Clarkesworld Magazine, Issue 216, September 2024

by Neil Clarke (Editor), Marissa Lingen (Contributor), Tiffany Xue (Contributor)

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 September 2024 issue (#216) contains:

* Original fiction by Marissa Lingen ("The Music Must Always Play"), Tiffany Xue ("Fish Fear Me, You Need Me"), Laura Williams McCaffrey ("Broken"), Eric Schwitzgebel ("How to Remember Perfectly"), Cirilo Lemos ("The Children I Gave You, Oxalaia"), Ben Berman Ghan ("Those Who Remember the World"), Renan Bernardo ("A Theory of Missing Affections"), and R H Wesley ("A World of Milk and Promises").

* Non-fiction includes an article by Gunnar De Winter, interviews with Aliette de Bodard and A.C. Wise, and an editorial by Neil Clarke.

Genres: Science Fiction, Short Stories, Fantasy

190 pages, Kindle Edition

First published August 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

[Bradley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fiction:

The Music Must Always Play -- (3.75 stars) A short, interesting, first contact story that just managed to stick to the wistful. I kinda wish I knew what the groove sounded like.

Fish Fear Me, You Need ME -- (3.5 stars) Also short, this one barely has a tie to SF, just a hint of flooding. Otherwise, it's a fish story, a longing story, a willpower story, and eventually, just a story of acceptance. I guess I used to read a lot of these a while ago, so it's somewhat interesting to see it again.

Broken -- (4 stars) I tend to like these little claustrophobic, small scale perception SFs. A pilot and her obsession with her helmet. It feels very much like anything we are, staring at our phones. Oh, the helplessness if it gets broken!

How to Remember Perfectly -- (5 stars) This is the first in this month's stories that I think is beyond excellent. Gamifying memories in old people--it's beautiful, eerie, and more than subtly disturbing. The implications beyond this one good use is frankly terrifying. I totally recommend it.

The Children I gave you, Oxalaia -- (5 stars) Beautiful and ugly at the same time, this story of the home life of Venusians, or geckos, living in a slum-shelter after losing a battle with humans, is rather haunting. Yes, it's absolutely about poverty, racism, and colonialism, and it's gloriously alien, too.

Those Who Remember the World -- (5 stars) Woooo... I love me the weird of the New Weird. Or rather, is all fiction that has mycelium automatically weird? Or must it also have tentacles? Anyway, this was a great, strange mystery with a satisfying ending.

A Theory of Missing Affections -- (4 stars) This turned out to be a pretty cozy, even-headed SF archeology tale. Sometimes these really hit the spot. I really think we ought to have a lot more of these in general.

A world of Milk and Promises -- (4 stars) A short, strange little story about family. Really, really close family. :)


Non-Fiction:

A Genetic Recipe for Future Baby-Making -- A decent super-quick primer for genetics leading to -- you guessed it -- babies. With good SF biblios.

Disaster Queers and Romance: A Conversation with Aliette de Bodard -- A quick interview with the author.

Mashing Tropes: A Conversation with A.C. Wise -- Interesting short interview for a short fiction artist. :)

Editor's Desk: On Being Weightless -- A big Yay! for Neal. :)

[Cathy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nothing really stood out in the September issue. I liked most of the stories. Unfortunately the longest entry in this one, Those Who Remember the World, really wasn’t my cup of tea.

The Music Must Always Play (link) BY MARISSA LINGEN
👽👽👽👽☆
‘The aliens took a large part of Mankato, Minnesota, with them when they went.‘
‘… she found herself with the equivalent of an engraved mountain, covered inside and out with characters—symbols? pictures?—she had no native speaker to illuminate for her.‘
An alien ship crashes to Earth. Maryam has to try and decipher their language. But that‘s not all she has to deal with. Nice.

