Clarkesworld Magazine, Issue 149 February 2019

by Neil Clarke (Editor), Brit E.B. Hvide (Contributor), Robert Reed (Contributor)

Our February 2019 issue (#149) contains:*Original fiction by Brit E. B. Hvide ("East of the Sun, West of the Stars"), Robert Reed ("Painwise"), Ian Creasey ("The Final Ascent"), A. T. Greenblatt ("Give the Family My Love"), Bo Balder ("The Face of God"), and Suo Hefu ("The Butcher of New Tasmania").* Reprints by . Qiouyi Lu ("Mother Tongues") and Ian McDonald ("Digging").* Non-fiction by Douglas F. Dluzen, an interview with Suzanne Palmer, an Another Word column by Cat Rambo, and an editorial by Neil Clarke.

Genres: Science Fiction, Short Stories, Fantasy, Fiction, Speculative Fiction, Audiobook, Anthologies

131 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 2019

About the author

Neil 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.

Reviews

[carol. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read for "Give the Family My Love" by A.T. Greenblatt, Nebula short story finalist

reviewed briefly at

https://clsiewert.wordpress.com/2020/...

[Dennis · Rating 4 out of 5]

***Winner of the 2019 Nebula Award for Best Short Story***

Give the Family My Love by A.T. Greenblatt

Now that one was fun. And confusing. But not because of the tale itself. I’ll come to that later.

First things first. What is it about? Well, that’s pretty straightforward. On a distant planet, we follow an anthropologist on her search for knowledge. While she’s making her way to a gigantic library that is run by an alien life form, that she simply refers to as the Librarians, she is recording voice messages for her brother Saul, back home on earth. What kind of knowledge is she searching for exactly? One that helps us save the planet that we so thoroughly fucked up, of course.

Since the whole story is told through these voice messages, it’s probably best to listen to the audio version of this Nebula nominee for Best Short Story. The narrator has a beautiful voice, I have to say. However, and that’s what I mean with confusing, I did both, read the story and listen to the audio, and it changed the experience significantly.

The premise wasn’t exactly the best thing about this story, to be honest. What I liked best about it was the voice of the first-person narrator. Reading the story myself, I first and foremost appreciated her sarcastic remarks, and mainly thought that she is a funny person I would like to share a laugh with. But I also thought that the story’s ending was missing a proper pay-off. Letting Kate Baker read the story to me, though, it became a more atmospheric tale, which is good. But now I thought the main character was less funny, and almost a bit whiny. On the other hand, for some reason the ending worked way better for me now, and I almost shed a tear. Like I said, confusing. In both cases, though, there is some really cool imagery. That’s the other thing I liked a lot about this story. I want to be in that library. Badly!

Sooo, a bit hard to rate now, for me. I think I go with a 3.5, rounded up to 4. Not sure if having the topic of global warming is enough to earn this an award. It remains mainly on the surface in that regard, and is actually more about relationships. But anyways, so far this is the only short story nominee that I really enjoyed.

Read it (or listen to it, or both) for yourself here: http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/green...

_________________

2019 Nebula Award Finalists

Best Novel
• Marque of Caine by Charles E. Gannon
• The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow
• A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine
• Gods of Jade and Shadow by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
• Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir
• A Song for a New Day by Sarah Pinsker

Best Novella
• Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom by Ted Chiang ( Exhalation)
• The Haunting of Tram Car 015 by P. Djèlí Clark
• This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone
• Her Silhouette, Drawn in Water by Vylar Kaftan
• The Deep by Rivers Solomon, with Daveed Diggs, William Hutson & Jonathan Snipes
• Catfish Lullaby by A.C. Wise

Best Novelette
• A Strange Uncertain Light by G.V. Anderson ( The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, July/August 2019)
• For He Can Creep by Siobhan Carroll
• His Footsteps, Through Darkness and Light by Mimi Mondal
• The Blur in the Corner of Your Eye by Sarah Pinsker ( Uncanny Magazine Issue 29: July/August 2019)
• Carpe Glitter by Cat Rambo
• The Archronology of Love by Caroline M. Yoachim (Lightspeed Magazine, April 2019)

Best Short Story
• Give the Family My Love by A.T. Greenblatt (Clarkesworld Magazine, Issue 149, February 2019)
• The Dead, In Their Uncontrollable Power by Karen Osborne (Uncanny Magazine Issue 27: March/April 2019)
• And Now His Lordship Is Laughing by Shiv Ramdas (Strange Horizons 9 September 2019)
• Ten Excerpts from an Annotated Bibliography on the Cannibal Women of Ratnabar Island by Nibedita Sen (Nightmare Magazine, Issue 80)
• A Catalog of Storms by Fran Wilde (Uncanny Magazine, Issue 26, January-February 2019)
• How the Trick Is Done by A.C. Wise (Uncanny Magazine Issue 29: July/August 2019)

