Clarkesworld Magazine, Issue 172 (January 2021)

Clarkesworld Magazine, Issue 172
edited by Neil Clarke (January 2021)

(Not a review, just some notes to help me remember the things I've read. But written this way because it's the Internet, and some people will stumble across this page.)

Neil Clarke is the editor of a fabulous online science fiction magazine, Clarkesworld. (Note: I have submitted many stories to Clarkesworld. As of this writing, I have not been accepted. That doesn't mean I won't stop trying, nor does that bias this review in any way.)

If I've been informed correctly, when Neil goes to conventions, he brings along paperback copies of his magazine that didn't pass quality control. This book in particular is stamped on the inside front cover: This Is A Misprint. The cover failed quality control but the inside is fine.

As with last month's issue, I didn't see anything wrong with the cover I have, which looks like the cover shown above.

Being that this is summer, this book was mostly pool reading.

The stories include:

• Intentionalities by Aimee Ogden. I recognized the name by it took a moment to place her. I haven't read her before, but Aimee is an editor that I have submited (but not sold) to. The story is of a woman named Sorrel who agrees to have a child to "confer" to the Braxos Corporation for ten years. It's not "slavery", it's training for any job they could want afterward. She's inseminated, has the baby, Abigail April, and raises her for a few years as best as she can with the stipend she got from Braxos to help make ends meet. Naturally, she has regrets about letting Abigail go but can't repay the money. Sorrel joins an advocacy group and searches the dark web, but she doesn't see her daughter for 10 years. Abigail asks her if she's her mother, and Sorrel doesn't believe she deserves that title. Sad, chilling. I prefer happier endings, but there wasn't a way for a happy ending out of this in a short story, just growth and regret.
• Deep Music by Elly Bangs. Quinn has an "aquid" capture and rehabilitation center. Aquid are watery creatures that get removed from homes like squirrels and stray cats. She keeps them in jars and has one that she's given a keyboard to and that the aquid types on. It becomes obvious partway through that the "gibberish" text is going to start making sense, which it does. There's also an adversary exterminator who wants to wipe out the aquids and cause trouble for Quinn. He's the weak point of the story. It was interesting but predictable, really, though maybe not the exact outcome.
• Philia, Eros, Sturge, Agaipe, Pragma by R.S.A. Garcia. As the expression goes, once bitten, twice shy. I wasn't sure if I wanted to venture into another novella after left month's novella. This one had a prologue that had Brother-Adita, recon drones, and shells, and I wasn't sure what was going on. Page 2 started the Philia section which subsections of Now, Then, Now, Then, Before, which was a little confusing. When it got to the Eros section, I hadn't noticed a change but by then I realized that people weren't speaking but signing or indicating their language which was why so much of the "speech" was in italics. I lasted 20 pages without much of a clue what was going on or what the timeline was, and I gave up. If it hadn't been for the December novella, I might've stuck it out. But I was getting a headache.
• The Last Civilian by R. P. Sand is another story that just drops you into the future and leads you to figure out where you are and what you are doing. Literally, in fact, because it employs Second Person storytelling, and I never had a grasp of who this "You" was supposed to be, even though "You" is in every section title. (A lot of section titles in this issue.) You are a generic, genetic soldier, but there are others referenced in the story so it's hard to imagine an unnamed soldier bearing witness to all this and interacting with the characters. The story starts by introducing the reader to the Uilai of Uiloolea, who was flamingo-like with antlers. And then the action shifts to the humans who they are at war with. The humans are clones, developed to be adults at activation, and You are part of the 8th generation, making Your name Eta and a number. It turns out that the war has not been going on for as long as the clones are taught to believe and they aren't as old as they think. Basically, it reminded me of a Donna Noble story.
  In the end, we come full circle and meet the Uilai who has been telling this story to You and seems to know everything You did and whom You talked to and what You said. Sure, the Uilai could know all this, but why bring it all up?
  The story was okay.
• Aster's Partialities: Vitri's Best Store for Sundry Antiques by Tovah Strong. Syd was a magician and she was executed in multiple ways, but she survived in the mirrors of a house that her death created. The house narrates the story as a "we" that sometimes eats people who visit, and then it has to move afterward. A child (always referred to as "child" and "they") named Mor shows up with one of Syd's talismans, so the house protects Mor. THis is another story with multiple sections and other than the first, I couldn't decode what they referred to. I enjoyed it. Definitely above average.
• Leaving Room for the Moon by P. H. Lee. Two children, a boy and a girl, are taken from their planet and brought to the world of the Emperor of All Space and Every World. Some 65,000 years have passed since they've left home and everything that they knew of is dead and gone. Meanwhile, the shine came off the palace and the world many millenia ago. They are presented to the emperor who tells them that the demiurgist can create anything that they desire, but the record of what was doesn't match the memories. Not a bad story, but not a great one.

