Clarkesworld Magazine, Issue 209, February 2024

by Neil Clarke (Editor), H.H. Pak, Zohar Jacobs

Clarkesworld is a Hugo and World Fantasy Award-winning science fiction and fantasy magazine. Each month we bring you a mix of fiction, articles, interviews and art. Our February 2024 issue (#209) fiction by H.H. Pak ("Scalp"), Rajeev Prasad ("The Flowers That We Intend To Share"), Zohar Jacobs ("The Enceladus South Pole Base Named after V.I. Lenin"), David Goodman ("Kardashev''s Palimpsest"), Yang Wanqing ("The Peregrine Falcon Flies West"), Isabel J. Kim ("Why Don''t We Just Kill the Kid In the Omelas Hole"), Ryan Marie Ketterer ("The Beam Eidolon"), and Meghan Feldman ("Lonely Ghosts").Non-fiction includes an article by Ben Lockwood, interviews with Wole Talabi and Bogi Takacs, and an editorial by Neil Clarke.

Genres: Science Fiction, Short Stories, Speculative Fiction

214 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 31, 2024

About the author

Neil Clarke is best known as the editor and publisher of the Hugo and World Fantasy Award-winning Clarkesworld Magazine. Launched in October 2006, the online magazine has been a finalist for the Hugo Award for Best Semiprozine four times (winning three times), the World Fantasy Award four times (winning once), and the British Fantasy Award once (winning once). Neil is also a ten-time finalist for the Hugo Award for Best Editor Short Form (winning once in 2022), three-time winner of the Chesley Award for Best Art Director, and a recipient of the Kate Wilhelm Solstice Award. In the fifteen years since Clarkesworld Magazine launched, numerous stories that he has published have been nominated for or won the Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, Sturgeon, Locus, BSFA, Shirley Jackson, WSFA Small Press, and Stoker Awards.

Additionally, Neil edits  Forever —a digital-only, reprint science fiction magazine he launched in 2015. His anthologies include: Upgraded, Galactic Empires, Touchable Unreality, More Human than Human, The Final Frontier, Not One of Us,  The Eagle has Landed, , and the Best Science Fiction of the Year series. His next anthology, The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume Seven will published in early 2023.

He currently lives in New Jersey with his wife and two sons.

Reviews

[Hirondelle (not getting notifications)]

I only read, so far, the Isabel J. Kim short story Why Don't We Just Kill the Kid In the Omelas Hole which is precisely what it says on the cover. It's about another short story, one of the most famous in sf/fantasy, Ursula K. LeGuin's The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas (and a cursory goodreads search shows a few other works referring to it (it is an important interesting philosophical idea...). So you need to know what the LeGuin story is about to read this.

And it is a sarcastic, very in tune with modern world political reflection on that world and universe. It is not exactly conventional fiction with characters (but then again neither is the LeGuin short story), it is got rage and a voice. It feels "fast", it is very meta.

Not typical of Kim's work by the way (though her short stories are all very varied).

Rating, I will dodge that (but right now if I had to rank her stories for others to read, this would likely be near the bottom). How impactful this is, let me see how much I retained from it later...

[Silvana · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rating for Isabel J. Kim's "Why Don’t We Just Kill the Kid in the Omelas Hole". Well, that's just brilliant. Omelas was one of the many thought provoking stories from Le Guin and I am glad to read a speculative fiction about it, so meta.

[Netanella · Rating 4 out of 5]

For Zohar Jacobs' "The Enceladus South Pole Base Named after V.I. Lenin"

For Isabel J. Kim's "Why Don't We Just Kill the Kid In the Omelas Hole."

This is part of a continuing buddy read where we are reading stories and books inspired by Ursula Le Guin's famous original. The thread is located here: https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

[Shauna Lawless · Rating 5 out of 5]

Review is for Kardashev’s Palimpsest - which is the best novelette I’ve ever read. Absolutely beautiful and breathtaking in scope. Everyone must read this if they can.

[Anurag Sahay · Rating 5 out of 5]

Review and rating for Why Don't We Just Kill The Kid in the Omelas Hole by Isabel J. Kim, which is available to read for free.

