Clarkesworld Magazine, Issue 207

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Issue can be read on-line: https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/issue_207/

Rating: 3/5

A better than average issue, with interesting stories by Fiona Moore, Ng Yi-Sheng and Fu Qiang.

• “Morag’s Boy” by Fiona Moore: a follow-up to the author’s earlier story, this one has a boy sent to a farm. What he learns there, along with his skills in fixing machines, would send him on a journey of invention, in a world where technology and civilization has partially collapsed, and people are still picking up (and repairing) the left-over machines.
• “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Cyborg” by Samara Auman: a story told from the viewpoint of an intelligent crow who, at the start of the story, finds its favourite human cyborg dead. As the story develops, we learn more about where the crows come from, their relationship with the dead person and what the crows will do in memory of her.
• “In Memories We Drown” by Kelsea Yu: in a deep underwater lab cut off from the surface after an unknown disaster hits, one person tastes a marine plant and discovers that it can surface vivid memories of her favourite food. But this may turn out to be a curse when the plant also surfaces vivid memories of her loved ones, now maybe lost to her.
• “Waffles Are Only Goodbye for Now” by Ryan Cole: an intelligent fridge lies buried in a house during a conflict and gets a visit from a refugee looking for food. Time passes, and they develop a relationship. But it may soon end when the refugee has to move on, unless the fridge is willing to give up on memories of its beloved owners.
• “The World’s Wife” by Ng Yi-Sheng: in a sequence of unlikely events, the corpse of a person in space has become the home planet for intelligent bacteria. But now the bacteria want revenge over an accidental act unknowingly caused by the person’s wife.
• “The Last Gamemaster in the World” by Angela Liu: in a future where people are hooked up to virtual reality, the person in charge visits his mother to talk to her before going back to his job. For while everybody is enjoying the game, somebody has to stay outside to watch over everybody else.
• “Kill That Groundhog” by Fu Qiang, translated by Andy Dudak: three people sit down in a cafe, not for the first time, to discover why they are stuck in reliving one particular day. They try various schemes to break out of the day and eventually hit on a plan that may do it. But it may not end the way they planned it.
• “Eight or Die (Part 2)” by Thoraiya Dyer: the second part of the story where aliens recruit a human to help them capture a criminal that may be planning genocide. The human has now fit into an alien society and after going on a dangerous mining operation, he is now on the way to a deadly island filled with mechanical killers where the criminal is hiding.

Magazine read from 2023/12/06 to 2023/12/13