Status Updates From Clarkesworld Magazine, Issu...

So far excellent and darkly funny and relatable. Also making me kind of want steak.

4 of 5 original stories read.

The Evolved Brain: A neuroscientist discusses the way the brain works: so dedicated to movement, and what the consequences of a better understanding of the brain has for SF.

A Collective Pseudonym: James SA Corey: An interview about working together. This Clarkesworld is a few months old, but I just heard JSAC on a recent episode of Sword and Laser. After reading this, moved Leviathon Wakes up in my To Read Queue.

The Shipmaker: A story of a designer of ships that have a cyborg birthed to command them. The ship's design needs to be perfect Feng Shui, but the next cyborg to be born is coming early. A beautiful story and one that takes place in a very interesting universe.

Events Preceding the Helvetican Renaissance: A SF story in which a monk undertakes an espionage mission. Pretty neat backstory is hinted at. Just about the right level of intrigue for a short story.

Milla - Someone is exploring a new planet and encounters an alien AI. Things go interestingly.....

Interchange - A group of workers upgrading a highway get into a time forwarded chunk of space to work on a stretch of highway without interrupting traffic. To the outside world, the highway will be upraded one second later. There's a glitch and the story takes off from there. Just like space miners, the blue collar folk end up in a terror situation so everyone else can profit from their labor.

Justice Systems in Quantum Parallel Probabilities - Explores a bunch of different ways we could orient the justice system if we were to start from scratch. Some are mere glimpses and some attack the straw man arguments that prop them up. This seems like it would be a great story to give first year law students as a reminder that our way isn't necessarily the only or best way, it's just the one we've ended up with.

A Series of Steaks - Very, very great fun story. This one by it self is worth the price of the issue. Depicts a future in which meat can be 3D printed cheaply (or cheaply enough that's it's not just universities doing it). It's a blackmail-based story. The characters were fun and the so was the conclusion to the story.

The Ghost Ship Anastasia - It's the space trope no character is ever wise to - you DO NOT inspect a distress call on a space ship! So of course things go pear-shaped. The specifics of this story involve ships run by AIs and an experimental Bioship in which the ship is partly metal and partly living matter.

A Series of Steaks by Vina Jie-Min Prasad was a 5* read for me.