Kim's story Homecoming is Just Another Word for the Sublimation of the Self is one of my favourite contemporary short stories and The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas is, of course, a masterpiece. Thus, one may think it's fair to go in with high expectations into this story. However, in recent times I've had a not-so-great experience with a beloved author writing their own take on Omelas, so I tempered my expectations accordingly.

Once your expectations are sufficiently tempered in that way, this story is definitely worth a read. Unlike Le Guin's timeless classic, this story is not going to stand the test of time -- if nothing else, the references to real world activities, (which Le Guin explicitly elides in her work but which are used her by Kim like a jackhammer to make her points) will date them. But that doesn't mean that this story is not worth reading in the here and now.

I think when I initially read the story, I missed part of the point and was going to lump it in the same category as (though much better than) Jemisin's response. A relatively unremarkable reddit comment (by the user /u/ShornVisage on /r/scifi) did change how I view the story though, so I think it definitely merits further thinking on.

Here's the text of the reddit comment, for the sake of posterity:

My personal take is that Isabel was trying to introduce ambiguity as to whether the load-bearing suffering child actually physically prevents anything. 'Thank God we know it exists' is more a riff on the drop-of-blood-in-the-milk thing that kept coming up; Omelas is a society of the willfully ignorant, the willfully blind, who content themselves on the idea that they are paradise with this one exception, and at least they are not China with the Uighurs or the Third Reich with the Holocaust.

When the child is killed, when the problems of other places cease to be, the problems in Omelas become impossible to ignore. Set the world aright, (that is, wrong, with a load-bearing suffering child) and suddenly, the milk is sweet again, Omelas is a relative paradise again.

I'm trying to mentally rectify this in a way that isn't just the first 'bad interpretation' that Isabel went out of her way to call out; I think the error in that take is that it accepts the premise that the first world is actually a perfect place to live in. There's this sense in our globalized modern culture that, so long as we do not persecute the Uighurs, our allowing the poor to be mistreated and for children to be shot in schools and for the government to mismanage hurricanes and earthquakes is not so bad. We are the shining city on the hill, and the rest of the world with all its evils are the load-bearing suffering child.

That phrase, 'load-bearing', is interesting too; the kid doesn't actually materially prevent anything. How could it? (Omelas is now kind of place where sometimes, bad things happen, after all) To do so, it would have to be magic. The child is cognitively load-bearing. The silent, unassuming knowledge that "the kid suffers and that's it" is what lets us pretend that we are doing okay in the grand scheme of things; all the evil in the world exists in this compartmentalized bucket, a mental abstraction of evil that exists out of sight, and after a while, out of mind.

When you're a teenager, you might even care, or want to solve it, but that goes away as you age, because the comfort the cognitively-load-bearing suffering child provides lets you ignore the real problems in your immediate surroundings. If something goes wrong in our society that we cannot ignore, something must not be going wrong elsewhere, and social media and the news go dutifully searching for something to occupy our attentions again, to put a child back in the hole.

There are people who want to actually solve the world's problems, but that kills the child, and makes us recognize ourselves, and instead of accepting that maybe we are empowered to effect the things that make our problems feel real, we soundproof the hole better and put a new child in. Flint, Michigan has lead in the water, but there are African villages filled with people who walk all day for water. School shootings don't even make the news anymore, but maybe North Korea sucks worse in some nebulous, autocratic way that we can't even imagine because of how free we are. Surely, the Omelas hole child comes from somewhere, but that's something we only have to think about when we need to work out how we're going to fill the hole again.

In this context, I think the ending becomes a critique of the original story, how Ursula Le Guin's pre-internet morality tale becomes just another, albeit fictitious, candidate to fill the Omelas hole. Thank god we know Omelas exists, because knowing it exists allows us to think that we're not so like those places that allow load-bearing suffering children and Uighur persecution and genocide... right?

And yet, Omelas is not so exceptional. It has a load-bearing suffering child.

[Bonnie McDaniel · Rating 3 out of 5]

This issue isn't quite as good as the previous one, but it has a barn-burner of a story called "Why Don't We Just Kill the Kid In the Omelas Hole," by Isabel J. Kim. She has written very good stories in the past, some of them within the pages of this very magazine, but I think this is the best one I've seen from her yet.