The Nonfiction section of the book includes

• There are two interviews. The first was with Connie Willis, whom, as much of a fan of scifi that I am, I should've heard of and been more familiar with. The other is with E. Lily Yu, who won a writing contest at 15 and has been writing since. Neil Clarke presents a list of all the stories published in 2021 that are eligible for their own best of awards as well as for the Hugos. Finally, there's a blurb about the cover artist. Once again, I don't believe it goes with any particular story. It shows a girl, probably a fairy, in a sealed jar with flowers and tree and a butterfly. Imagine Tinkerbell in a terrarium, but without wings. Again, this cover would've been considered defective, which is why the issue was given away from free. I don't see any issue with it myself. The online image is a little more vibrant. Also, the back cover, which is a closeup of the front cover without text seems to be off-center, so that might've been the problem.

And that's this issue. Not a great second issue for me. Let's hope February 2021 will be better. And let's hope there's still some pool weather left or this becomes subway reading material.

If you stumbled across my page via the Internet, please check out my short book series, Burke Lore Briefs.

The Book of Genesis

The Book of Genesis

(Not a review, just some notes to help me remember the things I've read. But written this way because it's the Internet, and some people will stumble across this page.)

Not kidding.

A couple of years ago, I decided -- and I don't remember if any conversation provoked this -- that I could download a bible onto my kindle app, which I could read between books. Also, I arrive at Mass on Sunday mornings 10-15 minutes early so I can get my usual seat, and I tend to read before the service begins. As much as this sound like a reverent thing to do to reflect on God's word before Mass, it's mostly because the current book I'm reading might not be the most appropriate thing to dwell upon inside a church.

That said, I read most of this on subways, I believe. And, in any event, I read a bunch a year or two ago, and only recently decided to finish this (meaning Genesis, not the entire Bible). I didn't scan back to the Tower of Babel or Sodom and Gommorrah, which I read then.

First off, I've read sections of bible in school, but never anything in depth. And I read along with the same readings each year for many years.

Genesis has 50 chapters, which right there said commitment. A number of chapters are straight genealogies, and sometimes this information is repeated. It's a lot of names, with a lot of variation among them, but others which are quite similar. How Bible scholars remember them all is beyond me.

Among the stories are the two creation stories, and then Adam and Eve, and Cain and Abel. Noah and the Great Flood are Chapter 6 -- if this was a movie, it would almost be "blink and you miss it". It's more "story" and less "history" at this point.

The rest of the book is Abraham, Issac, Jacob (Israel) and Joseph. Joseph being sold to slavery and his rise to power in Egypt is the last quarter of the book.

Next up is Exodus and Moses.

The Adventures of Larry the Alien (McDonnell)

The Adventures of Larry the Alien
by John McDonnell (2011)

(Not a review, just some notes to help me remember the things I've read. But written this way because it's the Internet, and some people will stumble across this page.)

This was a freebie that seemed like it might be a little humorous. And it was humorous, a little.

The book is divided into eight short stories, but it's actually one continuous narrative, about the size of a short novella. I think I've read longer things in Clarkesworld magazine. But it was sold as a book and it listed online as such, so that's how I'll record it.

Murphy owns a small, quiet bar, and he likes it that way. He sees that Larry is pretty scuppered and tries to cut him off. Larry zaps him back to dinosaur times, but brings him back before he's eaten by a T-Rex. Murphy thinks this is a great trick and becomes friendly to Larry, who would later zap other people away.

Larry appears to be human because Larry can change shape so that he could look like any human or animal. And when he gets too drunk, he accidentally shifts shapes. He goes home with Murphy where he causes trouble with Murphy's wife when he takes the shape of Kim Kardashian. Most is forgiven though when he morphs into Pierce Brosnan.

Larry winds up transforming Murphy's life and his bar. Dolores (the wife) likes the changes. There is a promise of more, but I haven't looked online.

It was an interesting short book to read. Some of the problems I had with it could be excused by the fact that this is a 2011 book originally published by Smash words. I'm not overly familiar with that site, but I've seen if referenced a bit. It seems like a place I could've gotten started if I'd been so inclined and didn't luck out with eSpec Books.

Moving on.

Clarkesworld Magazine, Issue 171 (December 2020)

Clarkesworld Magazine, Issue 171
edited by Neil Clarke (December 2020)

(Not a review, just some notes to help me remember the things I've read. But written this way because it's the Internet, and some people will stumble across this page.)

