Clarkesworld #228, September 2025
“Abstraction Is When I Design Giant Death Creatures and Attraction Is When I Do It for You” by Claire Jia-Wen
“Wireworks” by Sheri Singerling
“Four People I Need You to Kill Before the Dance Begins” by Louis Inglis Hall
“Aperture” by Alexander Jablokov
“The Fury of the Glowmen” by David McGillveray
“Five Impossible Things” by Koji A. Dae
“A World of Their Own” by Robert Falco
Reviewed by Axylus
As the title spells out, “Abstraction Is When I Design Giant Death Creatures and Attraction Is When I Do It for You” is about intense relationships and immense monsters, but the emphasis is firmly on the former. Claire Jia-Wen deftly packs more emotional realism and detailed world building into just under 6k words than many stories achieve in three times that length. The protagonist, Fiona, designs hybrid kaiju-like beasts, which are bioengineered and “flesh printed” into giant monsters called Mongos. The Mongos are then thrown into battle against human-piloted fighter “mechas” for immensely popular entertainment, viewed by civilizations in several galaxies. Profits from advertising are the economic backbone of their world. Fiona’s personal relationships with her younger sister, Alyssa, and a superstar mecha pilot named Val are in implicit conflict. Alyssa rebels against the world order, while Val is an iconic (but disposable) emblem of the system. This tension is resolved in a painful and costly manner. The story could be read on one level as an anti-establishment critique of shallow, exploitative pop culture, and on another as an explication of dysfunctional or broken relationships. There are a few bones to pick: The speculative element, while interesting, feels peripheral to the plot. The protagonist is not the active character; her reactive stance drains the story of energy and tension. She also never realizes that her moral core is indistinguishable from Val’s, to the detriment of the tale’s emotional arc. And Alyssa takes a very drastic behind-the-scenes action, but exactly what she had hoped to accomplish is never clear. The story’s biggest virtue may be its admirably compact and effective prose. Recommended.
Calista, the protagonist of “Wireworks” by Sheri Singerling, is grieving the recent loss of her mother. Her father is restrictive and somewhat harsh, and Calista suspects his unloving nature drove her mother to take her own life. Seeking distraction, she goes to a traveling fair or “Cyber Circus”. There she meets a robot (an “auta”) that has designed a life-changing brain implant, in the form of an easily-attached chip, designed to alleviate mental health problems. Callista accepts one and her grief is completely relieved. At the robot’s urging, she surreptitiously places a chip behind her father’s ear while he sleeps. Not long after, though, we see that the chip carries an unexpected price.
A story about an ephemeral troupe of dancers, “Four People I Need You to Kill Before the Dance Begins” by Louis Inglis Hall, almost never puts a foot wrong. The pacing of this novelette might be a touch slow for some readers, and it arguably fails to stick the landing. But the world it contains—a verdant enclave within a post-apocalyptic ice age—is vivid, fully-developed, and tailor-made for both a sense of mono no aware and a round of creation through destruction. In this tale, travelers from another planet built a palace for their own entertainment on an earth-like planet. In it, biologically engineered creatures known as Mayflies dance for the pleasure of the powerful, dying after a space of perhaps three months, and being replaced. Mayflies do not have mouths large enough for speech, and are as light of frame as their namesakes. However, each disposable life is not as fleeting as it seems, nor are some as devoted as their masters believe. If I have one reservation about the story, it is its missed opportunities. The events presented several landing spaces ripe for an emotional peak or crescendo, none of which seemed fully utilized. The ending in particular seemed less than fully articulated, to this reader at least. But this is a memorable story nonetheless. Definitely recommended for those who don’t mind its serene pace and subdued tone.
“Aperture” by Alexander Jablokov is a novelette-length anecdote—not a story, by my definition at least—in which the robust descriptions of the science behind the setting and the immediate believability of each moment the protagonist recounts are negated by a lack of storytelling. Although its characters are realistic, it almost seems as though the descriptions of science and setting are the entire point of the text. The protagonist, Prosper, is a “Placemaker” on Ecbatan, an abandoned habitation formed from an asteroid. He is part of a crew that is rehabilitating it for resettling. Prosper has a minor conflict with another character, the team successfully completes their mission, and several of its members (including Prosper) stay on as settlers. The difference between an anecdote and a story is that the former describes a series of events deemed noteworthy, while the latter is at its most atomic level a cause-and-effect chain of such events, leading to a resolution. No events in “Aperture” have consequences.
“The Fury of the Glowmen” by David McGillveray presents a future in which roughly half of the world’s population are “wired”, that is, interconnected via a surgically implanted neural net. This allows them to access floods of data, including virtual worlds. The Prime Minster of Malaysia, Bina Bakar, attempts to destroy a sentient military AI called Syurga that her country’s scientists have created. The attempt fails, and the furious Syurga takes vengeance upon humanity via virtual glowing men. They can overload the minds of anyone who is wired, causing death, and have some effect on the unwired as well. Seen through the eyes of the Prime Minister and an unwired female college student named Marla, the story is structured as a familiar cautionary tale aimed at the dangers of internet addiction and the inhumanity of world leaders who recklessly pursue hyper-effective military technology. However, neither Syurga’s exaggerated rants nor the interaction of any human characters provides the emotional resonance to drive its premises home.
“Five Impossible Things” by Koji A. Dae is another virtual reality tale, here set in a virtual world called Vtora Sviat (“second world” in Bulgarian). Vtora Sviat offers permanent Citizenship to those who pass a rigorous set of interviews designed to screen for applicants’ ability to successfully acculturate into VR. During the extended interview process, applicants are allowed intermittent access to Vtora Sviat, and their ability to adapt psychologically is assessed. Its protagonist, Alice, is bedridden in a hospice in the real world; during one interlude in reality she coughs blood all over her husband. She struggles to adapt, her thoughts frequently rejecting the impossibility of details and events in Vtora Sviat. She finds that success offers benefits that come at a price, and she makes her choice.
“A World of Their Own” by Robert Falco is set in a world ravaged by climate collapse and apocalyptic storms caused by its original occupants, the Creators. The Creators abandoned their world in rocket ships long ago, leaving behind mechanized caretakers. In recent decades, biomechanical versions of long-extinct animals such as magpies, snakes, and frogs have inexplicably emerged from the ruins of the Creators’ civilization. The caretakers are in an ongoing effort to relocate the biomechanical beings to sanctuaries for their preservation. The story presents the thoughts of one caretaker, Reco-2, as it spends a day navigating the considerable perils of this task. Despite its notable dangers, the day does not seem to be an atypical one in Reco-2’s existence, nor is Reco-2 atypical of its kind. Reco-2’s ruminations do not yield unexpected insights, and the ultimate fate of the emergent biomechanical creatures is not clearly shown. In the end, “A World of Their Own” is largely an exploration of an interesting setting that bears resemblance, however, to other post-apocalyptic tales.