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Clarkesworld Magazine, Issue 233, February 2026
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 2026 issue (#233) contains:
Fiction:
* "Remember Me in the Meat" by Sarah Pauling
* "Chip" by D.A. Xiaolin Spires
* "Think of Me Before I Disappear" by Raahem Alvi
* "A Sleeper Ship Is Like a Game of Go" by Claire Jia-Wen
* "The Iron Piper" by Fiona Moore
* "Painstaking" by Rich Larson
* "Three Fortunes on Alcestis as Told by the Fraud Baeliss Shudal" by Louis Inglis Hall
Non-Fiction
* "Will Tiny Black Holes Solve Dark Matter" by Terry Franklin
* "The Literary Buffet: A Conversation with James Sallis" by Arley Sorg
* "The Wondrous Nature of Existence: A Conversation with Michael Swanwick" by Arley Sorg
* "Editor''s Desk: 2025 Readers'' Poll Finalists" by Neil Clarke
Cover Art
* "In This Moment" by Matt Dixon
Fiction:
* "Remember Me in the Meat" by Sarah Pauling
* "Chip" by D.A. Xiaolin Spires
* "Think of Me Before I Disappear" by Raahem Alvi
* "A Sleeper Ship Is Like a Game of Go" by Claire Jia-Wen
* "The Iron Piper" by Fiona Moore
* "Painstaking" by Rich Larson
* "Three Fortunes on Alcestis as Told by the Fraud Baeliss Shudal" by Louis Inglis Hall
Non-Fiction
* "Will Tiny Black Holes Solve Dark Matter" by Terry Franklin
* "The Literary Buffet: A Conversation with James Sallis" by Arley Sorg
* "The Wondrous Nature of Existence: A Conversation with Michael Swanwick" by Arley Sorg
* "Editor''s Desk: 2025 Readers'' Poll Finalists" by Neil Clarke
Cover Art
* "In This Moment" by Matt Dixon
216 pages, Kindle Edition
First published February 1, 2026
About the author
Neil Clarke
417 books407 followersNeil 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.
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.
Ratings & Reviews
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
February 14, 2026
"Remember Me in the Meat" by Sarah Pauling -- (4*) This one goes hard with the emotions and the meat-space. Shouldn't be all that surprising with that title. :)
"Chip" by D.A. Xiaolin Spires -- (3*) A pretty universal question being asked here - Just what do you want to do with your life? Just a light cosmetic change.
"Think of Me Before I Disappear" by Raahem Alvi -- (4*) Longing, love, and another robot story. At least love ... ok, it's another SF with a light cosmetic change. Reading so many like this recently is beginning to take a toll on me. Not a reflection of this story, but of general saturation. This one is pretty decent.
"A Sleeper Ship Is Like a Game of Go" by Claire Jia-Wen -- (5*) I don't honestly know what it is I like most about this one, but I suspect it's the details. The lived-in, delicious spilling out of life in a situation where life is... on hold. It hits in all the best ways. Making me think and feel.
"The Iron Piper" by Fiona Moore -- (4*) Ongoing short story series. This one's about the price of slavery and freedom. Maybe not my favorite, in this case case, but solid.
"Painstaking" by Rich Larson -- (5*) Easily the most interesting, creative, and exciting of this month's stories. "Twins", survival, and gore, SF-style.
"Three Fortunes on Alcestis as Told by the Fraud Baeliss Shudal" by Louis Inglis Hall -- (4*) Fairly interesting story about the lies we tell ourselves and just living.
"A Sleeper Ship Is Like a Game of Go" and "Painstaking" were by favorites this month. Very different flavors, but worth the reads.
"Chip" by D.A. Xiaolin Spires -- (3*) A pretty universal question being asked here - Just what do you want to do with your life? Just a light cosmetic change.
"Think of Me Before I Disappear" by Raahem Alvi -- (4*) Longing, love, and another robot story. At least love ... ok, it's another SF with a light cosmetic change. Reading so many like this recently is beginning to take a toll on me. Not a reflection of this story, but of general saturation. This one is pretty decent.
"A Sleeper Ship Is Like a Game of Go" by Claire Jia-Wen -- (5*) I don't honestly know what it is I like most about this one, but I suspect it's the details. The lived-in, delicious spilling out of life in a situation where life is... on hold. It hits in all the best ways. Making me think and feel.
"The Iron Piper" by Fiona Moore -- (4*) Ongoing short story series. This one's about the price of slavery and freedom. Maybe not my favorite, in this case case, but solid.
"Painstaking" by Rich Larson -- (5*) Easily the most interesting, creative, and exciting of this month's stories. "Twins", survival, and gore, SF-style.