Neil Clarke is the editor of a fabulous online science fiction magazine, Clarkesworld. (Note: I have submitted many stories to Clarkesworld. As of this writing, I have not been accepted. That doesn't mean I won't stop trying, nor does that bias this review in any way.)

If I've been informed correctly, when Neil goes to conventions, he brings along paperback copies of his magazine that didn't pass quality control. This book in particular is stamped on the inside front cover: This Is A Misprint. The cover failed quality control but the inside is fine.

Personally, I don't see anything wrong with the cover. That said, I just went over to the webiste to look at Issue 171 and I can see that the issue is much sharper.

Being that this is summer, this book was mostly pool reading.

The stories include:

• The Island of Misfit Toys by Fiona Moore, a tale of an old homeless man who starts to resemble Santa and who used to program AI toys who finds ways to survive until one day he's beat by teens in a prank that goes too far. He finds himself in a junkyard along with some discarded toys and robot dogs, which he sets out to repair. It's a fun little tale.
• Things That Happen When You Date Your Ex's Accidentally Restored Backup from Before the Breakup by Lisa Nohealani Morton is a mouthful of a title. Once I was able to parse it correctly, I thought it an interesting premise for a story, but it just didn't work for me. As you can guesss, it's set in a future where cloning is a possibility and it's the type of cloning where you can "awaken" or "download" a consciousness from a memory drive of some point (as opposed to having a clone baby). Such a future is not free from bureaucratic errors (transposing numbers) and making mistakes. This much I liked, and applying it to a relationship where the partner doesn't know about the breakup is a fun twist. Unfortunately, other parts don't work for me. The politics, for one thing, with the whole resistance plot. And the other thing I'm on the fence about is that it's written in second person, you, and the ex is always referred to as "they", so you can imagine whatever genders you wish here. Second person stories are difficult to write, but I give it the benefit of the doubt here because it made it by the editor. It was a bit of a slog. Your mileage may vary.
• The Last Days of Old Night by Michael Swanwick was a fanciful tale of three near-omnipotent beings (Goat-Eater, Bone-Grinder, and the unnamed, mute one) traveling the long night, creating things and clearing obstacles with mere thoughts. A probelm arises when they get to a sea that they can't bridge nor ford. They are then informed by the locals that the old night will soon end because the day is coming which will end them all. The beings manage to turn back time ten years so that the local people can create a boat big enough to beings to escape the day. It reads like an old folktale, and in the end, we learn what inspired it. I did a search in this blog for Swanwick, but I didn't find any results. The name looks familiar (not surprising given the awards he's won). His bio says he's from Philadelphia, so it's possible that I've encountered him at sf/f cons.
  Edit: Not three hours after I typed the above entry, I got a Facebook suggestion of "People You Might Know" for Michael Swanwick. We have 13 mutual friends! LOL.
• Conversations in the Dark by Robert Reed was not a favorite. Stories are subjective, of course. The problem with novellas is that they take up a lot of the book, and if a novella doesn't pull you in, you can either stick it out until it does, or stick a large chunk of the book. I stuck it out. It was an odd story. There's a tank that can hide a person where nothing would detect it from outside. Then we're on a great ship in space, the greatest prize in the galaxy, an ancient ship. The people on it live for centuries and change appearance and gender when they sleep. And then it turns out that these people are human, so the human race must've evolved a bit and this story must take place really far into the future. I read a couple sections at a time and put it down to read other things. This probably hurt trying to immerse myself in the story, instead of thinking what I'd do with a great ship in a story. But I made it through.
  Reading the bio, I see that Robert Reed has written over 300 stories, including several "Great Ship" stories, so maybe I needed to know more background for this to have made more sense to me. And I'm guessing that the editor is better read than I am.
• No Way Back by Chi Hui, translated by John Chu, was an interesting story. Xia Xuejano isn't who she seems to be, and neither is her talking cat Aksha. It's in a future where talking cats aren't unusual as science has advanced there. But not as much as the online world has advanced. A man comes looking for Xuejano because he wants her to find her daughter. The daughter's body in in a hospital ICU but the person inside isn't her. In the future, not only can individuals jack into the net, they can abandon their bodies and live on the net. They usually regret this, if they live long enough and aren't carved up for data. That's why someone else would welcome the chance to jump into her body with some of her memories, without being her daughter. It doesn't have a particularly happy ending but does raise some interesting issues.
• Forward Momentum and a Parallel Toss by Ana Maria Curtis takes place in a small town (Madrid) where football and farming are a big thing. Matching bands are now automatons. And farming equipment is protected IP. Lacey and her students want to do something about that. Alex, Lacey's former boyfriend now works for the "enemy". I don't know if this is steampunk or hopepunk or some other kind of punk. She succeeds but it ends befrore we find out where one character stands -- but that's okay because either choice would be unsatisfying to some part of the audience, and it could feel like a coin flip by the author. It's not pivotal to the story.
• Songs of Activation by Andy Dudak is an interesting story with great worldbuilding, but in the end, I really have no idea want it was about except something to do with revolutionaries and counterrevolutionaries. The students memorize Odes and Sagas, passage of which activate something or other. And then there's Sinecure, which has caused people to commit suicide. Told well, but I don't know what I read. Note: I had to look up "Aestivation", which is the name given to a period of summer dormancy. Summer dormancy is often exhibited by animals when conditions become unfavourable. Had I known this sooner, it might've meant something, but I wasn't reading an electronic copy with a built-in dictionary. I had a paperback in the pool.