It's an answer to Ursula K. Le Guin's famous story "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas," which is less of a story and more of a thought experiment. The thought, in this case, is a variation on Spock's pronouncement from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan--"The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one."

Because Omelas as a city, culture and civilization, you see, depends entirely on the misery of one small child locked away in a room at its base. Everyone in Omelas knows this and either makes an uneasy peace with it or, as the title refers to, "walks away." There have been many replies to/engagements with this story over the years (including an episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds ), but I don't think I've ever seen one like this. Kim's story pulsates with rage, as she takes Le Guin's original premise and turns it inside out, applying it to today's world and all the things governments, rich people and capitalism enable or overlook to ensure their systems remain running.

The kid was the drop of blood in the bowl of milk whose slight bitterness would make the sweetness of the rest of Omelas richer. Without the kid in the hole, Omelas was just paradise. With the load-bearing, suffering child, Omelas meant something.

And of course, it was true that the whole city literally ran on the load-bearing suffering child in a very real physical way that was not a metaphor. And everyone really liked having running power and no blackouts and good schools and low crime and community-oriented government and safe sidewalks and public transit that worked.

This story hits you like a gut punch. So far, it's the best story I've read this year.

There are two other excellent stories in this issue. "Kardashev's Palimpsest," by David Goodman, is a tragedy/love story that spans literally billions of years in the narrative of Dee and Vee, who were once human and now are "computational matter, wrapped in the hardest, densest materials any species ever created." We follow these two as humans evolve past their biological bodies and are uploaded into a virtual universe, and graduate to self-contained mindships exploring the galaxy. Earth is destroyed and Dee thinks they lose Vee in its destruction; but eons later, the two find each other again, just in time to see the universe winding down...or perhaps being reborn. It's a timeless love story, and proof that for a narrative to succeed, you need characters, not just high-concept ideas.

Finally, we have "Lonely Ghosts," by Meghan Feldman, which tackles the need for companionship and connection, even between machines. Sini is an exploration android apparently abandoned on an alien planet--its last contact with its human minders was thousands of years before. Now, the only being it can reach is CRABB, a megacity construction droid on one of the planet's moons. But Sini has been seeing the ghosts of its previous handlers for centuries and is basically afraid that it is going insane. So it reaches out to CRABB for reassurance, and the construction droid ends up using its last long-range warp packet to bring Sini to its moon, where it has been building a city all by itself for eons. This is a fairly short story, but it has some lovely characters.

On Bluesky, the editor Neil Clarke has this to say about the state of his magazine:

"Round two of the Amazon magazine subscriptions nightmare is shaping up to be far worse than round one. I'll have more to say when I've finished reviewing my math (and maybe looking at Feb. data), but it's not good. Always a good time to subscribe."

Please, think about subscribing to this excellent magazine. I would hate to lose it.

[Kam Yung Soh · Rating 3 out of 5]

An average issue, with interesting stories by Zohar Jacobs and Yang Wanqing.

- "Scalp" by H.H. Pak: a young janitor does his job in a facility where people infected with an extreme addiction are sedated and put into virtual worlds to recover.

- "The Flowers That We Intend To Share" by Rajeev Prasad: robots that take care of modified plants in a greenhouse began to develop awareness. The two sons of the parents who own the greenhouse are determined that the robots can explore the world, against the wishes of the parents.

- "The Enceladus South Pole Base Named after V.I. Lenin" by Zohar Jacobs: set in an alternate world where the Soviet Union has a base on Enceladus, the story centres about the base commander who discovers that religion is becoming popular as the base, which is against Soviet principles. His attempts to stamp out it occur when a major discovery is made, prompting new explorers to come from the Earth. But the new people bring news of changes on Earth, leading the commander to consider a new path for the base and for himself.

- "Kardashev's Palimpsest" by David Goodman: in the far, far, future, a Seeker recreates his earlier self to explore his beginning on Earth and his relation with a long-lost companion that, perhaps, is not lost forever.

- "The Peregrine Falcon Flies West" by Yang Wanqing, translated by Jay Zhang: a girl makes a trip to the west of China, on a fanciful desire to follow a falcon. But events in this warming world make a change when unknown aliens turn up and turn the climate around, but maybe not for the better in the long term for humanity. The girl, and her interest in birds and their intelligence, may be what is needed to break through and communicate with the aliens.