Fish Fear Me, You Need Me (link) BY TIFFANY XUE
🎣🎣🎣🎣☆
‘Mac comes in after running around the little island we live on—used to be ten laps, then it became twenty, now thirty—all sweaty and out of breath and says, “Good weather for fishing today.”‘
Dystopia, a drowned world. Survivors, someone searching, someone wishing. The fish are a little disturbing and hint at an unusual metamorphosis.

Broken (link) BY LAURA WILLIAMS MCCAFFREY
🪖🪖🪖🪖☆
“Flyer 247-3 hasn’t flown in five days.“
Her helmet is broken. The world is wrong. Perception, reality. A story moving back in time.

How to Remember Perfectly (link) BY ERIC SCHWITZGEBEL
“Joy catches my eye, shuffles my direction. Her face lights the dining room.“
⭐️⭐️☆☆☆
Octogenarians, mood enhancements. I didn‘t feel it.

The Children I Gave You, Oxalaia (link) BY CIRILO LEMOS, TRANSLATED BY THAMIRYS GÊNOVA
🦎🦎🦎☆☆; 7530 WORDS, NOVELETTE
“One of my oldest memories is of my mother, Maria das Dores, stirring a pot of pinto beans, the kitchen filled with smoke, while I crawled on the packed dirt floor.“
Refugees from Venus in a favela in Rio de Janeiro. A civil war on Venus? The refugees are similar to dinosaurs. Brazilian author. Alcoholism, domestic abuse, discrimination, poverty, violence. The author lost me in the second half due to the uneven pacing. This felt a lot longer than 26 pages.

Those Who Remember the World (link) BY BEN BERMAN GHAN
🦇🦇☆☆☆; 11910 WORDS, NOVELETTE
“The low rumble of the train cut through the night and the living flesh of The City, carrying its passengers ever further from the gleam of parliaments and providence.“
A living city. Mushrooms, fungal infections, human-animal hybrids bred by an AI. And a murder mystery. This is definitely very weird. If you like this kind of writing, you will love this. For me it was close to unreadable.

A Theory of Missing Affections (link) BY RENAN BERNARDO
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️☆
“The Injector of Lasting Vasoconstrictor Fluid for Eternal Wakefulness and Apprehension, or the Device of Ceaseless Panic.“
Another Brazilian author. A warp gate between two worlds is about to be closed. On one side is a historian/archaeologist researching a race of alien beings. On the other side is her religious sister, who considers those being holy and her sister‘s research as blasphemous. It took me roughly to the middle of the story until the coin dropped and I understood what the author was doing. Clever.

A World of Milk and Promises (link) BY R H WESLEY
🌸🌸🌸🌸☆
“When your little sister is born, will I tell her that we live inside your ribcage?“
Disaster, colonization, symbiosis. Interesting and different. Strange, but pretty.

None of the NON-FICTION really grabbed my interest. I skimmed all three of them.

[Howard · Rating 3 out of 5]

This monthly sf/fantasy magazine, typically about 200 pages. A mix of short stories (often represented in annual awards), A nonfiction article, A couple of author interviews, and a letter from the editor. A great way to stay current on the field, and the mix of stories appeal to me to varying degrees. I, personally, have not enjoyed the nonfiction articles, but they typically compromise about 5% of the content.

[Pontus Doverstav · Rating 3 out of 5]

A mostly good issue with a strong start, with only one story (sadly also the longest) not really being to my liking.

I enjoyed Fish fear me, you need me, it being a fairly simple but still interesting story set after civilization has collapsed.

That was followed by Broken - my favorite in this issue - a story about getting your tech issues solved in a world you're not familiar with interacting in, told in reverse chronological order.

How to remember perfectly had some promise, and it seemed like it was going in an interesting direction at the halfway point, only to then change course, which dissapointed me a bit.

Those who remember the world was the longest story and the one that felt most like a drag. While the setting was fairly interesting, the writing style did not vibe with me at all, and I found that there were words and punctuation missing, and some misspellings as well, making it mostly a chore to get through.

