Clarkesworld Magazine, Issue 237, June 2026

by Neil Clarke (Editor), Carrie Vaughn (Contributor), Claire Jia-Wen (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 June 2026 issue (#237) contains:

Fiction

• "Up the Line to Death" by Carrie Vaughn
• "The Potential Side Effects of Roleplay Stimulation Therapy" by Claire Jia-Wen
• "The Floating Republic" by Rebecca Campbell
• "Three Cases from the Cosmic Psychiatric Clinic" by Pan Haitian
• "A Life Measured in Seconds" by Anne Wilkins
• "Burning Day" by Samantha Murray
• "Ice, Rock, Empathy" by Damián Neri

Non-Fiction

• "Finite Resources & Congestion Charges: What Will EV Technology of the Future Actually Look Like?" by Kyle Tam
• "When The Future Catches Up To You: A Conversation with Naomi Kritzer" by Arley Sorg
• "To Know, and to Have a Choice: A Conversation with Isabel J. Kim" by Arley Sorg
• "Editor's Desk: One for the Team" by Neil Clarke

Cover Art

• "Migration" by Kristin Kest

217 pages, Kindle Edition

First published June 1, 2026

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

[Thia Reads A Lot]

"Burning Day" and "Up the Line to Death" very good, the rest fine. Both interviews very good.

[Kam Yung Soh · Rating 4 out of 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.

- "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.

- "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.

[Nico · Rating 5 out of 5]

Review and rating for novella “The Floating Republic” by Rebecca Campbell. This is an interesting short novella about a group of Martians and Company Men and their contractless children on a mining planet after a decades-long war. Some are legally deserters and others not. Really fascinating snapshots of the colonists of Gliz when they find out the war has ended and how they got here to begin with. It’s a great, even if sad, story with excellent character work in the short form.

[Jacob · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Floating Republic by Rebecca Campbell was a strong favorite this month, a tale of doing what you can with the whole world put on pause that I found incredibly compelling.

Three Cases from the Cosmic Psychiatric Clinic by Alan Haitian was a solid runner up though, I loved the lighthearted tone of it, and I feel like the subtleties like that don’t always survive the translation process, a testament to the work of translator and the author.

[Brendan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Three Cases from the Cosmic Psychiatric Clinic was the standout story for me in this collection. The black comedy of a seemingly amoral space psychiatrist solving problems in highly dubious ways was pretty fun.

The low point for me was probably the first story, Up the Line to Death, which mostly seemed like a somewhat corny retread of the wargames line "A strange game. The only winning move is not to play."

A Life Measured in Seconds was also quite interesting to me, though it left me wishing it was a bit longer. I want more of this dystopia of AI-overseer arbitrarily augmenting children into gods!