Clarkesworld #204, September 2023
“Stones” by Nnedi Okorafor
“A Guide to Matchmaking on Station 9” by Nika Murphy
“The People from the Dead Whale” by Djuna (translated by Jihyun Park and Gord Sellar)
“Upgrade Day” by RJ Taylor
“The Queen of Calligraphic Susurrations” by D.A. Xiaolin Spires
“Axiom of Dreams” by Arula Ratnakar
“The Five Remembrances, According to STE-319” by R.L. Meza
Reviewed by Geoff Houghton
The September issue of Clarkesworld contains seven stories: six original (5 short stories and a novella), and one first time translation into English from the Korean from 2020.
The first short story is “Stones” by Nnedi Okorafor. This SF story is set in solar space, between Saturn and the Sun, perhaps a century into the future. It describes an unplanned first contact between the human race and a very alien form of sentient, star-faring form of life. The science is inconsistent but the heart of the story is the uplifting thought that two such dissimilar species may start with mistrust and misunderstanding, but can still find common ground for trust and co-operation. It is noteworthy, given the ethnicity of the author, that this conclusion is a mirror image of the general history of recent centuries of human/human first contacts and colonisation where an over-trustful initial position often degenerates into conquest and servitude.
The second original offering is “A Guide to Matchmaking on Station 9” by Nika Murphy. This is a story set in high Earth orbit in a technologically advanced but socially stunted near-future. The story is written as a light-hearted second person narrative directed at the Point-of-View character, a lesbian or bisexual Jewish Matchmaker.
The author paints a society where merely being an autonomous sentient being is not enough to protect against ostracism and oppression. Androids and humans with psychic abilities suffer the same discrimination and enforced displacement that Jews have historically suffered throughout history. From this point of view, the technology deployed in this tale is almost entirely incidental, except to make the ghettos more physically luxurious. The key elements of this story, the camaraderie of the oppressed and their need to make the best of things, could be applied to any minority enclave in the past, present, or future.
The third tale is “The People from the Dead Whale” by Djuna. This has been translated from the original Korean by Jihyun Park and Gord Sellar.
This classical SF trope of long-lost colonists is set on an improbably tidally locked world where the gradient between the boiling light side and the icy dark side is sufficiently shallow that multicellular organic life forms have developed and adapted to that environment. These massive lifeforms are the “Whales” of the title, and it is their ability to navigate the narrow temperate twilight band between the ice and the fire that allow the human survivors of a colonising expedition to maintain a precarious existence on this dangerous world by becoming symbionts or parasites upon their backs.
Now the “Whales” are failing, dying from a new disease in much larger numbers than their normal replacement rate, and the humans appear to have no chance to survive without them until, by chance, our protagonist discovers their ancient origin point, still frozen in the ice of its landing place.
Could the original survivors have left their spacecraft in working condition? Could its AI have repaired any damage? The author is upbeat about the possibility but deliberately refuses to give the reader a definitive answer. You must decide for yourself.
“Upgrade Day” by RJ Taylor is a short story set in an aggressively capitalist nation that could be the USA, a few decades into the future. In this world, individuals may sell their brains in advance to robotics corporations. The arrangement is that after death, their brain patterns will be used to power robotic bodies. They will continue an awareness of who they once were, but with inbuilt control hardware that prevents them from objecting to any orders or refusing any commands from their still living human owners. In exchange for money up front and the dubious gain of continued real or apparent self-awareness, they essentially become unfree slaves, property with no civil rights until their mechanical bodies suffer hardware or software malfunction, when they are scrapped as obsolete.
Although this is a work of SF, set in a technological future world that may never even be technically possible, it seems to raise many of the same questions as Uncle Tom’s Cabin did in a past age, as well as additional questions such as what is consciousness and sentience.
“The Queen of Calligraphic Susurrations” by D.A. Xiaolin Spires is set on a highly cybernetic future Earth in which even some insects such as bees are linked into the global net. The story is told from the viewpoint of the beekeeper who is also an aspiring but apparently relatively insipid writer. Even she admits that the quality of her prose is limited until she acquires a new and highly interactive AI assistance programme and discovers that its collaborative input completely revitalises her pedestrian voice and style.
Modern authors already make variable use of synonym generators and thesaurus programmes that would have been considered near magic a half-century ago. The author of this SF piece explores the real meaning of creativity and asks just what level of external assistance is acceptable if an original work is to be claimed as ones own.
The largest offering in this issue of Clarksworld is the novella: “Axiom of Dreams” by Arula Ratnakar. This unusual piece occurs in two locations, the first being a near future Boston, Massachusetts and the second being a very strange dodecahedral world whose location is slowly revealed over the course of the first half of this novella.
The activity in Boston mainly occurs in its high-end academic community, amongst young super-bright post-graduate students who appear to live in a highly pressurised, drug-soaked sub-culture. Only the very small number of readers who have studied modern math theory at an advanced level will follow the most esoteric parts of their conversation and it is extremely brave of the editorial team at Clarkesworld to allow advanced math concepts and topological equations to appear in one of their works of fiction. However, it is possible to just accept the word of the characters that they understand, even if we don’t. This reviewer’s technique was to just skip on through any bits of math theory that made my brain hurt!
The inhabitants of the second world are considerably more down to earth, although, as you will discover if you persevere with this demanding work, Earth has absolutely nothing to do with them.
It is not possible to say much more without revealing too much that the reader is supposed to discover for themselves. I am certain that some readers will abandon this story before its end and others will find it fascinating. It is certainly and by far the most challenging piece in this issue.
The last original short story is “The Five Remembrances, According to STE-319” by R.L. Meza. The narrator is a large military android, designed as a ruthless extermination machine by an unspecified future dictatorship on an unidentified continent. A brief reference to the light of the planet Mars suggests that this is may be a future Earth, but it is the ruthless and inhumane attitude of the android’s creators and not their location that is critical to the story. The creators of the android are waging an unwarranted and unfortunately only too successful war of extermination against a sub-group of their own race who exhibit some trivial difference from the mainstream group and must be exterminated for that crime.
Robot STE-319 is severely damaged during the final decisive battle and some combination of the initial damage and the egress of salty ocean water into his processors causes him to escape his original programming. Instead of exterminating an escaping child of the proscribed race, according to his original programme, he shelters and nurtures her and thereby acts as a catalyst for the gradual recovery of her people from the genocide perpetrated upon them.
The author appears to lean towards the belief that this was an informed moral choice by a sentient machine. There is also the possibility that it was no more than a malfunction that reversed some element of the android’s pre-installed programme. The reader is left free to believe that an AI could discover morality, that morality is a purely human concept or even that free choice is a chimera and that we too are slaves to our own programming.
Geoff Houghton lives in a leafy village in rural England. He is a retired Healthcare Professional with a love of SF and a jackdaw-like appetite for gibbets of medical, scientific and historical knowledge.