Website: clarkesworldmagazine.com

"Assassins" Author: Jack Skillingstead & Burt Courtier Main Characters: Sonia (Simone the Slayer) Main Elements: Science Fiction - Virtual Reality "Prosthetic Daugher" Author: Nin Harris Main Characters: Admiral Zhen-Juan, Yun-Li Main Elements: Science Fiction - Advanced Tech "How Bees Fly" Author: Simone Heller Main Characters: Salpe Main Elements: Science Fiction - Post Apocalyptic "Rain Ship" Author: Chi Hui Main Characters: Jin, Holt, Dar Main Elements: Science Fiction - Spaceships "Dragon's Deep" Author: Cecilia Holland Main Characters: Perla, Marco Main Elements: Fantasy - Dragons "The Dragonslayer of Merebarton" Author: K.J.Parker Main Characters: Dodinas le Cure Hardy Main Elements: Fantasy - Dragons Non-Fiction "Frodo Is Dead: Worldbuilding and The Science of Magic" by Christopher Mahon "Organic Tech and Healing Clay: A Conversation with Nnedi Okorafor" by Chris Urie "Another Word: A Doom of One's Own" by Genevieve Valentine "Editor's Desk: The Next Chapter Begins" by Neil Clarke

Assassins - In revenge for having her favorite vitual NPC character erased from a virtual world, Sonia started wiping out other popular NPC's, causing pain to those who had built relationships with them, to be able to feel she has the ability to affect the real world. It was an interesting concept, the assassination of a person that doesn't even exist (they aren't even avatars of real people) and yet they cause widespread grief amongst those who have been attached to, well, a bunch of pixels.

Prosthetic Daugher - In this one we have an advanced society that stores their identities in nodes, thus taking the concept of identity-theft to another level. It questions who we are when our memories, and even parts of our bodies, can be replaced. Where a mind can be plugged into a ship instead of a body. And what happens if someone steals our identities, hacks into our nodes and not just erases us but absorbs us. And taken a bit farther, if the memories of your existence could also be wiped from the minds of those you love, or maybe not wiped, replaced. You could in fact watch someone live a whole different version of your own life.

How Bees Fly - This one was fully of surprises, because of the first person narrative, she doesn't think to fill in the reader as to what's going on, because, well, she herself knows so doesn't spend much time thinking about it. You have to piece it together bit by bit. Like the fact the main character isn't human (we discover as we go that she has claws and a tail). It's clear she's living on a devastated world with chemical storms, and inhabited by "demons". The narrator's primitive race believes in wiping them out, that just to be in their presence will taint a person. But it seems that these demons are perhaps simply humans that have gone underground to escape the devastated world while the narrator's race maybe evolved on the surface? Though the narrator is probably correct that the demons were the cause of the devastated world. If I say much more I'll give away the puzzle you must work your way through, but it was worth the effort, I enjoyed it, even if not all questions are answered. This has the potential of making a decent novel.

Rain Ship - Another one where you have to pay attention to the details of the story to realize your protagonist isn't quite human, in fact humans have come, colonized space, and then gone. In our wake, another Earth species has evolved and is following in our footsteps as archaeologists, trying to understand us. It's a little hampered by the fact that this species is the rat and that they are one-sixteenth of our height, so our structures are gloriously huge to them. Oddly, the story was littered with footnotes to fill in some background information the Ruderan species, which was helpful but on a tablet it was awkward to scroll to the bottom then try to find my way back to where I was, I ended up just reading all the footnotes at once. But the worldbuilding was excellent, extrapolating from modern rat behaviour to what their society may be like in the future. Another bonus, we get a taste of Asian SF from this Chinese author.

Dragon's Deep - A kind of twist on the dragon stealing the princess. A girl goes with her male villagers in a desperate bid to fish dangerous waters, only to discover that it wasn't the reefs that were the danger. A dragon hunted there, and having devoured most of the men plunged under the water, his wake drawing her down with him. Eventually he discovers her in his lagoon where she has become trapped and demands that she tells him stories. Stories of dragons and princes and princesses and of evil dukes, like the one that was driving her own village to starvation. The dragon is never good, he is always willing to eat her, there is even a kind of creepy rape scene. But when faced with the cruelty of her own species, the innocent girl from the fishing village must make a choice.

The Dragonslayer of Merebarton - In which we get the see the process involved in slaying a dragon from the point of view of an aging knight, who frankly wasn't ever really all that good at being a knight in the first place (coming somewhere in the middle of the ranks during the jousts). He's got a bad knee, he's short on money, and frankly, doesn't know anything about slaying dragons. It is cynical and sarcastic and pokes holes in the whole mythology surrounding the knight. Like the fact we envision him always as an individual that rides out to save the world, but in truth, the guy can't even put on his armour by himself. He doesn't go anywhere alone, he has the guy to carry his extra lances in case his breaks, his squire, the boy that leads the extra horses, and a few others in his entourage. Or that while the hero is out setting the perfect trap to catch the dragon and spends the day obliviously sitting in some hedges by the side of the road, the dragon is off burning his own village. Legends are what we are left with after we've stripped off reality and polished it up to remove the fact that the this brave and wonderous hero was in fact, just a middle-aged man who couldn't figure out how to fix his broken chamberpot.