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Clarkesworld Magazine, Issue 90, March 2014
FICTION
“Morrigan in the Sunglare” by Seth Dickinson
“Human Strandings and the Role of the Xenobiologist” by Thoraiya Dyer
“Suteta Mono de wa Nai” by Juliette Wade
“The Egg Man” by Mary Rosenblum
“Mountain Ways” by Ursula K. Le Guin
NON-FICTION
“A Sympathy of Light and Shadow: Science Fiction, Gothic Horror and How They Met” by Mark Cole
“Beyond the Boundary: A Conversation with James L. Cambias” by Jeremy L. C. Jones
“Another Word:The Words We Carry” by Jason Heller
“Editor’s Desk: Reader’s Poll Results and Other Award News” by Neil Clarke
“Morrigan in the Sunglare” by Seth Dickinson
“Human Strandings and the Role of the Xenobiologist” by Thoraiya Dyer
“Suteta Mono de wa Nai” by Juliette Wade
“The Egg Man” by Mary Rosenblum
“Mountain Ways” by Ursula K. Le Guin
NON-FICTION
“A Sympathy of Light and Shadow: Science Fiction, Gothic Horror and How They Met” by Mark Cole
“Beyond the Boundary: A Conversation with James L. Cambias” by Jeremy L. C. Jones
“Another Word:The Words We Carry” by Jason Heller
“Editor’s Desk: Reader’s Poll Results and Other Award News” by Neil Clarke
116 pages, Paperback
First published March 1, 2014
About the author
Neil Clarke
411 books406 followersNeil Clarke is best known as the editor and publisher of the Hugo and World Fantasy Award-winning
Clarkesworld Magazine.
Launched in October 2006, the online magazine has been a finalist for the Hugo Award for Best Semiprozine four times (winning three times), the World Fantasy Award four times (winning once), and the British Fantasy Award once (winning once). Neil is also a ten-time finalist for the Hugo Award for Best Editor Short Form (winning once in 2022), three-time winner of the Chesley Award for Best Art Director, and a recipient of the Kate Wilhelm Solstice Award. In the fifteen years since Clarkesworld Magazine launched, numerous stories that he has published have been nominated for or won the Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, Sturgeon, Locus, BSFA, Shirley Jackson, WSFA Small Press, and Stoker Awards.
Additionally, Neil edits Forever —a digital-only, reprint science fiction magazine he launched in 2015. His anthologies include: Upgraded, Galactic Empires, Touchable Unreality, More Human than Human, The Final Frontier, Not One of Us, The Eagle has Landed, , and the Best Science Fiction of the Year series. His next anthology, The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume Seven will published in early 2023.
He currently lives in New Jersey with his wife and two sons.
Additionally, Neil edits Forever —a digital-only, reprint science fiction magazine he launched in 2015. His anthologies include: Upgraded, Galactic Empires, Touchable Unreality, More Human than Human, The Final Frontier, Not One of Us, The Eagle has Landed, , and the Best Science Fiction of the Year series. His next anthology, The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume Seven will published in early 2023.
He currently lives in New Jersey with his wife and two sons.
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Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews
August 11, 2024
“Morrigan in the Sunglare” by Seth Dickinson
🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀 with a 🍒 on top. 6290 words.
Wow, this one gave me goose bumps in just 21 pages. War between Earth and her colonies. Fighter pilots. Killing, how to deal. Motivation. Loyalties. Brutal. Very, very good. So much happening in those few pages. Loved it.
Can be read for free here: https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/dick...
There is also a MORRIGAN IN SHADOW, also published online in Clarkesworld Magazine, Issue 111, December 2015. It‘s novella length and I just got that particular issue of Clarkesworld for it. I have to read what happens to the MC, Laporte, next. And if I like that novella just as much, I have to take a serious look at everything else by the author. So far I have read The Traitor Baru Cormorant. Recommended!
🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀 with a 🍒 on top. 6290 words.
Wow, this one gave me goose bumps in just 21 pages. War between Earth and her colonies. Fighter pilots. Killing, how to deal. Motivation. Loyalties. Brutal. Very, very good. So much happening in those few pages. Loved it.
Can be read for free here: https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/dick...
