Clarkesworld #82, July 2013

Reviewed by Bob Blough

I did not like this issue of the often fine Clarkesworld. However, I was glad to see that new writers are given chances to publish in professional magazines.

The first story is the best of the three. “Pockets Full of Stones” by Vajra Chandrasekera is a science fiction tale set on a space station in a future of true virtual reality via techno glasses. The station is the relay for communications from a generation starship sent into the void 80 years ago. The protagonist is the granddaughter of Rais who is the man communicating from the ship. She is bending the rules by attaching messages through the official relay to him on the generation ship and he is attaching messages in response. This time though, Rais nonchalantly mentions that they have made alien contact. This story has a kernel of an interesting idea of alien takeover. Unfortunately there is nothing that upholds interest in that idea. The writing strains to be interesting – bringing in Rais’s past and his grandaughter’s confusion as to why her Grandmother and Mother were left behind, but nothing is really important. Even the ending which should be moving merely signifies the end.

I have to say when I read the title of the next story I immediately thought – how pretentious can a title be? – and unfortunately it was mirrored in the story. “I Tell Thee All, I Can No More” by Sunny Moraine is told in second person with alternating sections in first person of an unnamed person who is a “dronesexual.” This is a person who has sex with drones. So immediately the story is weighted with political and military allusions. But the writing is so cold that I felt that Ms. Moraine was so taken by the central metaphor that she forgot to write an honest-to-god story around it. Again, an interesting idea but this time ruined by pretension.

After the first two stories I turned with apprehension to “Across the Terminator” by David Tallerman. It turned out to be a very serviceable if bland Analog-ish story of two bases on the moon. One is Chinese and the other American. There is the regular cold war tension between the two which is necessarily disrupted when a living organism is found in the lunar regolith. This is not an actively bad story but perhaps an even worse sort by being boring.

So, a story that almost works but doesn’t quite pull it off, an interesting idea betrayed by its pretension and a ho-hum story that could have been written 60 years ago. Clarkesworld is often a brilliant magazine. I mark down this issue as a fluke and look forward to the August issue.