Website: clarkesworldmagazine.com

"The Miracle Lambs of Minane" Author: Finbarr O'Reilly Main Characters: Maura Main Elements: Science Fiction - Post Apocalypse "Sparrow" Author: Yilin Wang Main Characters: Sparrow Lee Main Elements: Science Fiction - ??? "When We Were Starless" Author: Simone Heller Main Characters: Mink, Orion Main Elements: Science Fiction - Post-apocalyptic "The Facecrafter" Author: Anna Wu Main Characters: Ling Xi Main Elements: Science Fiction - Post-apocalypse / cyberpunk "Thirty-Three Percent Joe" Author: Suzanne Palmer Main Characters: Joe- Main Elements: Science Fiction - Cyborgs "In Everlasting Wisdom" Author: Aliette de Bodard Main Characters: Ai Thi Main Elements: Science Fiction - Aliens "The Falls: A Luna Story" Author: Ian McDonald Main Characters: Shahina, Nuur Main Elements: Science Fiction - Extraterestrial Colony / A.I. Non-Fiction "Endless Forms Most Horrible: Parasites and SF" by Julie Novakova "First Contact, Fantasy, and Cooperation: A Conversation with Steven Erikson" by Chris Urie "Another Word: In Praise of Taking it Slow" by Sarah Pinsker "Editor's Desk: After the Dirty Dozen" by Neil Clarke

"The Miracle Lambs of Minane" is a post apocalyptic tale but on a small scale in small town Ireland. After a loss of population there is a push to produce more children, but not every woman wants a child. I wasn't too impressed with this one.

"Sparrow" is about a female window washer who loses her job due to automation and tries to be inspired by Sparrow Lee, a fictional thief and assassin. I didn't quite get the point of this one, at least from an SF or F perspective. "When We Were Starless" made me work, we a dropped into what appears to be a post-apocalyptic future Earth whose dominant species is a kind of bipedal lizard. As they traverse the wastelands, they travel with their herds of weavers that seem to be mechanical spiders that act as 3-D printers, the tribe needed to find leftover raw materials for the weavers to weave. There are also centipede like "rustbreeds" that attack tha tribe from time to time, that could also be mechanical, just as their gearbeasts must be.

Mink, our main character is a Scout and her job is to exorcise "ghosts" to protect the tribe from being infected or ghost-shifted. We learn that these ghosts are actually leftover mechanical devices, anything that glows and blinks, automated doors, or in the case of Orion, a holographic AI that serves as a tour guide in a museum, or at least he used to, after all no humans have been by in a very, very long time. As Mink listens to him, terrified of him, but fascinated too, she learns about the past, about how people used to look to the stars (a concept long lost, as something is smothering the atmosphere and blocking their light). Her tribe feels she has been ghost-shifted, possessed or infected, but Mink realizes that perhaps the "ghosts" need not be feared, that they can learn from them, not just how to use the weavers to do things they never imagined before, but to imagine a world beyond this one, out there, beyond the black sky to the stars they barely remember. To dream of better things.

"The Facecrafter" takes place in a post-apocalyptic Earth where everyone is hiding underground. While struggling to surive, there is some room for storing works of art by Picasso and others, and the main characters is the curator. Until one day the paintings mysteriously disappear. And since being underground is so very boring, everyone is hooked into a cyber world, where Facecrafters create avatars...though it seems one of them named Hun Dun may in fact be a literal god of the arts and isn't very happy with the direction the human race is going in.

"Thirty-Three Percent Joe" is my favorite. Joe is a soldier, but not a particularly good one, he's now up to having 30% artificial parts. But the story is not told from his point of view, but rather the views of his parts. His mechanical heart has arguments with his artificial colon, his spleen claims senority, while his elbow is the newbie. Very amusing take on what is actually a sad story of war and keeping people alive just to send them out as canon fodder again and again and again.

"In Everlasting Wisdom" was interesting though a little unclear. We have people living in I guess a station or sealed off city while a war rages outside. The people are forced to give up more food and money to the war, and eveything is run by the Everlasting Emperor. And there are people, with alien symbionts inside them, that go around the city projecting feelings of duty and fealty towards the emperor. I didn't quite get the worldbuilding, whether the Emperor was an alien too, or a human using the symbionts, but then the tale is told by one of the hosts who herself volunteered out of desperation, to get enough money to have food for her daughter. A story ultimately of the sacrifices we must make.

And lastly, "The Falls: A Luna Story" is part of the Luna series which I haven't read, do I don't know if the characters in the story are part of the series as well, or really just an aside, but what I read here makes me want to read the novels. We have a psychiatrist, but not a normal one, one that helps extraterrestrial probes with their emotional problems! And interesting though that is, the story isn't even about our narrator but her daughter (took me half the story to figure out it was a mother, I actually thought it was a father). First she wants to become an archaeologist...on the moon, which had only been settled for about a century or so, and finds herself excavating places her mother used to live. Then that wasn't interesting enough and she got into parkour, which must be quite something on a world with so little gravity, but if you fall far enough, long enough, you'll still die.