Status Updates From Clarkesworld Magazine, Issu...

Law of Tongue 2,5⭐️

Endings & Experimentations: Conversation with Bora Chung and Anton Hur: Good, especially the translator, who recommends buying books by the same translator "We tend to be more prolific than writers, there will always be a Frank Wynne translation you haven’t read yet."

Left to Die: Binu is left to die by her two detraying "lovers". They figure out that the alien trees are sentient and manages to have them sent a message "Aila" (a naïve character from a drama) to the orbiting ship. They are rescued and want to go back to research those trees as soon as possible. I'm unsure of the pronoun so they/them it is.

Women Have Always Been Here: A Conversation with Lisa Yaszek: interesting. I was aware of the The Future is Female, but I had missed the second volume.

To Exorcise Mechanical Ghosts: 3* Man is greffed with a dead man's prostetic after an accident. He starts to ear echos of the dead man's conversations. He believes he was murdered, but he decided to reset the prostetic and not upset things. The end was a let down.

Upstart: 4* People get monetary compensation if they signed away their life. K Li is a man who is past his legal death date. His neighbour disappeared, A Xu came looking for him. He was part of a group trying to find an antidote to the genetic stuff injected by DPO. K accepts to be their test subject, takes A Xu to the Space Park. It was all a fraud, but K was happy with it. His daughter gets tickets to the same park

Editor's Desk: Wellness Check: short and good

Murder by Pixel: Crime and Responsibility in the Digital Darkness: 4* I find the style a bit confusing because it could be a real article about a real situation. It has links to real things that have happened throughout. Story: AI named "Sylvie" is harrassing some people (causing suicides even) and helping others. Is the creator responsible? What to do? What can be done?

The Lightness: 3* Woman becomes a surrogate for aliens, but the couple dies and she has an abortion.

Keiki's Pitcher Plant: A scientist from Maharlika (formerly the Philippines) gets to rename a plant (removing the colonial name). She is called to the dispensary, who delivers a clone of herself as a baby. She and three other childless scientists received babies. She names the child Keiki. Why only ten years though?

The Resting Place of Trees: 2* Robot Hector7 publishes a collection of conversations from the last day of humanity, but it's not all true. I don't really get it because the worldbuilding is so vague, what happened to the world?

A Stroll into Unfamiliar Worlds: Interesting essay.

Law of Tongue: 4* A world where orcas can talk with humans (and other stuff but pretty vague). A grandmother orca tasks a fixer to find her granddaughter before negociations. with the Mayor of Seattle The granddaughter has to be removed by former poachers, which is caught on film and used by the grandmother orca to get her way.

Murder by Pixel: pretty interesting, but would have liked more of a story.

Law of Tong: this was quite interesting, I liked the SF component and the smart twist.

Heard murder by pixel 4*