt Siphos owes. And yes, Ionna and Niko wonder if the man they’ve met is the mythological Sisyphus. There isn’t much in the way of conflict or suspense in this story, and the author’s bid to tie Ionna’s emotional burden over her father’s death to Siphos’ physical one is too obvious to resonate. It is an otherwise enjoyable tale, and the sci-fantasy premise has a sprightly charm.
On a colony planet reminiscent of the antebellum south, robots and humans have a master-slave dynamic in Ray Nayler’s “Fire in the Bone”. During a harvest night celebration, the young, gentry-class narrator plans a secret tryst with his robot lover. He knows of worlds where humans and robots live as equals and wants to believe his robot lover is as “alive” as he is, despite what human society says about them. The prose is gorgeous, from the description of the orbiting harvester ship eclipsing the sun to the night-worms making music in the fields, evincing a rich distillation of history and culture and a singular sense of place and time. The ending features one of those twists that cajoles you into skimming through the whole thing again to see how it added together.
Derek Künsken’s “The Ghosts of Ganymede” follows two groups of post-nuclear war refugees, one Ethiopian and one Eritrean, to the titular Jovian moon where they get a second lease on life mining helium-3. After setting up camp they discover long abandoned alien monuments, haunted by “ghosts” of long dead beings trapped in a quantum state. Hindering their attempt to rid their new home of the poltergeists are the lingering cultural conflicts that led them to this new world. Some aspects of the premise are tough to chew on: any company sending two nationalities who just fought a long and devastating war against each other over 480 million miles away for a (presumably) profitable enterprise has some questionable projections to sort through, though it gives the author an opportunity to do some allegorizing about quantum wave functions. The details make this story work, like the day-to-day difficulties of creating a sustainable living environment on such inhospitable terrain.
There is an almost biblical prescience to the stargazing in Lavie Tidhar’s planetary vignettes, an unwavering devotion to the dream of a new home for a displaced people, that finds fervid expression in his new story “Venus in Bloom”. In a Venusian cloud city, the famed botanist Samit dies surrounded by his miraculous flowers. His friend, the robot priest R. Brother Mekem, who fled earth for much the same reasons Samit did, and his granddaughter Maya, who joins with a mech to terraform the planet, are there to mourn him. The bittersweet resignation Maya carries in her work, knowing she must destroy “wild untamed” Venus to make it habitable for organic life, illuminates the contradictions that even the most hopeful idealism must bear.
While hunting down a rich store of platinum, asteroid miners Niko and Ionna crash land and find something impossible in Natalia Theodoridou’s “One’s Burden, Again”. The asteroid has a breathable atmosphere and a settlement, and a man calling himself King Siphos is pushing a boulder up a hill. While fixing the machine that processes the boulders, Ionna learns the somber truth about the debt Siphos owes. And yes, Ionna and Niko wonder if the man they’ve met is the mythological Sisyphus. There isn’t much in the way of conflict or suspense in this story, and the author’s bid to tie Ionna’s emotional burden over her father’s death to Siphos’ physical one is too obvious to resonate. It is an otherwise enjoyable tale, and the sci-fantasy premise has a sprightly charm.
On a colony planet reminiscent of the antebellum south, robots and humans have a master-slave dynamic in Ray Nayler’s “Fire in the Bone”. During a harvest night celebration, the young, gentry-class narrator plans a secret tryst with his robot lover. He knows of worlds where humans and robots live as equals and wants to believe his robot lover is as “alive” as he is, despite what human society says about them. The prose is gorgeous, from the description of the orbiting harvester ship eclipsing the sun to the night-worms making music in the fields, evincing a rich distillation of history and culture and a singular sense of place and time. The ending features one of those twists that cajoles you into skimming through the whole thing again to see how it added together.
Derek Künsken’s “The Ghosts of Ganymede” follows two groups of post-nuclear war refugees, one Ethiopian and one Eritrean, to the titular Jovian moon where they get a second lease on life mining helium-3. After setting up camp they discover long abandoned alien monuments, haunted by “ghosts” of long dead beings trapped in a quantum state. Hindering their attempt to rid their new home of the poltergeists are the lingering cultural conflicts that led them to this new world. Some aspects of the premise are tough to chew on: any company sending two nationalities who just fought a long and devastating war against each other over 480 million miles away for a (presumably) profitable enterprise has some questionable projections to sort through, though it gives the author an opportunity to do some allegorizing about quantum wave functions. The details make this story work, like the day-to-day difficulties of creating a sustainable living environment on such inhospitable terrain.