Andre Norton Nebula Award for Middle Grade and Young Adult Fiction
• Sal and Gabi Break the Universe by Carlos Hernandez
• Catfishing on CatNet by Naomi Kritzer
• Dragon Pearl by Yoon Ha Lee
• Peasprout Chen: Battle of Champions by Henry Lien
• Cog by Greg van Eekhout
• Riverland by Fran Wilde

[Nataliya · Rating 3 out of 5]

This review is for the Nebula-nominated short story Give the Family My Love by A.T. Greenblatt.

An “asthmatic anthropologist” from the future Earth ravaged by man-made disasters and climate change is the only one sent on a research mission to the alien Library where tons of knowledge are stored (and as a bonus you can get any food you want) and she gets to explore it at her leisure, while recording voice messages for her brother Saul back on Earth, the messages showing us the gloomy world she left behind.

It’s a bit twee, and a bit whiny, and the ending is both predictable and unsatisfying.

“I told you I had one last, terrible cliché and it’s the worst one of all. The one where the astronaut doesn’t come home.”

Yeah, that was obvious. Was it supposed to carry some kind of punch? Because it did not, and it fizzled.

3 average stars for a perfectly average story.

Read it here: http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/green...

———————

My Hugo and Nebula Awards Reading Project 2020: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

[Gary · Rating 3 out of 5]

Science and folklore collide in Brit E.B. Hvide’s “East of the Sun, West of the Stars”. As the generation ship’s first space-born children grow, Faith notices something different about her daughter Patience. She is stronger and stockier than the other low-gravity bred kids and has a head of white hair not unlike the Bear Prince from one of her folktales—the same Bear Prince who visits her dreams night after night. I appreciated its depiction of the division of labor in this religious society, how it both complimented and conflicted with the science-based project of deep space travel. The resolution is equitable and satisfying.
In Robert Reed’s “Painwise”, a married couple grapples with the fallout from a new disease called Rampant, and the inadequate response from an overtaxed health care industry. The story offers a quiet, low-simmering horror, thin on plot but excelling at characterization and at painting a severe picture of a world gone not-quite mad. The story drops a few eye-poppers (e.g. that mixed race and trans persons are harder to treat for Rampant than others), that beg for clarification.
Katherine and Lucian live on the planet Ardissa where the natives have a “ghost gland” that allows them to hang around after their bodies die and, free from the demands of the physical realm, to follow more intellectual pursuits. Katherine figures out how to transplant one of these glands into Lucien’s body before he dies, but the conservative Ardissans aren’t all that pleased to have an alien squatting in their afterlife and questioning their cherished beliefs and traditions. The playful tone and hand-wavy science in Ian Creasey’s “The Final Ascent” made it feel more like a folk tale than a science fictional one, which was fine for a while, until it raised moral and ethical questions about colonialism and cultural appropriation and hand-waved past them, too. A turn toward violent action marred the second half of the story and left a bad taste in my mouth.
Hazel is a researcher who travels 32.5 light years to an alien library to uncover a dead scientist’s missing research in A.T. Greenblatt’s “Give the Family My Love”. She knows she is unlikely to return to earth, but she hopes to at least help stave off the ecological collapse that threatens human civilization. The setup comes with a lot of question marks, but the relationship between Hazel and her brother Saul (whom the narrative addresses in absentia) was engrossing enough to get me to the end.
God falls from the sky, and men harvest his body for its divine properties in “The Face of God” by Dutch author Bo Balder. The narrator leads a dangerous expedition to God’s heretofore unexplored facial region and has a stunning revelation about God’s true nature. In terms of its physical appearance, God is just a gigantic man, but instead of viewing him with sympathy and awe, the salvagers regard him as nothing more than meat for the slaughter. This could be the best and only story about tiny men slicing up an enormous man you will ever need in your life.

[Peter Tillman · Rating 3 out of 5]

Review is solely for "Give the Family My Love" by A.T. Greenblatt, Nebula short story winner, 2019. Story link: http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/green...
An astronaut and anthropologist is recruited to visit an alien Library, in hopes she can recover lost research for restoring Northwest US forests. The story is, well, pretty good. Not award-worthy, in my opinion, though I liked it more on second reading, in Neil Clarke's Best Science Fiction of the Year Volume 5. Read it, and see what you think.

