bloodygranuaile

A few years ago a friend gave me a copy of the July/August 2015 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, with the thought that the first story, by a new-ish author, seemed like the sort of thing I would like. As frequently happens with this sort of thing, I intended to check it out in a timely manner, but the magazine soon got subsumed into the rest of my enormous TBR pile.

More recently, when I was Marie Kondo-ing said enormous TBR pile because what even is in there, I was somewhat surprised to pick up the magazine and see the name “Tamsyn Muir” on the cover, because oh shit, I know who that is now! And her stuff is exactly the sort of thing I like! So I sat down and read “The Deepwater Bride” and then put the magazine back in the TBR pile to finish later.

“Later” ended up mostly being “in the bath, recovering from the DSA convention” which it turns out is an excellent place to reread “The Deepwater Bride,” which is a very wet story involving sulphuric rains and mutant fish and dead sharks and that sort of thing. It excellently shows off Muir’s Monty Python-esque mastery of mixed-register humor and is somehow, oddly, very sweet.

The other stories in the magazine are also quite good — I don’t think there was a one of them I disliked, although some of them were more engaging than others — and there were a few other author names I recognized. The central story of the magazine was the novella Johnny Rev by Rachael Pollack, which I got more into than I expected given its “man is tormented by the gruesome loss of his wife and daughter” element. The only bits of the magazine that truly fell flat for me were some of the nonfiction pieces, which is probably unsurprising as they are six years out of date.

I’m not sure if I want to hang on to the whole magazine just to keep a hold of “The Deepwater Bride” for, Idunno, reading out loud to myself when I’m bored and want things that are fun to say, but since I can’t decide I will probably keep it for now.

So, I’ve never tried to review a magazine before, but Clarkesworld magazines count as short story collections, so here goes.

First of all, Clarkesworld, Issue 73 has a fabulous cover, as always. I think this one has been nominated for something. We will pause to admire it.



All set? Good.

The first story in this issue is Genevieve Valentine’s A Bead of Jasper, Four Small Stones, which takes place in a human colony on Europa. Europa at this point is in the middle of a long and tenuous process of terraforming; humans have lived on it and slowly set up a permanent base over the course of five generations or so. Refugee ships periodically come from Earth, which is becoming increasingly uninhabitable due to unstable weather. (I find this bit rather depressing because I have serious doubts about whether or not humanity will get its shit together enough to start a workable space colony by the time Earth becomes too unstable to live on.) The main character in this story is Henry, an isolated youth who moved to Europa as a child and never really felt it to be home, hoping instead that the voyage to another of Jupiter’s moons—currently in the late planning stages—will yield a proper home instead. Henry works at the communications station, and starts a laconic (due to the time delay) but heartbreaking correspondence with Preetha, the woman working the comm station at Bangalore Ground Control. Though the story, like Henry and Preetha’s correspondence, is short, Valentine manages to explore a number of serious questions in it, about what “home” is, and the connection of humans to the rest of Earth’s natural life, and the significance of names and mythologies.

The second story is Theodora Goss’ England Under the White Witch, an alternate-history fantasy that takes place just after the Second (I think) World War, in which the White Witch comes down from the North and establishes herself as Empress of England. The story is told from the point of view of Ann, who was a young girl when the Empress first came down, and who establishes herself over the years as a decorated member of the Empress’ girl army. The thing I really like about this story is that it isn’t simplistic. A lot of people sympathize with the Empress and are more than willing to join her, and happily allow her to take over England, where she really does provide employment, equality, stability, etc. The only real, physical drawback is that wherever the Empress rules, it is always winter—meaning food needs to be either grown in greenhouses or imported, rendering it pale, tasteless, and expensive. The other main drawback is that, as a totalitarian state, it comes with many of the stifling loyalty and censorship issues characteristic of totalitarian states. It all strikes me as a metaphor for Communism, in a much more nuanced way than we usually talk about Communism—that there are real reasons so many people are eager to try it, and a lot of problems with the system itself and the system it replaces. It isn’t a coincidence that the women of England rally so eagerly behind the Empress from so early on, and the story never seems to condemn anyone for doing so. There’s also a strong thread about fairy tales running through this story, and the way they change as the world changes. I found this story to be simultaneously charming and disturbing, and it definitely made me think.

The third story, Yoon Ha Lee’s The Battle of Candle Arc, also made me think, but less about real-world history and politics and more about trying to figure out what was going on in the story. It’s a military story and an impressive feat of original sci-fi worldbuilding. As far as I can tell, the universe it takes place in is run by a coalition of various tribes that all have very different cultures; their ruling parties coalesce into a heptarchate. Power in this universe is heavily dependent upon a high calendar, which somehow seems to translate into real, tangible power that affects machinery and military tactics and stuff. I had no idea what mental images to even start building when Lee uses terms like “calendrical terrain” but the general effect of mapping military tactics onto a religious calendar isn’t that hard to follow if you have a basic grasp of both calendars and military tactics. The only thing I dislike about this short story is that it is a short story; it’s something I’d really like to see explored on an epic scale and explained enough that I could picture it. The storyline for this one follows Jedao, a military commander of the Shuos tribe/race/something, who are the scheming assassin ones. He’s been pulled off military leave to command a force of Kel, a highly disciplined military tribe, to fight off a force of Lanterners—a rebelling/heretical sect—after the Lanterners had given the main coalition a very embarrassing defeat. Jedao is engaging in psychological warfare as well as physical warfare, trying to figure out how to outwit the unknown Lanterner general despite being outnumbered. In some ways this is a fun, knotty strategy game of a story, but the tone is very serious, and it has some serious things to say about warfare, loyalty, and management.

Clarkesworld also features some nonfiction pieces after its featured stories; in this case, there was a really good essay about technological progress and some of the fallacious assumptions about technological progress that science fiction authors (and people in general) have tended to engage in; an interview with author John Varley about his newest apocalypse novel and being a hippie; and a short essay about book reviews, critique, and “practicing dissatisfaction”—in short, the author of this essay, Daniel Abraham, stopped writing book reviews when he realized it was causing him to look for stuff to criticize, and he’d rather just enjoy reading. I feel I should probably not have read all three pieces in one go, as they all deserve to be sat with and thought about separately.

The letter from the editor is at the back. Is this usual? I feel like I’ve only ever seen letters from the editor in the front. At any rate, it’s now slightly dated, which happens. Perhaps that’s why he decided to put it after all the literary stuff.