Clarkesworld Magazine, Issue 237

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

Issue can be read on-line: https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/issue_237/

Rating: 4/5.

A good issue, with fascinating stories by Carrie Vaughn, Rebecca Campbell, Pan Haitian and Samantha Murray.

• “Up the Line to Death” by Carrie Vaughn: AI based drones around the world suddenly stop working. And it would need the help of a literature teacher to make sense of the lines of poetic text that start to appear in the output data of the drones.
• </id>“The Potential Side Effects of Roleplay Stimulation Therapy” by Claire Jia-Wen: a student gets involved in an accident. To help her recover her ability to play the violin, she is enrolled in a simulated environment. A misunderstanding makes her think it is a ‘stimulated’ environment. But her interests begin to drift as she gets involved with a fellow student also enrolled in the environment, but for a different reason.
• </id>“The Floating Republic” by Rebecca Campbell: a small colony on a world is adrift, waiting for a long conflict to resolve itself, which it eventually does. Told through various viewpoints, this is a story about what the people, left for decades on (and off) the planet want when contact is reestablished with the company that owns the planet and may not have the colony’s interests in mind.
• “Three Cases from the Cosmic Psychiatric Clinic” by Pan Haitian, translated by Blake Stone-Banks: an amusing tale of a psychiatrist on a deep space station that has to deal with three cases: one of a man who thinks he is a tree, another of a salesman who turns into a ‘toy terrorist’ and an unusual one involving the stations’ cleaning droids with a hive mind of their own who decides to take cleaning a bit more literally.
• “A Life Measured in Seconds” by Anne Wilkins: in the future, a machine selects ‘gods’ from the people by the second they are born on a certain day. This story is about two people, one born on that second and is considered a god, and another not born on that second and wishes that he was born on that second. On a day that celebrates the birth of the gods, they would meet and discover that their lives as a god and a non-god are not as good or bad as it appears.
• “Burning Day” by Samantha Murray: a researcher on an alien planet falls in love with one of the aliens, whose emotions of memories manifest as nodules on their bodies. But on Burning Day, the nodules are burned off, and the alien only has the memory but not the emotion behind it. Now the researcher has to decide whether their love and life together will last past the Burning Day.
• “Ice, Rock, Empathy” by Damián Neri: aliens live under the ice of a world that turns out to be Europa. But they have the ability to absorb the memories of a human researcher that dies under the ice. And now, the aliens are on a mission to try to save the memories of other humans after a calamity overcomes their colony.

Magazine read from 2026/06/02 to 2026/06/10.