A theory of missing affection had some interesting world-building going on, but it felt like it never utilized it completely, but it was still a good read.

[Kam Yung Soh · Rating 3 out of 5]

An average issue, with interesting stories by Ben Berman Ghan and R H Wesley

- "The Music Must Always Play" by Marissa Lingen: an alien ship crashes on Earth. A linguist is tasked with trying to understand the alien's language, but it is the 'music' that she hears from the ship that would lead to a possible breakthrough, and a way for making the rest of humanity have an understanding of what the aliens are.

- "Fish Fear Me, You Need Me" by Tiffany Xue: in a future where water has flooded much of the world, two people go out fishing. But it is no ordinary fishing trip, for it appears that much of humanity have been turned into fish, and one man searches in vain for his wife.

- "Broken" by Laura Williams McCaffrey: a story, told in reverse, about repairing a broken virtual reality helmet. Only, the player has been in the virtual world for so long, it has become the Real World to her, and the real world is now just a shadow of reality.

- "How to Remember Perfectly" by Eric Schwitzgebel: two elderly people in a nursing home take a special treatment that enables them to change their mood and their memories. In the end, it is up to the reader to wonder if the abiilty was really worth it.

- "The Children I Gave You, Oxalaia" by Cirilo Lemos, translated by Thamirys Gênova: a story about alien refugees from Venus in a Brazilian favela. In this story, one of the alien refugee is caring for human children, and later strikes up a relationship with a human. But things change, when a war on Venus that caused the refugees to flee, is declared to be over. Now, the refugees are being forced to leave the favelas and return home. But for this refugee, Earth is home, setting up a confrontation with the authorities.

- "Those Who Remember the World" by Ben Berman Ghan: a death occurs in a city. But the cause of death may be a fungal infection, and an Investigator investigates. But as the story progresses, it becomes clearer that the Investigator isn't originally human and neither are the city's inhabitants, in a tale where the line between what is originally real and what was created by the city blurs.

- "A Theory of Missing Affections" by Renan Bernardo: a researcher of alien artefacts tries to convince her sister to join her on the alien's world before the gateway between their worlds is closed. But beliefs in the aliens' system of treating each other for an unknown purpose clashes with the needs of their family.

- "A World of Milk and Promises" by R H Wesley: the survivor of an accident while surveying an alien world discovers that life-forms there survive by cooperating with each other, rather than competing. This would have an effect on the development of the survivor's children.

[Bonnie McDaniel · Rating 3 out of 5]

This issue is a bit below Clarkesworld's usual quality, but there are two outstanding stories here. The first, "Broken," by Laura Williams McCaffrey, is a creepy and uniquely structured tale of Flyer 247-3, who we gradually realize is a human so caught up in her virtual-reality universe that she refers to it as the "real world" and other people as "shadows." After her helmet breaks, she must journey across a flooded and climate-change-ravaged city to get it repaired, and we see in this future, robots are running what remains of the world. The different structure of the story is that it is actually reading backwards, ending at the moment of her helmet failing. I had to read it twice to get the full impact, but it was worth going through again.

The second story, "A World of Milk and Promises" by R H Wesley, tells us the tale of a pregnant woman stranded on an alien planet after her space station breaks up and all her crewmates die, who then has to survive and raise her daughter alone. She gradually realizes this planet's ecosystem is based on cooperation and symbiosis instead of prey and predation, with the planet's organisms feeding each other. She and her daughter are gradually adopted into the alien ecosystem, until her daughter abruptly dies--but the child's bones keep on growing, creating a giant skull and ribcage that shelters her mother. The nameless woman also dies at the end, waiting to fully merge with the planet and perhaps meet her daughter again. This story is dense and layered in its exploration of a mother's love, and is amazingly Wesley's first published story, according to the author notes.

I didn't particularly care for the other stories in the issue, but these two are worth your time.