There is also a MORRIGAN IN SHADOW, also published online in Clarkesworld Magazine, Issue 111, December 2015. It‘s novella length and I just got that particular issue of Clarkesworld for it. I have to read what happens to the MC, Laporte, next. And if I like that novella just as much, I have to take a serious look at everything else by the author. So far I have read The Traitor Baru Cormorant. Recommended!
March 19, 2021
I read "Mountain Ways" by Ursula K. Le Guin, the (1996) Tiptree (now know as the Otherwise) winning and Hugo nominated novelette.
This was an interesting story and the society set-up was intriguing , but I feel that the story ends abruptly and without resolution.
This was an interesting story and the society set-up was intriguing , but I feel that the story ends abruptly and without resolution.
January 16, 2015
"[A] marriage isn’t two pairs. It’s four pairs!"
As usual, Le Guin masterfully crafts a society and culture that is fundamentally different from ours in some aspect we take for granted, and then uses it to make us reflect about ourselves. The only fault I can find in this story is the sudden, ambiguous ending.
As usual, Le Guin masterfully crafts a society and culture that is fundamentally different from ours in some aspect we take for granted, and then uses it to make us reflect about ourselves. The only fault I can find in this story is the sudden, ambiguous ending.
March 7, 2014
Original fiction:
"Morrigan in the Sunglare" by Seth Dickinson - more great space opera, I love Dickinson's stuff. Pilots on a damaged ship, falling into the Sun, told in language reminiscent of pilots' "brevity code."
"Human Strandings and the Role of the Xenobiologist" by Thoraiya Dyer - oh, what are advanced aliens to do with these silly humans who keep crashing onto planets. Funny and sad at the same time.
"Suteta Mono de wa Nai (Not Easily Thrown Away)" by Juliette Wade - more fantasy than sf, about a Japanese girl cramming for college entrance exams, who befriends some spirits with bodies made of cast-off material. Lovely, aching story.
Non-fiction:
Mark Cole talks about movies that mix sf and gothic horror. I approve of this.
Jeremy L. C. Jones interviews James L. Cambias, author of A Darkling Sea. Was already on my to-read list. Dammit, I have to get through a bunch of other stuff first.
Jason Heller writes the "Another Word" column this month, about growing up poor and not seeing a lot of economic diversity in SFF stories. Very true. Every character it always seems is royalty/nobility or at least middle class. It shouldn't be that way.
Very happy to see four (I think) out of the five top stories in the reader's poll were on my personal "Best of 2013" list. Yay!
"Morrigan in the Sunglare" by Seth Dickinson - more great space opera, I love Dickinson's stuff. Pilots on a damaged ship, falling into the Sun, told in language reminiscent of pilots' "brevity code."
"Human Strandings and the Role of the Xenobiologist" by Thoraiya Dyer - oh, what are advanced aliens to do with these silly humans who keep crashing onto planets. Funny and sad at the same time.
"Suteta Mono de wa Nai (Not Easily Thrown Away)" by Juliette Wade - more fantasy than sf, about a Japanese girl cramming for college entrance exams, who befriends some spirits with bodies made of cast-off material. Lovely, aching story.
Non-fiction:
Mark Cole talks about movies that mix sf and gothic horror. I approve of this.
Jeremy L. C. Jones interviews James L. Cambias, author of A Darkling Sea. Was already on my to-read list. Dammit, I have to get through a bunch of other stuff first.
Jason Heller writes the "Another Word" column this month, about growing up poor and not seeing a lot of economic diversity in SFF stories. Very true. Every character it always seems is royalty/nobility or at least middle class. It shouldn't be that way.
Very happy to see four (I think) out of the five top stories in the reader's poll were on my personal "Best of 2013" list. Yay!
October 21, 2016
I read this as part of The Mammoth Book of SF Stories by Women
A foursome marriage (two women, two men) becomes something different and they learn to live with it. Good story. 4 out of 5 stars.
A foursome marriage (two women, two men) becomes something different and they learn to live with it. Good story. 4 out of 5 stars.
