Clarkesworld Magazine, Issue 218

Main Index / Reviews Index / Magazine Reviews Index / Clarkesworld Reviews Index

Issue can be read on-line: https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/issue_218/

Rating: 4/5

A better than average issue, with interesting stories by Resa Nelson, A. W. Prihandita, E.N. Auslender and a funny one by Michael Swanwick.

• “LuvHome™” by Resa Nelson: a humorous story of a home that locks its owner out ‘for her own good’. Left with little choice, she explores the neighborhood, something she hasn’t done since moving in, and starts to discover she likes being out and about.
• “Mirror Stages” by Claire Jia-Wen: a fashion model in the future reflects on the life she had and what she had to do to get to where she is now.
• “Luminous Glass, Vibrant Seeds” by D.A. Xiaolin Spires: a story set in a future where the world is recovering from the climate crisis, an artist who works with glass is asked to help transport a rare seedling using her portable (and intelligent) annealer to keep the seedling in a controlled environment.
• “Negative Scholarship on the Fifth State of Being” by A. W. Prihandita: an interesting story of a doctor who get an alien patient with an unexplained condition. Trained only to do diagnosis using a diagnostic machine, she is forced to not use the machine (which is against the medical rules) as the alien and its condition are not listed. What she discovers, by listening to the patient, is a condition that requires a special treatment from a companion: one that she can give is she is willing to continue breaking the rules.
• “Duty of Care” by E.N. Auslender: a touching story of a future where the Earth is no longer inhabitable after being flung out of the solar system by an encounter with a rogue planet. The last two people on Earth maintain a signal array, in hopes of contacting the fleet of ships that left many years ago. But an event would change what one person would know about the actual history of the ships and what really happened to the Earth.
• “The Slide” by Oliver Stifel: the story about a World Rally and a racer preparing for it. But in this world, reality intrudes in the form of an ongoing war, which the racer later discovers may be an instigator of the war. Sadly, her brother was involved in the war, and now she has to decide whether to continue racing to further the cause of the war, or honour her brother.
• “Technicolor Bath” by Raahem Alvi: a story about two people, one of whom gets uploaded into a cloud storage. Questions of identity and taking care of the uploaded personality get asked in story.
• “Unquiet Graves” by Michael Swanwick: a humorous story of a man who visits a graveyard with the intention of uploading the personality of his wife into a new body. The wife doesn’t like the idea, and neither does the dead father of the man. A twist at the end of the story reveals that not all dead personalities deserve to be revived.

Magazine read from 2024/11/04 to 2024/11/07