Clarkesworld Magazine, Issue 236

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Issue can be read on-line: https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/issue_236/

Rating: 4/5.

A good issue of Clarkesworld, with interesting stories by Louis Inglis Hall, Tia Tashiro, Grace Chan and Zhao Haihong.

• “The Profitable Sentience of Household Goods” by Louis Inglis Hall: a household AI talks to a newly activated AI running a light switch. As time passes, the household AI becomes more capable and hopes to achieve biological sentience. But what it discovers is a world with companies that only want to protect themselves against other companies.
• “Archaeological Evidence for the Time Traveler” by Tia Tashiro: a mother who is an archaeologist goes on excavation project, while raising her a child. But then she discovers messages written long ago that are apparently aimed at her, and it may involve her former lover who is doing research in time travel. As in all such tales, the ending is inevitable but still has a twist that some readers may be able to guess.
• “Conquerors” by Nick Wolven: a ceremony takes place between those on Earth and people from space who have returned for a short while. But the people from space prove to be very rowdy and one Earth girl wants nothing to do with them. But then an accident and a meeting with her uncle from space changes her perspective on the people from space.
• “Paper Airplane Poet” by Sheri Singerling: a story set in a world of haves and have-nots in a city. A have-not girl loses her parents to a strange ‘non-Euclidian’ affliction. Faced with a life of poverty, she decides to make use of her resemblance to an upper-class lady to move up in life. Unfortunately, the unusual affliction pays no further part in the story.
• “Aly” by Grace Chan: in a future Australia beset with global warming, a man accidentally encounters a stranger from Taiwan, and they strike up a relationship. But it becomes strained over the man’s dependency on an Aly, an AI attached to him at birth. He turns it off in hopes of improving their relationship but the struggle to live, and to love, without an Aly may be too much.
• “Decimation Circles” by Raahem Alvi: on a world where people are implanted with a chip that remembers who they are when they die and reborn in a new body, an officer is charged with recovering her previous body. But in the process, she encounters an unusual human and comes to realise that there may be a better way than constantly living and dying on this dystopian world.
• “The Scent of Memory” by Zhao Haihong, translated by S. Qiouyi Lu: a man is desperate to meet with his former romantic partner before her wedding to another man, hoping to stop it. But before that, he needs a way to remind her of their good times, which may come in the form of a scent bottle that can cause vivid memories to resurface.

Magazine read from 2026/05/11 to 2026/05/13.