September 6, 2021
ive only read morrigan in the sunglare but it rocked my world so hard i wanted a physical copy. anyways : so much yearning and hurt and warmth into one single story i will never get over this
October 18, 2021
i just read morrigan in the sunglare, and yeah the quiet yearning and the humanity of it all hurt3
March 6, 2014
I'm honored to be a part of this issue alongside my longtime inspiration, Ursula K. LeGuin. I thought Seth Dickinson's story was visceral and fascinating. Thoraiya Dyer's had an interesting mood to it and was very mysterious. Mary Rosenblum's story painted an interesting vision of a post-apocalyptic West, and I really cared about the characters. Ursula LeGuin's story was an interesting thought experiment with some really great language and mood.
January 6, 2015
An interesting, if short, look at a very different way of life.
How would society look if we bonded as foursomes, not pairs? Practically, I think humanity would die out, but nothing in Le Guin's story actually says that the people described are "human", and perhaps they're a species where it makes sense.
August 6, 2023
Morrigan In The Sunglare - Seth Dickinson ****
Human Strandings And The Role Of The Xenobiologist - Thoraiya Dyer ***
Suteta Mono de wa Nai - Juliette Wade ***
The Egg Man - Mary Rosenblum ****
Mountain Ways - Ursula K Le Guin *****
Human Strandings And The Role Of The Xenobiologist - Thoraiya Dyer ***
Suteta Mono de wa Nai - Juliette Wade ***
The Egg Man - Mary Rosenblum ****
Mountain Ways - Ursula K Le Guin *****
December 18, 2017
Comment solely for "Morrigan in the Sunglare"by Seth Dickinson. DNF. Lost interest, and may just be me. Try something else by him? Writing is OK, but story didn't click for me. YMMV.
December 28, 2023
I love love love sci fi that's intense and dense where I have no idea what the fck it's saying but also that I relate to on a weirdly human level. This was one of those pieces. This felt kind of like Becky Chambers but in a more moral conundrum science jargon kind of way. Plus it was wlw which is my science fiction jam.
*
Maybe that’s who Simms is. The moment. A place where Laporte never has to think, never has a chance to reflect, never has to be anything other than laughter and kill-joy. But that’s a selfish way to go at it, isn’t it? Simms is her own woman, impatient, profane, ferocious, and Laporte shouldn’t make an icon of her. She’s not a lion, not a war-god, not some kind of oblivion Laporte can curl up inside.
Care for those you kill. Mourn them. They are human too, and no less afraid.
But Simms’ voice said: I know how to live with this. I know how to love it.
Like weaponized poetry, except that deep down your poem always says we have to live. They have to die.
You don’t remember love as a series of acts. You just know: I love her. So it is here. They fought, and it was good. (And damn, yes, she loves Simms, that much has been apparent for a while, but it’s maybe not the kind of love that anyone does anything about, maybe not the kind it’s wise to voice or touch.)
Captain Simms takes the chance to drill her new pilots to exhaustion and they begin to loathe her so profoundly they’d all eat a knife just to hear one word of her approval.
This happens after the intervention, after Simms teaches Laporte to be a monster (or lets her realize she already was), after they manage the biggest coup of the war—the capture of the Agincourt. Before they fall into the sun, though.
But Simms and Laporte, they flew each other home. Home to die in this empty searing room with the bolted-down frame chairs and the bottle caps and their cells rotting inside them.
Or maybe it’s just that Simms hated harder than anyone else, hesitated the least. And Laporte, well—she’s never hesitated at all.
*
Maybe that’s who Simms is. The moment. A place where Laporte never has to think, never has a chance to reflect, never has to be anything other than laughter and kill-joy. But that’s a selfish way to go at it, isn’t it? Simms is her own woman, impatient, profane, ferocious, and Laporte shouldn’t make an icon of her. She’s not a lion, not a war-god, not some kind of oblivion Laporte can curl up inside.
Care for those you kill. Mourn them. They are human too, and no less afraid.
But Simms’ voice said: I know how to live with this. I know how to love it.
Like weaponized poetry, except that deep down your poem always says we have to live. They have to die.
You don’t remember love as a series of acts. You just know: I love her. So it is here. They fought, and it was good. (And damn, yes, she loves Simms, that much has been apparent for a while, but it’s maybe not the kind of love that anyone does anything about, maybe not the kind it’s wise to voice or touch.)
Captain Simms takes the chance to drill her new pilots to exhaustion and they begin to loathe her so profoundly they’d all eat a knife just to hear one word of her approval.