- "Why Don't We Just Kill the Kid In the Omelas Hole" by Isabel J. Kim: an unsettling story of a community people are happy and healthy, except for one child who must suffer in a hole. Then, the child is murdered, and disasters occurs until another child can be found who can suffer on behalf of the community. Conflicts break out between those who say the child must suffer and those who think the community are moral monsters for doing it.

- "The Beam Eidolon" by Ryan Marie Ketterer: a conscious planetary entity's peaceful existence is shattered when four people arrive to dig up its earth, cut up its forests and eat its creatures. Now the entity just wants to take revenge for its suffering.

- "Lonely Ghosts" by Meghan Feldman: a robotic planetary surveyor keeps asking an unseen entity exploring on a nearby moon whether it is along on the planet, for it is seeing the ghosts of its trainers, and now even doubts the existence of the other explorer.

[Alexandra · Rating 3 out of 5]

This issue was interesting, especially the short story by Isabel J. Kim. But there were too many underwhelming stories, so the overall rating will be 3 stars.

“Scalp” by H.H. Pak - janitors walk among people in tanks, who are living virtual lives. I think it’s supposed to be poignant, but I didn’t enjoy it at all. 2.5 stars.

“The Flowers That We Intend To Share” by Rajeev Prasad - the end of childhood, sentient mechs, flowers that drug you and creepy families. I liked the feel of this story. 3.9 stars.

“The Enceladus South Pole Base Named after V.I. Lenin” by Zohar Jacobs - an alternative history of sorts, with Soviet colonies on Saturn’s moons. It’s written as old school Soviet sci-fi, but it is subversive, of course. 3.8 stars.

“Kardashev’s Palimpsest” by David Goodman - of post humanity and love spanning millennia. I liked it! 4 stars.

“The Peregrine Falcon Flies West” by Yang Wanqing - This one is a nice mix of combating climate change, aliens, birds and bird-watching, and people refusing to conform. A cool story. 4 stars.

(It’s nice to see more Chinese sci-fi in Clarkesworld! Even when I don’t like a story, it’s still interesting to read something different from my “usual” sci-fi diet.)

“Why Don’t We Just Kill the Kid in the Omelas Hole” by Isabel J. Kim - a very vicious and brilliant dialogue with Le Guin’s famous short story. 4.5 stars.

“The Beam Eidolon” by Ryan Marie Ketterer - a story featuring a living planet and stupid humans. I’ve read similar stuff before. 3 stars.

“Lonely Ghosts” by Meghan Feldman - abandoned machine intelligences are trying to be less lonely. Nothing special, 3 stars.

[Mitticus · Rating 2 out of 5]

Nebula winner 2024 for short story : “Why Don’t We Just Kill the Kid in the Omelas Hole” by Isabel J. Kim

2.5 stars. Not my cuppa.

Basada en la famosa historia corta de Ursula K. LeGuin - The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas -, la autora se refiere al tema en forma sarcástica criticando la complacencia e hipocresía de la sociedad moderna.

and Omelas became the sort of city that killed people using painless lethal injection.

But that was okay, because it happened during the period of time while the kid wasn’t in the hole, so it was a fluke, the same way the typhoon was a fluke, the homophobia was a fluke, the Omelans being shitheads on social media was a fluke. It was something that could only happen while Omelas wasn’t Omelas and was instead just like every other city with no load-bearing suffering child and many load-bearing suffering adults.

Tal vez sea el lenguaje coloquial lo que no me encajó del todo.

https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/kim_...

[Jackie]

Finally finished this issue after a loooong break. May as well share my opinions on all the stories (I see most of the reviews are from people who read IJK's story for awards, which is valid). I read the first three stories back in June so I don't remember them as well.

"Scalp" by H.H. Pak: Pretty good.

"The Flowers That We Intend to Share" by Rajeev Prasad: Felt rough to me but I don't remember exactly why.

"The Enceladus South Pole Base Named after V.I. Lenin" by Zohar Jacobs: This one was good. Poignant.