For whatever reason, I often disagree with the Nebula voters in recent years, especially for short fiction.

[Silvana · Rating 2 out of 5]

Rating and review for the Nebula nominated AT Greenblatt's story "Give the Family My Love", which kind of annoyed me since I found this kind of soppy stuff more often nowadays. I need excitement, sass, wonder, provocation, quirk, anything but soppy.

[Beth Tabler · Rating 5 out of 5]

Review for Give the Family My Love by AT Greenblatt

“Give my family my love” is a phrase fraught with meaning. It could be a phrase as light and delicate as something uttered on the phone to a relative while on vacation, “Hey see you next week and give the family my love.” Or, densely and emotionally packed containing the summation of a lifetime of love between individuals, “Goodbye my love, I am leaving for boot camp and then active service, give my family my love.” It is purely contextual and outright compelling phrase dependent on the circumstances. That is why it is such an apt name for this nebula nominated short story, Give my Family My Love by AT Greenblatt. In this turn of phrase, it is used in a way that encompasses all. It is a goodbye to not only the protagonist’s planet, and her life, but to everything she has ever known.

It all started with a letter and a trek across a foreign land.

“I’m beginning to regret my life choices, Saul. Also, hello from the edge of the galaxy.”

Hazel, an astronaut, is traipsing to a destination through on an utterly foreign planet. She is an astronaut, matter a fact, she is the last astronaut from Earth. Hazel is a hail mary; she is all the hopes and dreams for a dying planet. And most of all, she is the little sister to a very pissed older brother. Whom the letter she is dictating as she tromps through the soil is meant for.

“So here I am. Walking.”

Saul(her brother) becomes a beacon for why she is doing this.

“Sorry to do this to you, Saul, but if I don’t talk to someone—well, freak out at someone—I’m not going to make it to the Library. And like hell I’m going to send a message like this back to the boys on the program. You, at least, won’t think less of me for this. You know that emotional meltdowns are part of my process.”

As she walks, she realizes that she might die far from home and alone in the most real and complete sense. What Hazel is walking to is The Library. An alien collection of information, that if Hazel is good enough for, she may have access to and live. She tells Saul all this.

The reason I loved this story is that it is subtle and still magnificently massive in scope. The subtleties are around Hazel’s relationship with her brother and a lifetime of nuances and moments. Moments that are known and appreciated to anyone that has a brother, maybe a brother you are currently in a tiff with. It is an intimate moment inside a character, that even with such limited dialog, you can get a clear sense and feeling of her mind and presence in the scene. Also, through Hazel’s letter writing, you can get a sense of the hugeness of what she is doing. The last hurrah of the human race. The one and only astronaut sent to the stars to save humanity. Even with this huge thing, Hazel is pretty grounded and ordinary, making jokes with her brother while occasionally being flummoxed at the craziness of doing what she is doing.

“The Archivists have set up something that’s not too different from a studio apartment in the corner of the section on sea coral. It has running water and artificial sunlight and all eleven seasons of M*A*S*H on a TV that looks like it came from the 1980s. I have this theory that my living quarters are part of some junior Archivist’s final thesis project, but I’m probably just culturally projecting. On the bright side, if they picked the 80s, they could have done much worse than M*A*S*H.”

The story delves even deeper when Hazel talks about moments where things changed for her. Moments of profound sadness.

“There aren’t many defining moments in my life. Mostly, I think defining moments are clichés in hindsight. So maybe this is too, but do you remember that summer, ten years ago, when everything burned? Yeah, hard to forget.”

I feel like somewhere in our ever-diminishing world, there is someone like Hazel, or maybe she hasn’t been born yet. That will get this chance to see The Library and send information back that will save humans from themselves. I hope to meet that girl, or maybe my daughter is that girl, or perhaps your daughter is. I wish I meet her. I will not want her to go, can’t someone else go? But she leaves me to seek the stars. I will miss her, desperately, to the very marrow of my bones, I will miss her. And maybe I will be her Saul. She will tell me how her day went at the Library, learning of the wonders of the world, how books came to life right before her and enveloped her. I will get to see this girl live a dream. I will get to know this girl save us. But I will never see this girl again. In that last part, Give My Family My Love becomes bittersweet.

I loved this story, and you will love it too.

[Lena · Rating 3 out of 5]

East of the Sun, West of the Stars by Brit E. B. Hvide ★★★★☆
A modern retelling of Prins Hatt Under Jorden set on an Amish generation ship.