The Nonfiction section of the book includes

• Ghosts of Christmas Past: The Victorian Christmas Ghost Story Tradition by Carrie Sassarego was an interesting article about the popularity of ghost stories around Christmas times and how they brought some Victorian elements into them. "A Christmas Carol" wasn't the first, but it is perhaps the best known. And the tradition continues if you think about Christmas movies having ghosts or moving into horror.
• After that were two interviews. The first was with Stina Leicht ("sTINA Lite"), author of Persephone Station and the second was with Tim Pratt, author of Doors of Sleep. I didn't get far through the second one. Instead I skipped to the end of year editorial "Don't Let Go of the Future" by Neil Clarke. Finally, there's a blurb about the cover artist. I like the artwork but I'm not sure what story it goes with, if any.

And that's this issue. I made a blog entry for magazines, and Clarkesworld is one of them, so if I venture out without a copy of one of the magazines, I can go to the archives online.

Now, on to the January 2021 issue, which I picked up at the same Heliosphere convention.

If you stumbled across my page via the Internet, please check out my short book series, Burke Lore Briefs.

Tequila Sheila and Other Tall Tales (Lucci)

Tequila Sheila and Other Tall Tales
by Jessica Lucci (2021)

(Not a review, just some notes to help me remember the things I've read. But written this way because it's the Internet, and some people will stumble across this page.)

This was a book from a recent Kickstarter. It's not labeled "Kickstarter edition" but this ebook has a plain blue cover, not the one pictured above (which is quite nice). Also my copy is 85 pages on Kindle (keeping in mind, I fiddle with the font size) but Good Reads says it's 102 pages. In any case, I enjoyed the book.

The main story is about Cleo Westwind, lover of a woman named Tequlia Sheila, who starts by transporting pigs across the river, but has to dump them overboard when a police submarine rises out of the water. Realizing that she's in trouble and will be responsible for the cost of the lost pigs, Cleo runs off. Later on, Cleo brings down a bear with her pistol as the same time that Zonta, a Lakota hunter, attacked it with a spin-bow. She's befriended by the Lakota, stays with them for a while before going on her way. She learns that there's a reward for the wild boars running around the county, so she starts tracking them, but not so quickly, because she wants to stay gainfully employed for a while. Tragedy happens. Cleo gets revenges, but has to flee again. And then there's more betrayal.

A fun novella with some steampunk elements. I'm enjoying reading more steampunk because at some point, I'm going to have to try writing some.

The second half of the book is comprised of shorter stories. "Instellar Games" is about space Olympics and dragons. "Watch Your Back" is a cautionary flash tale. "Sugar Skull" is labeled "Chapter 4" for some reason, but I guess it's the fourth story in the book and the tag might've been a mistake. It starts with a dog licking her face and I'm not sure where it went after that. "Mary Baker Eddy" was a fun one about restoring old phones to their original state and working order. There's a problem though because there seems to be a phone missing, and they have to find it to make it work. There's a little bit of a Twilight Zone ending to this one, which it didn't need, but gives it a little more oomph. Finally, "Prince Charming" takes place six years into the pandemic (and at the time it was written, I'm sure it seemed like it might last that long) where a female representative of a sticker company goes to a Hollywood hotel and winds up having an encounter with Prince Harry, along with some rude woman.

A fun, quick read.

Notes: The Good Reads page states that this book was published by Indie Woods. Again, I received it as a bonus book from an eSpec Books Kickstarter. This particularly Kickstarter included my book, A Bucket Full of Moonlight.