SciFi and Fantasy Book Club discussion

This topic is for a Buddy Read of the 7 stories in Clarkesworld Magazine #174, March 2021, which was just released today, and is available at http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/

Please join us!

I plan to read the stories in order...

I had intended to jump right in, but then got busy for a couple days... Anyway, I've read the first story, Mamaborg's Milk and the Brilliance of Gems by D.A. Xiaolin Spires. I'd describe it as a vivid dystopian vignette, marred by an apparent lack of editing. For example:

- In the first sentence it says the main character, "ducks under" a cart, but then she's suddenly inside the cart rather than under it at the beginning of the next paragraph.

- In the second and third paragraphs, the words "package," "case," and "pack" are confusing and make it hard to tell what's going on.

- In the second paragraph a "robot arm" has a masculine pronoun applied to it for no apparent reason.

I like the word "Mamaborg," though, and the story's imagery is sharp and potent. Just seems like the writing could've benefited from a more thorough editorial pass.

I listened to the podcast version of this story. I did have some trouble with the visuals that came to mind while I was listening but put them down to a combination of cart geometry and an attempt to disguise the nature of the "package" from the readers at the start. It wasn't the cleanest beginning but it wasn't quite so jarring for me.

My overall take on the story, probably colored in part by the narration, was that it was a vivid description of a scarily brutal setting for motherhood. It's not my favorite of the stories that I've heard from this author but it's certainly compelling.

I will try to follow along here as other podcast episodes are released. The availability of these can be a bit erratic (I was surprised to see this story released on March 1st), so I may be a ways behind.

Wow, I really liked the second story, Homecoming is Just Another Word for the Sublimation of the Self by Isabel J. Kim. Even though it's written in the second person, which I'm a little wary of, her "instancing" metaphor was great. It resonated with me as someone who's spent time on the other side of the world (I lived in Japan for awhile), and then felt like there was a part of (or version of) myself that stayed there when I returned. There's a similar idea in one of my favorite Star Trek: TNG episodes: The Inner Light. Also, I use version control software heavily at work, so it was fun to see that reference.

The third story, The Orbiting Guan Erye by Wang Zhenzhen is a cross-cultural revisitation of an Arthur C. Clarke classic. I'm sure I don't know enough about Chinese history and culture to fully appreciate it, but the subtle divergences between this story and Clarke's end up giving it a completely different significance, I think.

Also, I'd never heard the thing about birds being unable to live without gravity...so I learned a fact to impress my teenage sons with.

Hope some others will give this magazine a try and join in here!

I read Submergence by Arula Ratnakar. It's the longest story of this issue, and frankly seemed a lot longer than it needed to be. I found myself glazing over during the paragraphs of extended biological explication. It's pretty apparent the author is currently studying biology and neuroscience.

I was hoping more would happen with the (view spoiler)[sentient sponge, like it would be discovered to be secretly controlling the company Noor worked for, or would somehow intervene in human affairs. So I was disappointed that a creature with "over ten times more synaptic connections than the ones in a human brain" only ended up being an exploited resource to protect. (hide spoiler)]

Also, the whole musical communication thing. (view spoiler)[Hard to imagine that being viable at all, and I'm pretty sure that a piece for solo flute with a note for every letter in a scientific paper would be an impossibly massive musical tome. (hide spoiler)]

The central idea of replaying one person's experiences directly into another person's brain is an intriguing one, though.

55 Plaque by Isabel Lee is my favorite story so far in this issue. Fibonacci numbers are something I'm familiar with from teaching programming, but I'd somehow missed (or maybe just forgotten) that they can be visually represented as a spiral. In this story, that ever-widening spiral seems to be a metaphor for the way the worldviews held by different groups can diverge.

The ending of the story (view spoiler)[with the main character driving away from a cult with one of their children (hide spoiler)] reminded me of the movie Midnight Special, and I felt like the overall tone of this story had a similar vibe to that film.

I've enjoyed several stories in this issue, but this is the first one that's made me want to read more of the author's work. In this case, it looks like that's not much--just one other story and a pseudo-interactive fiction piece. Definitely putting both on my to-be-read list, though.

Well, I finished up reading the fiction in this issue with the stories by Wole Talabi and Sarah Pauling.

Pauling's potent image of invaders building on top of the church of the invaded will stick with me, but I think that's about it from these two very short pieces.

This was the first issue of Clarkesworld I've read, but I liked it enough that I'm sure it won't be the last!

I listened to "Homecoming is Just Another Word for the Sublimation of the Self" this evening. I've heard a fair amount about the importance of family in Korean and neighboring cultures and about how difficult it can be to be your own person in the face of those expectations. This certainly took that to a new level of both execution and understanding for me. The historical references and parallels to software versioning help ground it in my mind. Overall I was pretty impressed with this one.

I think that I lack some of the cultural touchstones to appreciate how and why "The Orbiting Guan Erye" differs from the Clarke original. The story was amusing but it didn't work as well for me as the first two stories in this issue.

I'm not convinced by the claim about birds and waste elimination in zero-G. Gulls seem quite adept at targeting cars as they fly over. I've also seen eagles deliberately turn and eject their waste over the edge of the nest. This isn't to say that birds won't have other problems in space (eating and drinking, for example) and it would certainly be a mess.

I listened to "55 Plaque," "Comments on Your Provisional Patent Application for an Eternal Spirit Core," and "To Study the Old Masters in the Prado at the End of the World" this evening. I liked all of these for different reasons but the patent application was my favorite of the trio. Perhaps that's partly because I used to be in the patent business but it also held a world of possibilities for me despite being only a brief sketch of an idea.