These old stories are full of misogyny, rape, subjugation and betrayal. While still present in Hvide’s story, this version gives the female characters agency to change the ending.

That alone makes it a thousand times better than Karin Tidbeck’s Underground.


Painwise by Robert Reed ★★★☆☆
After antibiotics fail new lines of bacteria take their place. Miracle drugs in some cases and a slow agonizing death by pain as a side effect for many others.

It’s a story about the care givers and the choices they make.


The Final Ascent by Ian Creasey ★★★☆☆
Strange story about finding the afterlife on a preindustrial planet with deep gender inequality. A dying man’s ex-girlfriend decides he should enter this afterlife. Layered and interesting.


Give the Family My Love A. T. Greenblatt ★★★☆☆
An anthropologist from a dying future earth travels far to an alien library. It’s possible the information could save the world but she’s not going back... hell, neither would I.


The Face of God Bo Balder ★★★☆☆
A massive statue lands outside a village and is declared a god but not treated with even the respect afforded another human being.


The Butcher of New Tasmania by Suo Hefu ★★★☆☆
A scientists wakes up years after saving a society from war to be accused of genocide. Tricky stuff but I can’t fault him, he had a point and the rest is Monday Morning Moralizing.


Mother Tongues by S. Qiouyi Lu ★★★☆☆
Heartrending story of a mother’s sacrifice to send her daughter to Stanford.


Digging by Ian McDonald ★★☆☆☆
A story about the people terraforming Mars. It should have been fascinating, but it was boring.

Average of three stars.

[Jassmine · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rating for Mother Tongues by S. Qiouyi Lu
This was utter perfection, completely devastating story about motherly love and sacrifice. Also linguistics, capitalism... just go read it, it's really short and perfect and I cried the whole time and then some more after finishing it. Definitely going to read more by this author, possibly everything they ever written 🙈

"Why can't you make a copy of the languages instead of erasing it?"
The technician smiles ruefully. "As our current technology stands, the imaging process has the unfortunate side effect of suppressing neurons as it replicates them..."
You can't help but wonder cynically if the reason why the neurons have to be suppressed is to create artificial scarcity, to inflate demand in the face of limited supply. But if that scarcity is what allows you to put Lillian through college, you'll accept it.

Read the story here: https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/lu_0...
BR thread: https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

[Alia · Rating 5 out of 5]

- Mother Tongues by S. Qiouyi Lu

[Jess · Rating 4 out of 5]

For the beautiful, heartstring-tugging Mother Tongues by Qiouyi Lu, originally published in Asimov's.
Also enjoyed Suo Hefu's The Butcher of New Tasmania.

[Alex · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read Give the Family My Love by A.T.Greenblatt for the Nebula Awards 2019 Short Story Finalists. I really enjoyed it. I loved the descriptions of the place and the library. I wanted to know more! Also the forestfires topic is very relevant for this year, especially in Australia. I enjoyed this a lot.

[Shiva · Rating 5 out of 5]

2019 Nebula Award winner for Best Short Story
I loved this story. Hazel is the anthropologist turned astronaut on a galactic mission to find information on how to save earth from being destroyed (not by aliens bit by our own doings). She meets with aliens who can help her find research that may be of help and she is just a human trying to do the best. The descriptive writing of her encounters is amazing and so heartfelt.

“It was one of the most nerve-wracking conversations I’ve ever had. Between the steroids from my inhaler and pure, uncut anxiety, my hands were like a nine on the Richter scale.”

Also the subtleties in the brother-sister relationship are beautiful. Oh and the enormity of our planet’s being destroyed in contrast with the last astronaut’s intimate messages is so elegantly pictured and yet heartbreaking.

“I’ve found plenty of other interesting things here. Like patents and working concepts of solar powered vehicles and papers on regenerating corn seed that needs two times the amount of CO2 for photosynthesis. We had so many opportunities to stop things before they got terrible, Saul. And we missed them all.”

An intimate writing and sharing of her soul in the never-returning journey to save the planet. It is hard to pick a favourite, but the last few paragraphs are my favourites.

“Honestly, I’m still not convinced we can save Earth, …. So, give the family my love.”

5 Stars
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

[J_BlueFlower · Rating 4 out of 5]

My comments for short story:
The Final Ascent by Ian Creasey
Read Feb 2021

I did not read the "Clarkesworld Magazine, Issue 149 " hat this short story more or less randomly was combined into. My rating is for the short story only.

A fine story about the consequences of an afterlife on society and civilization. That part is well done and original. The story also contains a team about colonialism. It would have been stronger just focusing on the first part.

