Review of Clarkesworld 145, Oct. 2018
The cover is “Postcards from Asia: The Floodplain,” by Pat Presley, a landscape of walking houses with steampunk spider legs, reminiscent of Howl’s Moving Castle. In the foreground, a figure guides a similarly stylized catamaran towards the crawling houses. The scene is portrayed simply, sentimentally, like a future drawn by a clone of Norman Rockwell. But it serves to show that ancient floodplains will be used by people in the same way they always have, even as technology shifts and grows around them.
The first story, “The Miracle Lambs of Minane,” by Finbarr O’Reilly, is also a sentimental portrait of a future past to come. The story is essentially a flashback, an unnamed protagonists’ reminiscence of a local Irish anti-hero who had since been mythologized. He remembers her controversial quest to bring silphium, the long-extinct Greek and Roman birth control weed, to the masses. The story takes place in the wake of a famine from which Ireland is just starting to heal, and the religious state has cracked down on birth control in favor of population growth. The story blends past, present, and future, recalling the Great Famine of the 1840’s and the recent sea change of legalized abortion signed into law this past September.
“Sparrow” by Yilin Wang is barely a science fiction. This second-person story puts you in the shoes of a recently laid-off Chongqing a window cleaner who dreams of becoming the mythical rooftop-hopping Robin Hood, Sparrow Li. Wang’s Chongqing is a place of too many workers and not enough work, where one has to take what they can get after calling in as many favors as they can. But even that won’t stop you from being laid off when your job gets automated, as the protagonist warns her boss. It’s a story that almost feels too familiar.
“When We Were Starless” by Simone Heller is a post-apocalyptic fantasy about Mink, a “Blessed” outcast that fights ghosts for her community of nomads. It’s Mink’s job to excise ghosts whenever they threaten the community, which is ready to pack up and leave behind the sick and if they think the ghosts aren’t going anywhere. When Mink meets a ghost that fails to meet her expectations, she has to decide which parts of her community’s lore actually help them survive, and which parts are dangerous superstitions. The story immerses you from the beginning and explains little, but it’s easy enough for the reader to put the pieces together. This works to the story’s benefit, establishing early on an ambience of mystery for the readers to unravel.
“The Facecrafter” by Anna Wu (translated by Emily Jin) paints the story of apathetic people trying to maintain capitalism in the wake of Nuclear Winter. Stuck in shelters that are specialized by job, most people spend their hard-earned money by losing themselves to the virtual world of Eden. Ling Xi oversees a storage center for masterpieces, until one day when all of them are stolen without any trace of a break-in. Of course, this is just the set up for a trans-dimensional journey to save the world from immorality. Wu warps Chinese mythology into some pretty interesting characters and mind-bending imagery. (Reprint)
“Thirty-Three Percent Joe” by Suzanne Palmer stars the body of Joe, a reluctant soldier in a new US civil war, who has had a third of his body replaced by AI prosthetics, including the Cerebral Control implant, a nervous Left Eye, a cankerous Spleen and a newly replaced Left Elbow. Each piece of hardware has its own distinct identity and personality. Since Joe’s father, a soldier himself, was killed by a malfunctioning prosthetic, Joe worries about his own additions. But the A.I. inside him are mainly concerned with self-preservation, and so conspire to keep Joe out of combat. I would put this on par with some other popular sci-fi about robot emotions, including “Fandom for Robots” by Vina Jie-Min Prasad for Uncanny, Martha Wells Murderbot series for Tor Books, and Naomi Kritzer’s “Cat Pictures Please” for Clarkesworld (not to mention the McDonald story coming up).
“In Everlasting Wisdom” by Aliette De Boddard portrays a dystopia ruled by a godlike Everlasting Emperor, an alien being that telepathically influences people’s emotions. Ai Thi is a reluctant host for an appeaser, a Gao’uld-type parasite with their own consciousness that acts as a transmitter for the Emperor’s rebellion-suppressing influence. Ai Thi only volunteered to be a host because she was destitute, so when an equally destitute citizen tries to assassinate her, her sympathy is provoked. De Boddard avoids a long, drawn-out space opera in favor of a slice-of-life story about one subject in a brutal dictatorship. (Reprint from 2017)
“The Falls: A Luna Story” by Ian McDonald is a story set about century from now, about Nuur, a simulational psychiatrist who treats an AI named Callisto, a space probe that speculates and dreams on er way to explore the mysteries of Saturn. Nuur is an immigrant to the Moon, and while she treats Callisto she tries to control her wild and daring daughter, the moon native Shahina. Shahina has grown taller than her mother due to the moon’s lower gravity, and has taken to exploring and parkour, with possibly disastrous results. The story confronts historicity, the weak boundaries between human and artificial intelligence, and the potential for the cultural growth of communities outside Earth. (Reprint from 2015)
The issue also has three works of nonfiction. In “Endless Forms Most Horrible,” Julie Novakova weaves examples of real-world and sci-fi parasites. In “First Contact, Fantasy, and Cooperation,” Chris Urie interviews Steven Erickson, author of the first contact story Rejoice, A Knife to the Heart. And finally in “Another Word: In Praise of Taking It Slow,” Sarah Pinsker is a plea to fellow authors to try to avoid the rush of publishing and create a Slow Fiction Movement akin to the slow food movement of cooking, where each step of the process is considered patiently and mindfully before proceeding.
Just a quick note on this issue: I thought it was interesting that three of these stories (the reprints) feature characters with nonbinary pronouns, while none of those characters are actually human. Hun Dun, the androgynous deity (“The Facecrafter”) and the alien appeaser (“In Everlasting Wisdom”) both are referred to with they/them pronouns. Callisto (“The Falls”) uses e/er, and even corrects Nuur when she accidentally uses she/her instead. In “The Falls,” e/er pronouns are meant to denote and enforce the separateness of AI from humans, and it’s implied that Nuur’s use of the wrong pronouns is an effect of her humanizing Callisto, who reminds her of her daughter. While it’s interesting to see all of these characters in the same issue of a magazine, I am starting to speculate whether this is part of a larger trend of sci-fi writers using nonbinary pronouns to imply that something is inhuman or inherently “other.”
Of course, some real life humans use they/them pronouns to describe themselves, and while I don’t know of anyone who uses e/er specifically, these pronouns are very similar to the Spivak pronouns e/eir. Many people find it difficult to accept the concept of a nonbinary person, and implicitly believe that male and female are basic a priori features of humanity (i.e. if you’re not a woman or a man, you must not be a person at all). I’m not sure if this trend feeds into that mentality, or if it’s a wider acceptance of a selfhood that exists before being gendered. So while I accept that it makes sense for all three of these characters to be ungendered, I wonder if portraying gender neutrality in this way will have any effect on how we perceive the nonbinary humans of our own world?