Clarkesworld Magazine, Issue 228

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

Issue can be read on-line: https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/issue_228/

Rating: 4/5.

A good issue, with some excellent stories. The ones I especially enjoyed are by Sheri Singerling, Louis Inglis Hall, Koji A. Dae and Robert Falco.

• “Abstraction Is When I Design Giant Death Creatures and Attraction Is When I Do It for You” by Claire Jia-Wen: a designer who creates monsters that are bought to life to do battle with mecha-warriors is in a relationship with one of the warriors. That relationship gets strained when the designer’s sister hacks his system to stop him doing what she considers cruelty.
• “Wireworks” by Sheri Singerling: a thoughtful story of a girl who is deep in grief over the death of her mother. One day, she meets a sentient robot who offers to help her get over her grief with the help of a neural chip. But is the cure worth the girl losing some of her emotional attachment with her mother.
• “Four People I Need You to Kill Before the Dance Begins” by Louis Inglis Hall: the story of a being who only lives for weeks, and is created to entertain the rulers of a wintry kingdom by dancing for them. As we learn more about the creature and other like it, we begin to understand their resentment for the situation and their desire to kill their creators to get freedom not for themselves, but for a future generation of creatures born after them.
• “Aperture” by Alexander Jablokov: a person helping to rehabilitate an abandoned asteroid discovers that his keeps encountering obstructions during his work and after that keep him from being on time at social events.
• “The Fury of the Glowmen” by David McGillveray: an advanced military AI is locked-down and destroyed. But that is only the start of the troubles that being to engulf the world, in the form of glowing men.
• “Five Impossible Things” by Koji A. Dae: an elderly person has a chance to live a ‘better’ life in a virtual environment. But to do so, she has to believe in the virtual world, a task made harder when she keeps making lists of the impossible things that happen in the virtual world.
• “A World of Their Own” by Robert Falco: on an Earth long abandoned by humans, the robots left behind try to help and rescue newly emerging synthetic organisms as a storm rages around them.

Magazine read from 2025/09/08 to 2025/09/13.