This happens after the intervention, after Simms teaches Laporte to be a monster (or lets her realize she already was), after they manage the biggest coup of the war—the capture of the Agincourt. Before they fall into the sun, though.
But Simms and Laporte, they flew each other home. Home to die in this empty searing room with the bolted-down frame chairs and the bottle caps and their cells rotting inside them.
Or maybe it’s just that Simms hated harder than anyone else, hesitated the least. And Laporte, well—she’s never hesitated at all.
February 6, 2017
The concept of "sedoretu", a four person marriage of a culture in Le Guin's vast universe of alien planets, fascinated me from my first introduction to it. Adding in the fact that some people aren't attracted to other genders, or their own gender, makes it twice as interesting.
A short summary for a short story: Enno is a traveling spiritual Evening woman who visits many farms to share teachings. At Danro farm she meets the Morning woman Shahes and falls in love. But while both want to marry they'd need two men, a Morning and an Evening man; a complication seeing as Shahes has little interest in men and has already promissed a marriage to another woman.
The language in this story is beautiful. It's focused on the emotions of the characters, and while there is description of the world too it lets you fill in a lot of the details; a way of environment description that's always worked much better for me than pages upon pages of architecture, flora and fauna.
It would have been a five star story for me if it hadn't had such an open ending. Open endings can be great, but I felt the build-up in this story didn't get the pay-off I was looking for. Still a very interesting story though! Definitely worth the read.
A short summary for a short story: Enno is a traveling spiritual Evening woman who visits many farms to share teachings. At Danro farm she meets the Morning woman Shahes and falls in love. But while both want to marry they'd need two men, a Morning and an Evening man; a complication seeing as Shahes has little interest in men and has already promissed a marriage to another woman.
The language in this story is beautiful. It's focused on the emotions of the characters, and while there is description of the world too it lets you fill in a lot of the details; a way of environment description that's always worked much better for me than pages upon pages of architecture, flora and fauna.
It would have been a five star story for me if it hadn't had such an open ending. Open endings can be great, but I felt the build-up in this story didn't get the pay-off I was looking for. Still a very interesting story though! Definitely worth the read.
April 5, 2014
A high quality issue this month with "Human Strandings and the Role of the Xenobiologist" by Dyer being the highlight, a fabulous story about aliens trying to deal 'humanely' with less-advanced humans left helpless upon meeting unfortunate accidents. The reprint of "The Egg Man" also stood out as an entertaining SF tale, which as noted takes on even greater relevance with the prospect of water shortages and wars rearing in our probable near future. Shockingly, the least story of this issue came from the Le Guin reprint. While her writing and absolute love for language and words rings clear in this story, "Mountain Ways" fails to become engrossing in its plot. The story becomes more about inventing and relating this complex system of sexual and gender relationship than about the issues it engenders. Beyond the fiction, the nonfiction selections in the issue were intriguing, particularly Heller's column on economic diversity as a theme in the genre. Cole's discussion of 'gothic horror' meeting 'science fiction' from a historic perspective is useful, though the piece seemed rather disjointed, needing some better organization and flow of the ideas within it.
March 13, 2014
Excellent selection of short stories (all except one with a sf theme, actually I was hoping/expecting more fantasy) and a few essays. The story I liked least was the complicated “Mountain Ways” by Le Guin, and the essay on sf meeting gothic horror was a bit too much as I know pretty nothing about the films listed and discussed by Mark Cole, while my favourite story is the post-apocaliptic (sort of) “The Egg Man” by Mary Rosenblum, Jason Heller's “Another Word” is an excellent & passionate vindication of why “fantastic” literature isn't at all escapist, and finally the interview of James Cambias made me discover a new author I'll sure try to read.
This was my first try with Clarkesword, but sure not the last... and there's a very good chance I'll subscribe for a year pretty soon.
This was my first try with Clarkesword, but sure not the last... and there's a very good chance I'll subscribe for a year pretty soon.
April 7, 2014
I liked the non-fic article by Mark Cole, "A Sympathy of Light and Shadow: Science Fiction, Gothic Horror and How They Met," but the stories in this issue didn't grab me.
April 3, 2014
See my review here: http://wp.me/p40HVI-mV
Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews