I finally finished reading the March issue of Clarkesworld last week. Here are my brief review of the fiction there.
From Enceladus, with Love by Ryan Cole (4,970 word) — A young teenager stows away on a ship to find her mom on Enceladus, one of Saturn’s moons, where she is a miner. Everything changes when the ship wakes up. A fresh look at a newly awakening AI. (My rating: 5/5)
Pollen by Anna Burdenko, translated from Russian by Alex Shvartsman (5,330 words) — A family is the lead mission to a planet with psychedelic pollen. It hard to say much more without spoiling it. An emotional story of a family dealing with a difficult situation. (My rating: 4/5)
Mindtrips by Tlotlo Tsamaase (7,730 words) — A young woman with a traumatic past is forced to take therapy pills to deal with it so those in authority can figure out what actually happened to cause her mother’s death. Explores the ethics of forcing other to take mental health meds. (My rating: 4/5)
Those Uncaring Waves by Yukimi Ogawa (18,140 words) — A pattern maker who helps to heal people’s pain tries to help a person whose own skin patterns have damaged her mental health. A deeply moving story of helping others for its own sake as well as the importance of having difficult discussions. (My rating: 5/5)
Hook and Line by Koji A. Dae (4,150 words) — An old medium on a generation ship tries to find a way to stay connected to the spirits of those who boarded the ship on Earth. A story about reconciling the past with the future. (My rating: 4/5)
The Sound of the Star by Ren Zeyu, translated from Chinese by Jay Zhang (3,820 words) — A man visits a number of planets where their stars all affect how sound works. For example, on one sound stays available in the atmosphere almost forever. A very unique exploration of sound in our lives. (My rating: 5/5)
Funerary Habits of Low Entropy Entities by Damián Neri (3, 500 words) — A crab-like explorer who subsumes the minds of the dead he eats, finds a dead human, eats it, and builds a spaceship to leave one of Jupiter’s moons. This feels like a scientist wrote it without considering his layman audience. (My rating: 2/5)
The average rating for the stories in this issue: 4.14 out of 5 stars.
