Clarkesworld Issue 193

An average issue of Clarkesworld, with interesting stories by M. L. Clark, Alan Kubatiev and Gregory Feeley, and a disturbing story involving family abuse by Thomas Ha.

• "Junk Hounds" by Lavie Tidhar: in space, there is a lot of junk. But one man's junk is another man's treasure. And one junk hound may have found the ultimate treasure, is he can get it.

• "Coding Van Gogh" by Elaine Gao: a programmer / artist is deep at work programmatically recreating a work of art when she suffers massive injuries. When she recovers, she discovers she has lost her old job under mysterious circumstances. Her attempts to recreate one last work of art would reveal what happened the first time.

• "Sweetbaby" by Thomas Ha: a disturbing story of a physically (and possibly mentally) deformed brother who does violent acts on his sisters while their parents try to keep them alive on a world with known ways to synthesize organic material. The sister suspects the parents to be hiding information from her about their history or why they came to the world and eventually finds a way to find it and, in a way, escape from their control.

• "Lost and Found" by M. L. Clark: a story that starts with an 'info-dump' but gradually builds into an interesting story of about a world being watched over by semi-sentient artificial spiders and forbidden to outsiders. To this world comes a patrol to rescue a civilian ship that should not have been there. As it turns out, the rescue mission will not be to rescue the civilians, but only after the patrol realizes the truth about why the ship came to the world and what the occupants request from the spiders.

• "Fly Free" by Alan Kubatiev, translated by Alex Shvartsman: an unusual tale set in a time when birds have taken over the world and humans serve them. The first to be sentenced by the birds are the writers who wrote bad things about birds and the poultry farmers. But even a human translator who now work for the birds is not immune when found to be harbouring an enemy of the birds.

• "Giant Fish" by Chu Shifan, translated by Stella Jiayue Zhu: a fairy tale like story about a giant fish which apparently dies and washes ashore on an island. A frenzy begins to harvest its flesh, which begins to have a strange effect on humankind, making them desire to be one with the fish, leading to an inevitable outcome witnessed by one who did not consume its flesh.

• "The Secret Strength of Things" by Gregory Feeley: about a cat-and-mouse game of life and death on Neptune's moon, Triton, between two artificial organisms: one a deadly hunter; the other, desperate to continue living.

• "Rondo for Strings and Lasergun" by Jared Oliver Adams: a young, brilliant musician is involved in an accident. As the price for operating on her hands, she has to serve time in space fighting against an alien organism. But after an attack, her musical skills would prove to be a weapon against the aliens.