There is an almost biblical prescience to the stargazing in Lavie Tidhar’s planetary vignettes, an unwavering devotion to the dream of a new home for a displaced people, that finds fervid expression in his new story “Venus in Bloom”. In a Venusian cloud city, the famed botanist Samit dies surrounded by his miraculous flowers. His friend, the robot priest R. Brother Mekem, who fled earth for much the same reasons Samit did, and his granddaughter Maya, who joins with a mech to terraform the planet, are there to mourn him. The bittersweet resignation Maya carries in her work, knowing she must destroy “wild untamed” Venus to make it habitable for organic life, illuminates the contradictions that even the most hopeful idealism must bear.
January 17, 2019
Thoroughly enjoyed this issue. Favorite stories: "Eater of Worlds" by Jamie Wahls, "The Ghosts of Ganymede" by Derek Künsken, "Venus in Bloom" by Lavie Tidhar (I think this is set in the Central Station universe - my favorite of Tidhar's work so far), and "Left to Take the Lead" by Marissa Lingen. Lingen's story also seems connected to others by her I've read, and I've enjoyed them all!
November 8, 2020
Review and rating solely for these three stories. I highly recommend the first one:
● "Left to Take the Lead," novelette by Marissa Lingen. Reprint from Analog, 2018. A girl from the Oort settlements has lost her home, and is now an indentured servant at an Alberta farm to pay her debts. Earth is very strange to her:
"I had never lived anywhere with trees before. … The fact that they’re alive turns out to matter a lot. The branches move around, and you can really tell they’re alive. It��s more like living with a herd of giant elephants …"
Aftermath of the tornado:
“The lane was strewn with corpses. The tornado had left almost nothing of the groves of trees that lined the lane, nothing of the windbreak—the wind had broken them instead …
The Earthers were not treating them like corpses. … the Earthers were treating it just the same as the spilled trash bag from the bins, another thing to pick up. …
I will never, ever understand Earthers.”
She has to take up a new indenture, as the farmers can no longer pay her. She signs up for a high-paying but risky job as a miner in the Asteroid Belt.
This is a much better story than my little plot summary indicates. It's really about families and relationships, and you should read it. Award quality, and I'll have to seek out more of Lingens's stories. 4.5 stars! http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/linge...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marissa...
● "Eater of Worlds" by Jamie Wahls. An interesting and well-written mini-space opera: echoes of an ancient war, and an optimistic ending. Good story, but a bit glib. And 3.4 stars.
● "They Have All One Breath" by Karl Bunker. Read previously in the the Dozois Years Best #34, and pretty good. 3+ stars. Not reread here.
● "Left to Take the Lead," novelette by Marissa Lingen. Reprint from Analog, 2018. A girl from the Oort settlements has lost her home, and is now an indentured servant at an Alberta farm to pay her debts. Earth is very strange to her:
"I had never lived anywhere with trees before. … The fact that they’re alive turns out to matter a lot. The branches move around, and you can really tell they’re alive. It��s more like living with a herd of giant elephants …"
Aftermath of the tornado:
“The lane was strewn with corpses. The tornado had left almost nothing of the groves of trees that lined the lane, nothing of the windbreak—the wind had broken them instead …
The Earthers were not treating them like corpses. … the Earthers were treating it just the same as the spilled trash bag from the bins, another thing to pick up. …
I will never, ever understand Earthers.”
She has to take up a new indenture, as the farmers can no longer pay her. She signs up for a high-paying but risky job as a miner in the Asteroid Belt.
This is a much better story than my little plot summary indicates. It's really about families and relationships, and you should read it. Award quality, and I'll have to seek out more of Lingens's stories. 4.5 stars! http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/linge...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marissa...
● "Eater of Worlds" by Jamie Wahls. An interesting and well-written mini-space opera: echoes of an ancient war, and an optimistic ending. Good story, but a bit glib. And 3.4 stars.
● "They Have All One Breath" by Karl Bunker. Read previously in the the Dozois Years Best #34, and pretty good. 3+ stars. Not reread here.
March 16, 2019
Fire in the Bone by Ray Nayler ★★★★★
Ooh I love a bloody violent surprise ending! The last lines gave me that happy “gotcha!” shock. I went back and reread parts, enjoying the subterfuge. Overall, it seemed a story from the early prequels of Dune.
