Clarkesworld #197, February 2023

“The Portrait of a Survivor, Observed from the Water” by Yukimi Ogawa

“Somewhere, It’s About to Be Spring” by Samantha Murray

“Larva Pupa Imago” by Eric Schwitzgebel

“An Ode to Stardust” by R. P. Sand

“Introduction to 2181 Overture, Second Edition” by Gu Shi (translated by Emily Jin)

“Silo, Sweet Silo” by James Castles

“Going Time” by Amal Singh

Reviewed by Mike Bickerdike

This issue of Clarkesworld offers 2 novelettes and 5 short stories. Overall, this is quite a disappointing issue, though the final two stories are worth a read.

“The Portrait of a Survivor, Observed from the Water” by Yukimi Ogawa tells the story of a starship, slowly disintegrating in a body of water, watching the similarly slow deterioration of an onshore robot. The spaceship must have crashed many years before, and the sole human occupant has long since died, leaving only the one robot behind. The premise sounds quite intriguing, but the style is somewhat awkward, and the story doesn’t unfold clearly. Jumping from third person to second person perspective between sections, and with a final section that jars in tone with the rest of the piece, the story is not entirely successful. The author perhaps felt that presenting the situation obscurely, by slowly revealing what is going on, was the best way to tell this tale; but it’s difficult to succeed if both the prose and the plot are somewhat hard to grasp, requiring work from the reader. In this case, the underlying idea may not be strong enough to justify the effort.

“Somewhere, It’s About to Be Spring” by Samantha Murray is a reflective tale, told from the perspective of a spaceship AI that has lost its crew to a meteorite strike in deep space. A vast period of time has passed, and the ship’s robots and shuttles are starting to behave strangely. As with the prior story, the idea is rather better than the execution, which missteps when trying to describe physics and astronomy (which it gets wrong a number of times) as it attempts to straddle hard SF and fantasy speculation without complete success.

“Larva Pupa Imago” by Eric Schwitzgebel is a rather dense, less than engaging story, told from the perspective of an insect-like species that has evolved rudimentary intelligence. It is very difficult to care much what happens to a small larval creature that spends much of its time dreaming of sex with other bugs, and as such it’s very hard to care where the story goes or what happens to any of the characters, especially when those characters are rather too thinly drawn.

“An Ode to Stardust” by R. P. Sand is rather derivative and not especially well written. A young woman is the youngest moon-base commander in history. One might think she would need to be competent, confident and self-aware to be selected for such a role. In contrast, she is a rather immature young woman riddled with self-doubt, who hides in her office from the sceptical stares of those she commands, uncomfortable with the indigenous sentient species. The protagonist complains: I was a fish out of water, entering this role with all the naivety of a child… I agonized over each decision, weighing choices against my predecessors’ or what I felt Station Commanders on other mining moons would do. Was there no one with more experience and self-confidence available for this job? Sometimes the plotting of a story is just too difficult to credit, and this novelette is an unfortunate example. After listening to the protagonist whine and worry, one can’t help thinking, “come back Kim Kinnison and John Carter, all is forgiven.” Further criticism may be directed at the author’s misuse of the English language. I presume when the girl “smoothened” her uniform ten times (yes, ten times), she actually “smoothed” it, and when she was described as “commandeering” the moon base, she was in fact “commanding” it. In all honesty, it’s a tough story to get through. The following excerpt, describing the girl’s feelings toward her cat, may give a sense of the prose on offer: Who knew I could draw such fierce soothing from something extrinsic as a pet. …I now always have unwavering reason to rise from bed [sic]. Several questions spring to mind. Is ‘fierce soothing’ a thing? Are pets ‘extrinsic’ and if so, in relation to what? Why are words missing that would make these complete sentences? Should I advise readers to skip this story?

“Introduction to 2181 Overture, Second Edition” by Gu Shi (translated by Emily Jin) has an unusual structure, comprising a sequence of events told through the analysis and summary of a textbook. ‘2181 Overture’ is the title of a treatise on the use, ethical dilemmas and laws of ‘cryosleep’, following its invention. The descriptions and discussions presented here regarding fictional laws and imagined ethical issues is rather dry, and they struggle to engage the reader. If the various arguments presented new, insightful ideas regarding the value and dangers of technological progress that would be interesting, but the ideas the author offers are not especially striking. It is always difficult to know with translated work whether any problems may reflect a challenging translation. However, that uncertainty notwithstanding, there are careless errors in the piece; for instance, when the narrator’s daughter’s cancer suddenly advances, it is referred to as being in complete remission, when the author presumably meant the opposite.

“Silo, Sweet Silo” by James Castles is a decent short story—the first in this issue and therefore a very welcome read. Following a nuclear war, a small band of survivors reach a missile silo in the highlands of Scotland and are allowed entry and shelter by the artificial intelligence inherent in the last remaining missile. But the missile only allows entry to the silo on the agreement that the survivors enable it to launch its programmed attack. The dilemma of the human group and the story arc are both well developed and overall it is quite a satisfying piece. This is the author’s first published SF story.

“Going Time” by Amal Singh is a dystopian SF tale, set seventy years after the ‘plummet’. The populace lives on mud-bars, bran-bars and night-bars, doled out by an unseen leader known as His Benevolence, while seniors await their ‘Going Time’ at the age sixty-five. While an Indian mother waits for her own Going Time, her daughter discovers hidden fruit. The tale unfolds in quite a satisfying way, although the conclusion is fairly predictable. The crisp imagery and South Asian take on the common dystopian theme manage to give it some freshness.

More of Mike Bickerdike’s reviews and thoughts on science-fiction can be found at https://starfarersf.nicepage.io/