Clarkesworld Magazine, Issue 227

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Issue can be read on-line: https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/issue_227/

Rating: 3/5.

A nice issue, with good stories by Marissa Lingen, Ai Jiang, Bella Han and Raahem Alvi.

• “A Shaky Bridge” by Marissa Lingen: a father recovers from a stroke with the aid of a neural device. But when the device starts making the father do unconventional things, the family has to decide what to do with it.
• “And The Planet Loved Him” by L Chan: a husband and wife team crash on an unexplored world, with the husband dead. Until the planet’s fungal life revives him and gives the wife the choice of whether to join them or not.
• “Sleeper” by R.T. Ester: a ‘sleeper’ is offered the choice to kill a prophet that may be from the future. But the truth is revealed when the time to do the killing appears.
• “Memories Are Only Valuable if They Can Be Lost” by Ai Jiang: a worker at a ‘floating city’ struggles to get enough money to afford a train ticket to return home during the Lunar New Year. His attempts reveal the struggles of living in a city where people must work to live, and his memories of his home face away or are ‘stolen’ by the city.
• “Sea of Fertility” by Bella Han: a girl’s brother vanishes from the virtual city of Laputa. With all trace of him gone in the city, the girl starts on a journey to locate him, a journey that would go back through the music he wrote virtually, and retrace the entire history of the girl’s virtual reality and even past it, back to the world that was there before the virtual one.
• “Heart of Thunder” by Raahem Alvi: a ‘retired’ augmented soldier is sent to Mars for rehabilitation at a new job. But his military augments start to take over his life, giving him hallucinations from during the war, until the inevitable happens.
• “A Dream of Twin Sunsets” by Ryan Cole: on a deadly world filled with toxic pollen, a man is forced to crash-land in a pollen field. But he is rescued by a deserter from his colony (which is organised along military lines) and develops a relationship before going back. Years later, they meet again, but now they have to put their lives on the line against the colony if they are to save each other.
• “Vwooom!” by Uchechukwu Nwaka: a man who gave up on the education and care given by a man who took him in during a time of crisis decides to pay him back by doing a one-way journey into a space anomaly.

Magazine read from 2025/08/07 to 2025/08/12.