They Have All One Breath by Karl Bunker ★★★★☆
Bunker has reimagined Simak’s City with nanobots. In making the transition from our dystopian reality to something closer to a utopia Bunker highlights how little, or how much, people are willing to give up for peace and harmony.
Eater of Worlds by Jamie Wahls ★★★★☆
”Of the thousands of planets in the sky, the seed had to fall onto theirs.”
I enjoyed this story from the point of view of the doomsday weapon. The hopeful ending was unexpected and sat well with me.
”He was the sword, she says, with a new, steely determination. And I am the plowshare.”
Venus in Bloom by Lavie Tidhar ★★★☆☆
A robot that has seen generations of human violence and change decides to reinvent himself as a priest. Not unpleasant but not memorable.
One’s Burden, Again by Natalia Theodoridou ★★☆☆☆
I literally forgot this story hours after I read it. Just gone. I had to reread the first paragraph before writing this.
A space miner having trouble letting go of her emotionally abusive father crashes onto a planet where the god Sisyphus resides.
The Ghosts of Ganymede by Derek Künsken ★★☆☆☆
Refugees from Eritrea and Ethiopia escaped nuclear war to colonize Ganymede. They brought their animosity with them but have to come together to stop/free ghosts created by physics.
This story had heart but felt contrived. Intergalactic centipede physics ghosts in ice pyramids, really?
Left to Take the Lead by Marissa Lingen ★★☆☆☆
This was a refugee crisis story about broken families trying, and failing, to be there for each other. It went unresolved and felt hopeless.
Average 3.14 Stars
February 27, 2019
Great stories. I’m glad the podcast covers every single story in the issue. It helps me finish the magazine faster.
Shelved as 'only-read-parts'
March 27, 2024So far only listened to:
"One's Burden, Again" (pub 2019) by Natalia Theodoridou - 3*
Space miners crash land on a planet inhabited the god Sisyphus. Instead of a boulder of rock, he is pushing a boulder of metal. The miner's ship's sensors detected metal, that is why they headed there.
Thank goodness for the fantastic host/narrator Kate Baker without whom I wouldn't have caught the meaning of the story. I don't "read" lessons for a reason. One of the miners is
Here is a link to the audio version, the narrator's comments are at the end: http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/audio...
"One's Burden, Again" (pub 2019) by Natalia Theodoridou - 3*
Space miners crash land on a planet inhabited the god Sisyphus. Instead of a boulder of rock, he is pushing a boulder of metal. The miner's ship's sensors detected metal, that is why they headed there.
Thank goodness for the fantastic host/narrator Kate Baker without whom I wouldn't have caught the meaning of the story. I don't "read" lessons for a reason. One of the miners is
Here is a link to the audio version, the narrator's comments are at the end: http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/audio...
June 1, 2023
S'alright!
Some good stories, some not-so-good, some cliches, some neat new ideas.
I read this mostly for Nayler's "Fire in the Bone," which read like something I could have found in the 70s—focus on a pseudo-religion for a bit, and the prose having the similar sort of "name every color of the sunset" disease a lot of SpecFic authors do for some reason. Enjoyed it overall.
"Eater of Worlds" was neat, mostly in that it was new. I never thought to have a dialogue among the disparate parts of a mindless bio-weapon.
I was less enthusiastic about "One's Burden, Again," which is 80% demonstrating the Myth of Sisyphus and 20% using that myth to state what the myth has been stating for a few thousand years.
Overall, good issue.
Some good stories, some not-so-good, some cliches, some neat new ideas.
I read this mostly for Nayler's "Fire in the Bone," which read like something I could have found in the 70s—focus on a pseudo-religion for a bit, and the prose having the similar sort of "name every color of the sunset" disease a lot of SpecFic authors do for some reason. Enjoyed it overall.
"Eater of Worlds" was neat, mostly in that it was new. I never thought to have a dialogue among the disparate parts of a mindless bio-weapon.
I was less enthusiastic about "One's Burden, Again," which is 80% demonstrating the Myth of Sisyphus and 20% using that myth to state what the myth has been stating for a few thousand years.
Overall, good issue.
April 5, 2023
Personal memo:
Wahls. ***
Theodoridou. ***
Nayler. ****½
Kunsken. ****
Tidhar. *****
Lingen. ****
Bunker. *****
Decent essays.
Wahls. ***
Theodoridou. ***
Nayler. ****½
Kunsken. ****
Tidhar. *****
Lingen. ****
Bunker. *****
Decent essays.
March 24, 2019
Amazing issue
January 26, 2020
Only read Eater of Worlds, 4/5
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