Quick Sips - Clarkesworld #170

Art by Arjun Amky

Seven new stories from Clarkesworld weave a lot around sentience. Intelligence. Beings who are not human. Or not quite. Robots, AI, stars, even altered humans--the stories explore how these beings relate to the people who created them, or imprisoned them, or both. Some find ways to break free. Some find ways to cooperation. Some find ways to domination. Whatever the case, the issue hits on these ideas again and again, building up a rather thematically tight issue that looks at what it means to be alive and sentient, and explores how humans treat those they might not want to recognize as fully “people.” To the reviews!

Quick Sips - The Dark #60

Art by denissimonov

The two original stories in the May The Dark Magazine have some pretty heavy content warnings to them (perhaps to be expected given the publication). They both also find women dealing with abusive relationships and having to navigate their own shame and feelings of culpability for their pain and harassment, their oppression and fear. The situations they find themselves in are wrenching, dangerous, and dehumanizing, and the women are left having to make some impossible decisions. Accept the course that the men around them have laid out, even when it contains their own annihilation...or stand against them, and take whatever power is possible to smash the walls threatening to box them in. It’s not an easy month of stories, but it’s some moving and powerful horror. To the reviews!

Quick Sips - The Dark #56

Art by grand failure

My first reviews of 2020 look at the latest from The Dark Magazine, which kicks of the year with two very well paired stories dealing with families and with abuse. With the ways toxic cycles reproduce, and infect, and infest. The ways that they are expressed in those that are hurt, who are broken, and who wonder if there is any way for them to be whole again. The stories are difficult and complex, and offer little in the way of comfort, except to recognize the hurt that is done, and perhaps say that not all abuses have to be passed down, even if they also can’t be completely healed from. To the reviews!