Clarkesworld #189, June 2022
“Company Town” by Aimee Ogden
“Manjar dos Deuses” by Anna Martino
“Inhuman Lovers” by Chen Qian
“Marsbodies” by Adele Gardner
“The Art of Navigating an Affair in a Time Rift” by Nika Murphy
“The Odyssey Problem” by Chris Willrich
“We Built This City” by Marie Vibbert
Reviewed by Victoria Silverwolf
Five short stories and two novelettes, one newly translated into English, appear in this issue.
“Company Town” by Aimee Ogden features two women who live together but who have very different lives. One works a low-paying job in a near future dominated by an all-powerful corporation. She and her fellow workers secretly plan to go on strike, but their scheme is blocked by their employers.
The other frequently journeys into a world of magic, to do battle with the forces of evil. Their two contrasting existences come together when the worker seizes the warrior’s enchanted weapon, ready to use it against the corporation.
The combination of traditional heroic fantasy and dystopian science fiction is not always a graceful one. Discussions of goblins and wolf-men clash with realistic descriptions of everyday life among the working poor. The author may be trying to say that an ordinary person can be as heroic as the protagonist of a fantasy adventure, but the story fails to suspend the reader’s disbelief.
The main character in “Manjar dos Deuses” by Anna Martino is a chef who uses his clients’ strongest food memories, collected from pieces of their hair, to create dishes that will elicit their finest emotions. He performs the same service for hospice patients, allowing them to enjoy the comfort of a beloved meal from their youth. His attempt to do this for his dying mother, a bitter woman who never provided decent food for her children, ends in failure, until he understands the true meaning of her memory of the dessert that gives the story its title.
Although the premise sounds like pure fantasy, the text treats it as a form of advanced technology. It strains credibility to suggest that a strand of hair could allow others to experience one’s memories in vivid sensory detail. Other than this quibble, the story is a simple, heartwarming one, verging on sentimentality.
“Inhuman Lovers” by Chen Qian, translated from Chinese by Carmen Yiling Yan, is a futuristic crime story in which two police officers moonlight as unofficial private detectives. They accept an assignment to investigate the disappearance of a humanoid robot belonging to a wealthy woman. It soon becomes clear that their client is herself a highly advanced android. The solution to the mystery involves the bloody slaughter of several people by a rogue android and an old adversary of one of the detectives.
The story has the flavor of cyberpunk as well as hard-boiled crime fiction. Its themes and settings are likely to remind readers of the film Blade Runner. For Western readers, seeing these genres through the eyes of an Eastern writer is something of a novelty. Otherwise, these tropes may seem familiar, although the work is an effective example of its kind.
In “Marsbodies” by Adele Gardner, astronauts remain in suspended animation in orbit around Mars while their minds are copied into robots that prepare the planet for later colonization. A crisis forces the mechanized explorers to decide whether to return their minds to their bodies, which may already be dead. Remaining in robot bodies on Mars may doom their fleshly forms, but returning may end their existence as conscious machines.
If this synopsis sounds confused, that may be because I found the premise difficult to follow. I was never clear if the consciousnesses of the astronauts was transferred from their bodies, or duplicated. Much of the story deals with the narrator’s unrequited love for another astronaut, which is less interesting than the speculative content.
“The Art of Navigating an Affair in a Time Rift” by Nika Murphy features a woman who experiences different versions of her life as she passes from one reality to another. Some changes are minor, others are as extreme as transporting her from Earth to Mars. In many of these realities, she is involved in a passionate romance with the man who lives across the street. Her dilemma is the fact that returning to her base reality, and thus remaining with her husband and child, will remove her lover from her life.
Although the story offers a vague scientific explanation for this situation, it might be more appropriate to see the text as the daydreams of a woman torn between love and family. The scenes set on Mars, in particular, seem thrown in just to give the story the feeling of science fiction. As a whole, the work is more effective as soap opera (which I do not mean to use as a disparaging term) than as speculative fiction.
The narrator of “The Odyssey Problem” by Chris Willrich is rescued from imprisonment by the crew of a starship. He was locked up, doomed to suffer for the rest of his life, in order that the other inhabitants of his planet might enjoy the benefits of highly advanced alien technology.
(The parallel with Ursula K. LeGuin’s famous story “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” seems intentional. In a similar way, the description of the starship and its crew appears to deliberately evoke memories of Star Trek.)
The inhabitants of the starship think of themselves as heroes, even though their rescue of the prisoner dooms the rest of his planet to disaster. Contact with other aliens, who consider the starship crew to be immoral barbarians, is followed by yet another level of moral indignation from other beings.
As a response to LeGuin’s classic work, these multiple layers of condemnation seem to suggest that no one should claim to have the last word when it comes to ethical behavior. In addition to this theme, the story adds a fair amount of mysticism, in the form of the suggestion that all beings have multiple selves, and that it is a moral duty to set them free. Although this concept leads directly to the story’s climax, it seems out of place with the rest of the work’s content.
“We Built This City” by Marie Vibbert ends the magazine where it began, with laborers opposing management. In this case, the workers maintain the exterior of the dome protecting a city floating through the atmosphere of Venus from the hostile environment. When the bosses cut the labor force in half, resulting in double the work for those remaining, the protagonist must choose between keeping her job and quitting in solidarity with her fellow laborers. A threat to the city’s existence causes her to return to work, against the orders of her superiors, even though it may mean her death.
The story contains vivid scenes of workers ascending the enormous dome like mountain climbers. The protagonist is a believably reluctant hero, hanging on to her job at first, because unemployment leads to exile to a much worse place. Although the reader is sure to cheer for her success, the plot depends on management being extremely foolish, risking their own lives for the sake of saving money.
Victoria Silverwolf thinks manjar dos deuses sounds delicious.