Quick Sips - Clarkesworld #152

Art by Matt Dixon

There’s only one translation this month from Clarkesworld (from Chinese, for those curious), but there’s also another two short stories and two novelettes that explore science fiction and its sweep and flow. From far flung planets and evil empires to much more terrestrial prejudice and fear, the stories look at how people come together. How they relate to one another and how they seek to avoid each other and how they seek to understand themselves. Not always successfully, not always neatly, but always with an eye on human connections and relationships. The stories explore change, and transformation, and love, and they do so with depth and complexity. These are not overly easy reads, but they are indeed rewarding, and worth spending some time with. To the reviews!

Quick Sips - Clarkesworld #143

Three short stories (including one translation) and two novelettes round out Clarkesworld’s August, with a bit more fantasy that I was expecting. Or what would have been more fantasy than I was expecting, except that a number of the stories this month play with that in subtle ways, slowly revealing that what seems like magic is actually something different, something much more technological in nature. Not that the issue is completely sci fi, but I feel like the uniting thread is more that each story plays with expectations in interesting ways, and leading the reader through worlds where they must piece together the rules, only to occasionally find that the final piece of the puzzle is a leap of faith. It makes for an interesting bunch of stories, which I will review...now!

Art by Luis Carlos Barragán