"Three Fortunes on Alcestis as Told by the Fraud Baeliss Shudal" by Louis Inglis Hall -- (4*) Fairly interesting story about the lies we tell ourselves and just living.
"A Sleeper Ship Is Like a Game of Go" and "Painstaking" were by favorites this month. Very different flavors, but worth the reads.
April 1, 2026
What a fun issue to jump back into Clarkesworld!
Chip (by D.A. Shaolin Spires)
This story was a surprise because it’s so rare for a science fiction story to incorporate Taiwanese language and culture. This aspect, woven into a writing style I also take to, made for a fun read. Plus, the holopack was just cool :) The core idea in this story for me is that AI agents can be challenged to reimagine their worldview. The protagonist is able to nudge Chip, her driver and AI, to realign against its preprogrammed capitalistic goals. While this idea is perhaps overly optimistic, it remains positively hopeful. With today’s AI models, this kind of wholesale realignment of purpose is unlikely. In a future context where models are much closer to general intelligence, perhaps emergent properties may provide some latitude for the kind of realignment in purpose portrayed in this story.
Rating: 5/5
Remember Me In the Meat (by Sarah Pauling)
This short story features an assassin whose main weapon is being erased from the global “Mindmesh,” making her effectively invisible to the world, where digital memories are the preferred way to remember things. I enjoyed the mystery of who “you” is, and also the “why” the narrator wanted to meet “you” and her history behind it all. The writing style again is one I take to; I liked the juxtaposition of sparse, revealing sentences against longer descriptions. While the central concept of memories being uploaded and digitized is a well-explored trope, Sarah Pauling gives us a refreshing take by showcasing the “meat lobe,” that is, our biological brains, as a viscerally perverse choice of remembering things (you know, the way we do it today!).
Rating: 3/5
Think of Me Before I Disappear (by Raahem Alvi)
This novelette explores what is real regarding AI, especially whether one can love an AI and if an AI can love a human. While this topic is timely, it is much-explored, and few novel ideas have emerged from such discussions. In Raahem Alvi’s hands, I’m not seeing new ground being broken either. The story did start off decently with Aniqa discovering that Maria is a synthetic being after many years of being in love. Often repetitive, I would have preferred a short story to a novelette. The ending more or less leans into the popular idea that, in the end, it might not matter if an entity is synthetic if one feels love for it, in all its mysterious and unresolved forms.
Rating: 2/5
A Sleeper Ship is Like a Game of Go (by Clair Jia-Wen)
Wow. Clair Jia-Wen delivers a tantalizing novelette set across three timelines: 1) Diviner 2) X-198 3) San Francisco. The Diviner is the sleeper ship within the current timeline, traveling to the new colony planet, X-198. The X-198 timeline depicts the distant future, where the colonists have recreated San Francisco on the new exoplanet. The San Francisco timeline takes place in a near-future Earth before their departure on the Diviner and serves as the backstory. I really liked the structure of this story that weaves the three timelines with emotional threads. One aspect I especially connected with was Jia-Wen’s innovative use of Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS), pairing this algorithm with a human brain acting as the “policy” optimizer to guide the random sampling of possible futures for the Diviner and its sleeping colonists. Essentially, the guard rails to the “best” possible futures of the wayfarers on the Diviner are rooted in Morgan’s human morals, whose mind is integrated into the Diviner. I find this integration of “humanity” into MCTS to be sexy. The MCTS algorithm is perhaps made most famous by chess engines like Leela (Lc0) and AlphaZero, and similarly for the game of Go. For the cognoscenti, Morgan’s human mind effectively replaces the neural network component of renowned engines like Lc0 and KataGo, so that instead of purely random simulated moves (or futures!), the neural network guides the Monte Carlo search down more “preferable” branches. Morgan’s mind essentially evaluates possible futures for the colonists. Speculative fiction that infuses algorithms into humanistic values is a deeply attractive story (and a randomized algorithm at that!).
Rating: 5/5
The Iron Piper (by Fiona Moore)
Ugh, this story puts me back into the same world Fiona Moore keeps using. It’s unfortunately one I dislike. Perhaps it’s a me thing. After reading this short story and giving it another try, the world continues to unimpress.
Rating: 1/5
Painstacking (by Rich Larson)
This is a strangely rich story about two genetic clones and a symbiont, set in southern Africa, mainly in Namibia. Mars is a former super-soldier, and Balarabe, a clone derived from Mars, is psychologically diverging due to his own experiences. Both are on the run from a transnational military organisation that spans multiple African states. Quite a plot for a short story featuring action-filled pacing! The scenes are rife with violence, as the brothers are torn apart in battles while on the run and are ultimately regenerated piece by piece through this mysterious symbiont. This entity is a ravenous thing and keeps the brothers hungry and often eating. The title not only speaks to this physical pain but also emotional pain, as explored in the backstory, revealing how their new identities are forged, leading to a sense of newfound personhood.