[Nore · Rating 3 out of 5]

A volume that was mostly a literal three stars: I liked it! Commentary here again. The first nonfiction article actually got me to read it properly this time; quick, simple little overview of the science of babymaking.

Favorite story: A World of Milk & Promises. 5 stars. One of the things I've really enjoyed in this magazine so far is encountering a story which, in just a few pages, sets up an entire world, a cast of characters, a conflict which is so believable and so intrinsically human that it comes to life before you've hit the final paragraph. This is one of those little stories. Beautiful, horrifying meditation on love and reciprocity and adaptation.

Runner-up: A Theory of Missing Affections. 4.5 stars. This is the type of story about aliens where there are no aliens I like to see - one where their presence is felt on the narrator and the world around her, where even when the aliens aren't the focus of the story, they're characters in their own rights. Fantastic little meditation on different worldviews, compromise, belonging, meaning-making, and what makes life worth living. Lots to chew on in a few pages. Honorable mention to Fish Fear Me, You Need Me, the closest thing to romance I've enjoyed in these volumes so far.

Least favorite story: Those Who Remember the World. This was like reading the worst parts of VanderMeer's prose distilled down into too many pages. I'm not sure if the ungrammatical structures were the author playing with prose or typos; either way, on top of cluttered, rambling descriptions and a deliberate obtuseness that masquerades as intellect, it wasn't for me! If you like that vibe and enjoy the idea of a living city, I'd recommend you check it out, though.

[Alexandra · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a nice and solid issue, with mostly good stories.

The Music Must Always Play by Marissa Lingen - an alien ship crash lands on Earth, and a team of scientists is studying it. A poignant story that I liked. 4 stars.

Fish Fear Me, You Need Me by Tiffany Xue - two guys are living on an island after an apocalyptic flood. The rest of humanity has turned into fish. Nice one. 4 stars.

Broken by Laura Williams McCaffrey - a fighter pilot whose life is in the VR must confront a different world when her helmet malfunctions. A story told backwards. This one pressed all my ”I’m ten years old and I am high on sci-fi” buttons! 4.8 stars.

How to Remember Perfectly by Eric Schwitzgebel - a story about aging, love, memories, and brain enhancements. Interesting, but it left me cold. 3 stars.

The Children I Gave You, Oxalaia by Cirilo Lemos – alien refugees in an alternative reality Brazil. Very good. 4.3 stars. It’s great that Clarkesworld is publishing more and more translated stories!

Those Who Remember the World by Ben Berman Ghan - mysteries in a futuristic city. Cool setting, very imaginative. 3.9 stars.

A Theory of Missing Affections by Renan Bernardo – research into a vanished alien civilization and sibling relationships. 4 stars.

A World of Milk and Promises by R H Wesley - a mystical story about a lone survivor on a planet where all life is symbiotic. An impressive story from a debut author! 4.3 stars.

[Rachel · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed all but one of the stories in this collection. I don't like to review all the stories, but I'd like to mention a few standouts for me.

Fish Fear Me, You Need Me by Tiffany Xue for keeping me interested whilst leaving me guessing.

How To Remember Carefully by Eric Schwitzgebel, for providing a concept that is simultaneously comforting and terrifying.

The Children I Gave You Oxalia by Cirilo Lemos (translated by Thamirys Gênova), for making me care about racism against Venusians and twisting in immigration, poverty and colonialism in such a short space. I didn't even notice this was one a longer story until reading reviews here.

[David H. · Rating 3 out of 5]

A much weirder issue of Clarkesworld than I'm used to, though for the right reader it's going to do a lot. I think I probably liked Marissa Lingen's "The Music Must Always Play" and Laura Williams McCaffrey's "Broken" the most.

[Elaysee · Rating 4 out of 5]

Enjoyed the Lingen story.

[Kristen · Rating 4 out of 5]

For Marissa Lingen's 'The Music Must Always Play'