Merged review:

These comments are for Give the Family My Love by A.T. Greenblatt (21 pages)
Read april 2021

+1 for audio.
Kate Baker performed this bit rather than just reading it. Well done. And a fine story.

One thing I did not understand was, why an astronaut with asthma?

[Sibil · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars

This was original. The idea of this alien place where all the knowledge of the universe is collected is fascinating. And it would be an amazing place to visit, too. Sure, they required quite a lot to grant access to this magnificent place, but it is a worthy price to pay, I think.
And I really liked both the MC's voice and the way this story is narrated, via vocal messages to her brother.
It is a really short story, but it is a really good one!

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

Edit: GR is merging short story entries into their publications, so this review only covers A.T. Greenblatt's story "Give the Family My Love".

Every time I run across a Greenblatt story, I drop everything to read it. This one arrived in my Escape Pod feed late in 2020, and is no exception. It is absolutely stunning.

[Daniel Centeno · Rating 4 out of 5]

"It’s all new and deeply alien.
It’s wonderful."

El viaje de una antropóloga asmática a una biblioteca alienígena que recuperó todo el conocimiento humano, conocimiento que los humanos perdimos por necios. Un viaje emotivo.

[Anthony Buck · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely brilliant. I'd give it six stars if I could.

[lyla55 · Rating 5 out of 5]

This review is for Mother Tongues by S. Qiouyi Liu.

Mother Tongues is a futuristic novel about the concept of “selling” and “buying” languages in this world. A troublesome, Chinese-American, librarian mother, Jiawen, finds herself trying to sell her English to afford enrolling her daughter, Lillian into Stanford. Unfortunately, due to her accent, she doesn’t qualify for selling her English, so she has to turn to selling her Chinese instead. However, her mother only speaks Chinese dialects, and her daughter thinks that the process of “selling” languages is appropriative. Jiawen deals with her internal conflict throughout this short story.

I cannot sum up how good this book was into such simple words. You can’t just summarize it— it’s a rare special gem. It’s written in second person, so you feel more connected to Jiawen, and the authors writing style? Breathtaking.

This society shows the privilege of truly knowing English, especially as your native language. Look around the world, many signs in foreign countries are catered to people who speak English. Knowing English is truly a privilege.

Liu portrays the struggles of an Asian-American immigrant as well, from a mother to daughter perspective. How communication can flow through one another in different ways. How we sacrifice our own cherished things for the people we love.

Only one word: read it.

[Jordi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lately I’m finding more and more exciting to peek into new short science fiction. Besides the sheer fun of variety, the never ending quest of looking for new voices in the genre is highly addictive.

In this, my first Clarkesworld issue, my favorite story without a doubt was the stunning “Mother Tongues” from S. Quiouyi Lu, originally published in Asimov’s in 2018, and reprinted here. You can read it online in Clarkesworld website [http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/lu_02...].

Other highlights were the interesting take on the generational spaceship sub genre in “East of the Sun, West of the Stars”, where folk tales and religion coexist with technology; the witty exploration of the definition of genocide in “The Butcher of New Tasmania” by Suo Hefu; and the bleak apocalyptic tale in “Painwise” by Robert Reed. There was also the reprint of Ian McDonald’s “Digging”, a Martian Tale wonderfully written; and the pulpy, fun take on afterlife in “The Final Ascent” by Ian Creasey.

[Huginn · Rating 3 out of 5]

Review for “Painwise” by Robert Reed.

Written in 2019, this story has astounding parallels with the actual COVID-19 pandemic. However, it reads weirdly like an anti-vaccine story, where the main character’s rejection of taking the drugs “because there’s some stairs that I won’t fall down for you (the wife)” is portrayed in a confusingly heroic manner.

Again, very beautiful and poetic writing, just confused about the content.

[Jovan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another issue filled with thought provoking stories.

[Amanda · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mother Tongues

[Dimitar Dakovski · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Give the Family My Love" by A.T. Greenblatt ★★★

[Dana · Rating 5 out of 5]

S. Qiouyi Lu and Ian McDonald in the same issue, woohoo!!

[Kristīne Vītola · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read: "Give the family my love" by A.T.Greenblatt

[Grzegorz · Rating 4 out of 5]

+1 for audio.
available here: http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/audio...

[Brian · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars for the excellent short story "Give The Family My Love" by A.T. Greenblatt.

[Bismah · Rating 5 out of 5]

I needed a break from Heart of Darkness and found this little gem! A short story (less than 6000 words) but it packs an emotional punch.