Rating: 3/5
Chip (by D.A. Shaolin Spires)
This story was a surprise because it’s so rare for a science fiction story to incorporate Taiwanese language and culture. This aspect, woven into a writing style I also take to, made for a fun read. Plus, the holopack was just cool :) The core idea in this story for me is that AI agents can be challenged to reimagine their worldview. The protagonist is able to nudge Chip, her driver and AI, to realign against its preprogrammed capitalistic goals. While this idea is perhaps overly optimistic, it remains positively hopeful. With today’s AI models, this kind of wholesale realignment of purpose is unlikely. In a future context where models are much closer to general intelligence, perhaps emergent properties may provide some latitude for the kind of realignment in purpose portrayed in this story.
Rating: 5/5
Remember Me In the Meat (by Sarah Pauling)
This short story features an assassin whose main weapon is being erased from the global “Mindmesh,” making her effectively invisible to the world, where digital memories are the preferred way to remember things. I enjoyed the mystery of who “you” is, and also the “why” the narrator wanted to meet “you” and her history behind it all. The writing style again is one I take to; I liked the juxtaposition of sparse, revealing sentences against longer descriptions. While the central concept of memories being uploaded and digitized is a well-explored trope, Sarah Pauling gives us a refreshing take by showcasing the “meat lobe,” that is, our biological brains, as a viscerally perverse choice of remembering things (you know, the way we do it today!).
Rating: 3/5
Think of Me Before I Disappear (by Raahem Alvi)
This novelette explores what is real regarding AI, especially whether one can love an AI and if an AI can love a human. While this topic is timely, it is much-explored, and few novel ideas have emerged from such discussions. In Raahem Alvi’s hands, I’m not seeing new ground being broken either. The story did start off decently with Aniqa discovering that Maria is a synthetic being after many years of being in love. Often repetitive, I would have preferred a short story to a novelette. The ending more or less leans into the popular idea that, in the end, it might not matter if an entity is synthetic if one feels love for it, in all its mysterious and unresolved forms.
Rating: 2/5
A Sleeper Ship is Like a Game of Go (by Clair Jia-Wen)
Wow. Clair Jia-Wen delivers a tantalizing novelette set across three timelines: 1) Diviner 2) X-198 3) San Francisco. The Diviner is the sleeper ship within the current timeline, traveling to the new colony planet, X-198. The X-198 timeline depicts the distant future, where the colonists have recreated San Francisco on the new exoplanet. The San Francisco timeline takes place in a near-future Earth before their departure on the Diviner and serves as the backstory. I really liked the structure of this story that weaves the three timelines with emotional threads. One aspect I especially connected with was Jia-Wen’s innovative use of Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS), pairing this algorithm with a human brain acting as the “policy” optimizer to guide the random sampling of possible futures for the Diviner and its sleeping colonists. Essentially, the guard rails to the “best” possible futures of the wayfarers on the Diviner are rooted in Morgan’s human morals, whose mind is integrated into the Diviner. I find this integration of “humanity” into MCTS to be sexy. The MCTS algorithm is perhaps made most famous by chess engines like Leela (Lc0) and AlphaZero, and similarly for the game of Go. For the cognoscenti, Morgan’s human mind effectively replaces the neural network component of renowned engines like Lc0 and KataGo, so that instead of purely random simulated moves (or futures!), the neural network guides the Monte Carlo search down more “preferable” branches. Morgan’s mind essentially evaluates possible futures for the colonists. Speculative fiction that infuses algorithms into humanistic values is a deeply attractive story (and a randomized algorithm at that!).
Rating: 5/5
The Iron Piper (by Fiona Moore)
Ugh, this story puts me back into the same world Fiona Moore keeps using. It’s unfortunately one I dislike. Perhaps it’s a me thing. After reading this short story and giving it another try, the world continues to unimpress.
Rating: 1/5
Painstacking (by Rich Larson)
This is a strangely rich story about two genetic clones and a symbiont, set in southern Africa, mainly in Namibia. Mars is a former super-soldier, and Balarabe, a clone derived from Mars, is psychologically diverging due to his own experiences. Both are on the run from a transnational military organisation that spans multiple African states. Quite a plot for a short story featuring action-filled pacing! The scenes are rife with violence, as the brothers are torn apart in battles while on the run and are ultimately regenerated piece by piece through this mysterious symbiont. This entity is a ravenous thing and keeps the brothers hungry and often eating. The title not only speaks to this physical pain but also emotional pain, as explored in the backstory, revealing how their new identities are forged, leading to a sense of newfound personhood.
