Clarkesworld #193, October 2022

“Junk Hounds” by Lavie Tidhar

“Coding Van Gogh” by Elaine Gao

“Sweetbaby” by Thomas Ha

“Lost and Found” by M. L. Clark

“Fly Free” by Alan Kubatiev (translated by Alex Shvartsman)

“Giant Fish” by Chu Shifan (translated by Stella Jiayue Zhu)

“The Secret Strength of Things” by Gregory Feeley

“Rondo for Strings and Lasergun” by Jared Oliver Adams

Reviewed by Mike Bickerdike

This issue of Clarkesworld offers 2 novelettes and 6 short stories.

“Junk Hounds” by Lavie Tidhar is a short story set in Earth orbit, in a future where ‘junk hounds’ search through a constellation of orbiting space debris that has accumulated over the years, looking for historical artifacts. The lead characters are reasonably appealing, though the story is presented more as a snapshot of their lives in space, than as a satisfying story arc with a clearly defined beginning and end. As a result, the end is somewhat flat, though it’s quite readable.

“Coding Van Gogh” by Elaine Gao provoked quite a critical response as I read through it, but once I had read the short author bio at the end, I felt rather more forgiving; the author is a high school junior, and so some latitude should be given to the writing. Perhaps in time the author will stop writing things like “A frown surfaced on Tara’s forehead” and opt instead for “Tara frowned”. Looking beyond the uninviting, purple prose, the story itself is reasonably inventive and could have been interesting. In this story, art restoration programmers recreate great works of art through the use of advanced programming languages. One such restorer died and was brought back to life through cybernetic enhancement and replacement of a lost limb. But as a consequence of her ‘death’ she lost the job she loved. Unfortunately, too much focus is placed on the technology and making the world seem very different to our own, and not enough is directed at developing characters we care about.

“Sweetbaby” by Thomas Ha is quite an intriguing novelette, let down rather by its slow pace. A mother and a father—referred to as ‘Captain’—are raising a girl and a boy, seemingly in complete isolation from other people in the mountains of a colony world. The boy, named ‘Sweetbaby’, has contracted a mutating disease, leaving him horribly disfigured, extremely dangerous and living chained within the bowels of a tree. Full of grotesque imagery and a sense of doom throughout, this novelette is a rather chilling SF horror tale. However, rather than present a gripping and exciting yarn, Ha has opted for a slower style that doesn’t entirely work; just as you think the pace is quickening and the storyline is progressing, the reader is diverted by long exposition or internal monologue. The scenario is ultimately explained mostly at the back end, but given the slow and uneven build-up, some of the interest in the tale has been lost by that time.

“Lost and Found” by M. L. Clark kicks off with a long and complicated ‘info-dump’ to set up the story—and it labours under the weight of too many layers of exposition. It takes several thousand words before anything actually happens, which will doubtless be too slow for many readers. A human ‘Partnership Officer’, Essen, wakes from hypersleep after her long journey to Drasti Prime. This is a world that was taken over a hundred years ago by arachnoid bio-computers, who insist the humans leave because their ‘masters’ were coming. Essen’s goal is to rescue any survivors from a Partnership spaceship that crashed on the planet. The ideas here are quite good and they could have been made into a compelling story, but this novelette is much too long for the tale it has to tell, and far too slowly paced to engage the reader.

“Fly Free” by Alan Kubatiev (translated by Alex Shvartsman) is an animal fantasy tale, in which humans have learned to speak with birds (‘zoolinquistics’) and the birds have taken over. Strangely, birds appear to have assumed superiority in a legal and jurisdictional sense. How this could happen isn’t dealt with, as this is presented in a jokey, fantastical manner and the reader must just accept it. How successfully the scenario and plot work as a short story, I’m far from certain.

“Giant Fish” by Chu Shifan (translated by Stella Jiayue Zhu) was rather better, telling the tale of a giant fish that washes up on a shore, providing an enormous resource of its valuable, life-enhancing, flesh. Aspects of this story were reminiscent of Ballard’s “The Drowned Giant,” with its otherworldly appearance of a washed up figure and the effect this has on the local population. The author manages to segue into more of a ‘hard’ SF plot and outcome from what starts out as fantasy fable and does this in quite a smooth way. Perhaps the most interesting story in this issue of Clarkesworld.

“The Secret Strength of Things” by Gregory Feeley manages to spin quite an engaging story, despite a lack of human characters. A small AI device (a ‘sprite’) burrows into the nitrogen ice of Triton—Neptune’s main moon—to avoid the attentions of a second, guardian AI entity (The ‘Snow Woman’) who hovers in Triton’s thin atmosphere as protector of the moon. The hard SF elements are described quite nicely without coming across as a lecture, and the story arc is reasonably satisfying and inventive.

“Rondo for Strings and Lasergun” by Jared Oliver Adams is quite short, but effective. A teenage virtuoso cellist damages her hands with frostbite, and so is recruited to help defend Earth from an alien species, as a ‘Laserlance’ pilot.

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