"Kardashev's Palimpsest" by David Goodman: Not bad but felt too much like a retread of Diaspora by Greg Egan for me to really love it

"The Peregrine Falcon Flies West" by Yang Wanqing, translated by Jay Zhang: Solid but not much else to say

"Why Don't We Just Kill the Kid In the Omelas Hole" by Isabel J. Kim: a reread because it made such a splash when it came out. It's really good.

"The Beam Eidolon" by Ryan Marie Ketterer: Meh. Didn't do a lot for me.

"Lonely Ghosts" by Meghan Feldman: Fine, cute, not very innovative.

[Valentine · Rating 4 out of 5]

Trying very hard to catch up with my 2024 Clarkesworld issues. This was honestly a really good one!

Standouts for me were
- 'The Enceladus South Pole Base Named After V.I. Lenin' by Zohar Jacobs (always love some Slavic sci-fi and I am especially a big fan of the word cosmonaut)
- 'Kardashev's Palimpsest' by David Goodman (big fan of the fated lovers who meet in every lifetime trope)
- 'Why Don't We Just Kill the Kid in the Omelas Hole' by Isabel J. Kim (you need to know about the original story by Ursula K Le Guin to really enjoy it, but regardless a great read)

[Thia Reads A Lot]

A fine issue. I picked it up because of "Why Don't We Just Kill the Kid in the Omelas Hole", which is nominated for some awards, but I lack some context to fully appreciate it, it seems. I really liked "Kardashev's Palimpsest" (humans becoming digital, thus immortal, Dee searching for Vee until the end of the universe) and "Lonely Ghosts" (robots finding companionship after Last Contact), as well as the two interviews. I DNFed the essay "Eeriecology: What Nature Remembers and What It Tells Us".

[Pau Lethani · Rating 3 out of 5]

Review of Why Don't We Just Kill the Kid in the Omelas Hole by Isabel J. Kim.

Hmm quite interesting but didn't connect with it. I had to read the original short story written by Ursula K. Le Guin to have the full context. I'm not sure, I feel like this could have been much more impactful than it was for me.

[Alana · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just the Kim story

[Dimitar Dakovski]

"Why Don't We Just Kill the Kid In the Omelas Hole" by Isabel J. Kim ★★★★

[Zoe]

Hugo and Nebula award finalist for best short story:
“Why Don’t We Just Kill the Kid in the Omelas Hole” by Isabel J. Kim - pretty good!

[Kathryn Atreides · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read "Why Don't We Just Kill the Kid in the Omelas Hole" by Isabel J. Kim

[elle · Rating 4 out of 5]

STANDOUTS:

Lonely Ghosts by Meghan Feldman — I love it when a short story destroys me. Hauntingly beautiful writing + buddy robots and feelings.

The Enceladus South Pole Base Named after V.I. Lenin by Zohar Jacobs — LOVED THIS. Beautifully atmospheric + I adore scifi that delves into the messy sociological side of Space Pioneer Science Communities. Faith and belief and looking for a cause. Great prose. Extremely up my alley

Why Don't We Just Kill the Kid In the Omelas Hole by Isabel J Kim — Ok this was a banger. Kim gets it!!! For real!! The only valid way to write about Omelas.

(my arbitrary 4 stars rating mostly applies to these stories. The rest wasn't Bad, but forgettable overall)

Everything else:

Kardashev's Palimpsest by David Goodman — I'll bet someone out there loves this to bits. Love through realities, or something like it! Unfortunately it's aggressively not my thing.

Scalp by H.H. Pak — This hits. Solid read overall.

The Beam Eidolon by Ryan Marie Ketterer — This is mid at best. Cool POV premise, but everything else is meh.

The Flowers That We Intend To Share by Rajeev Prasad — Not Good verging on Bad. The characters are unbelievably flat and I couldn't even make it to the end without skimming.

The Peregrine Falcon Flies West by Yang Wanqing — Wasn't life changing or anything, but I enjoyed it.

[Eric Juneau · Rating 2 out of 5]

Another selection in trying to understand how to write a short story. I'm trying to alternate novels with short story compilations so I can stay on task. The stories in here are, well, meh. They're better than the O. Henry collections which are all literary and obfuscating for the sake of "beautiful prose". Science fiction can be harder to understand, depending on the concept at the heart.