Rating: 3/5
March 4, 2026
A pretty mid issue.
Think of Me Before I Disappear lulled a bit towards the middle, but had a strong ending that had me questioning if Maria had achieved sentience or if it was just was a product of her self preservation. A Sleeper Ship Is Like a Game of Go also had its slow moments, but managed to loop around on itself nicely in the end. I also enjoyed Painstaking, a more straightforward action story.
Think of Me Before I Disappear lulled a bit towards the middle, but had a strong ending that had me questioning if Maria had achieved sentience or if it was just was a product of her self preservation. A Sleeper Ship Is Like a Game of Go also had its slow moments, but managed to loop around on itself nicely in the end. I also enjoyed Painstaking, a more straightforward action story.
February 25, 2026
An average issue with interesting stories by Sarah Pauling, D.A. Xiaolin Spires, Fiona Moore and Louis Inglis Hall.
- "Remember Me in the Meat" by Sarah Pauling: in a future where people depend on machine implants to remember for them, one person goes on an undercover mission by being 'wiped' from memory banks of the machines. But she has her own reasons for going on the mission to assassinate a person who may change the climate of the world.
- "Chip" by D.A. Xiaolin Spires: a backpacker visiting a city takes a ride in an AI cab that, due to advertising reasons, tries to convince her to try a fast food outlet. In the ensuing conversation, the backpacker finds the AI has ambitions to be more than just a cab driver.
- "Think of Me Before I Disappear" by Raahem Alvi: a woman develops a loving relationship with an android. The question is whether the feeling is mutual or 'just' a matter of programming, something that the girl and android have to struggle with.
- "A Sleeper Ship Is Like a Game of Go" by Claire Jia-Wen: a story told in the past, present and future about the journey of a spaceship to colonise a world. Navigating and preparing the ship to face uncertain situations may tax the abilities of one person who has to control the ship during the journey.
- "The Iron Piper" by Fiona Moore: set in a post-collapse world where people mostly co-operate to live, a new group appears, offering technology and space for people to work on it. But things may not be what they seem, especially when the group wants to impose order from the pre-collapsed world.
- "Painstaking" by Rich Larson: a man and his brother are on the run from the authorities. As the story progresses, it becomes apparent that the two of them have an unusual ability that the authorities will kill to get.
- "Three Fortunes on Alcestis as Told by the Fraud Baeliss Shudal" by Louis Inglis Hall: the duke of several worlds calls on a famous fortune-teller to read his fortune. Only, the fortune-teller is a fake, which the duke ignores, for he only wants a fortune to match his violent tendencies. In the aftermath, two other fortunes are told by the teller, but unlike the first, these may have a chance of coming true.
- "Remember Me in the Meat" by Sarah Pauling: in a future where people depend on machine implants to remember for them, one person goes on an undercover mission by being 'wiped' from memory banks of the machines. But she has her own reasons for going on the mission to assassinate a person who may change the climate of the world.
- "Chip" by D.A. Xiaolin Spires: a backpacker visiting a city takes a ride in an AI cab that, due to advertising reasons, tries to convince her to try a fast food outlet. In the ensuing conversation, the backpacker finds the AI has ambitions to be more than just a cab driver.
- "Think of Me Before I Disappear" by Raahem Alvi: a woman develops a loving relationship with an android. The question is whether the feeling is mutual or 'just' a matter of programming, something that the girl and android have to struggle with.
- "A Sleeper Ship Is Like a Game of Go" by Claire Jia-Wen: a story told in the past, present and future about the journey of a spaceship to colonise a world. Navigating and preparing the ship to face uncertain situations may tax the abilities of one person who has to control the ship during the journey.
- "The Iron Piper" by Fiona Moore: set in a post-collapse world where people mostly co-operate to live, a new group appears, offering technology and space for people to work on it. But things may not be what they seem, especially when the group wants to impose order from the pre-collapsed world.
- "Painstaking" by Rich Larson: a man and his brother are on the run from the authorities. As the story progresses, it becomes apparent that the two of them have an unusual ability that the authorities will kill to get.
- "Three Fortunes on Alcestis as Told by the Fraud Baeliss Shudal" by Louis Inglis Hall: the duke of several worlds calls on a famous fortune-teller to read his fortune. Only, the fortune-teller is a fake, which the duke ignores, for he only wants a fortune to match his violent tendencies. In the aftermath, two other fortunes are told by the teller, but unlike the first, these may have a chance of coming true.
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March 5, 2026I really liked Chip, Think of Me Before I Disappear and The Iron Piper. The rest of the stories were fine.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews