Quick Sips - Clarkesworld #169

Art by Francesca Resta

It’s another Big issue of Clarkesworld Magazine, with four short stories and three novelettes. And there’s perhaps a theme that runs throughout the pieces, that of family. Explored in some interesting ways, the pieces all seem to circle around what makes a family and what might tear it apart. The stories are not always incredibly happy, many of them unfolding in post-disaster scenarios, but that’s not unusual for the publication, nor is the fact that this is once more an entirely-science-fiction issue. It makes for a lot of possible worlds, a lot of future we’d probably do best to avoid. And it’s just a lot of strong work, so I’ll get right to my reviews!

Quick Sips - Clarkesworld #138

March brings four short stories and a new novella to Clarkesworld Magazine. Which means for the second month in a row, the publication is bringing an original novella. It certainly continues the trend of including longer works at online (primarily, for there is a print edition) venues. The stories overall are, well, rather dark. To me, they focus a lot on corrupt systems and how sometimes there’s no real fixing them all at once. How what often happens is that people live and die, are crushed and ground to powder, for a long time before a bad system starts to improve. Not that it can’t improve, but that for many vulnerable people it doesn’t improve fast enough. Which makes for a slew of often very difficult stories, but ones that do hold onto a hope that things will get better, even if we don’t all live to see it happen. To the reviews!

Art by Arthur Haas