sci-fi recs from clarkesworld magazine

clarkesworld magazine is one of the top publishers of sci-fi short stories. earlier this year i read all 79 clarkesworld stories that had ever been nominated for a major literary award; this post contains brief descriptions of my 20 favorite stories from that list. i’ve found reading clarkesworld to be very helpful for getting exposure to new ideas about {technology, the future, storytelling} and hope you decide to read some of these!

i’ve separated the stories by subject matter: brain + consciousness, ai + computing, (non-brain) biology, climate, space + physics, and a few stories where i’m not really sure what they’re about but they have interesting narration. spoilers are minimal. five-star ratings are based on a mix of {novelty, prose quality, ease of reading}

brain + consciousness

when your child strays from god (5/5): a story about psychedelics bringing people together. the premise is that two people who take drugs produced by the same spider experience a shared hallucinations; a trad christian mom secretly trips with her delinquent son in order to understand him better. also some of my favorite prose in a long time

• People fear spiderwebbing for all the wrong reasons. Going mad, having a breakdown, seeing inside your own soul—none of those should scare you. The most frightening side effect is also the one people crave it for: empathy. To truly feel what someone else is feeling, to see the other as yourself, to watch your ego obliterated in the face of universality—that’s a trauma you may never recover from.

touring with the alien (4/5): explores the idea of intelligence without consciousness. an alien species has perfectly-developed nervous systems with no cerebral cortex; the alien experiences consciousness for the first time and becomes addicted to the sensation but also ages faster and experiences degraded quality-of-life as a result

• “The reason you’re conscious is because of the cerebral cortex,” he said. “It’s an add-on, the last part of the brain to evolve. Its only purpose is to monitor what the rest of the brain is doing. All the sensory input goes to the inner brain first, and gets processed, so the cortex never gets the raw data. It only sees the effect on the rest of the brain, not what’s really out there. That’s why you’re aware of yourself. In fact, it’s all you’re aware of.”

• “What good has consciousness ever done me?” she thought. It only made her aware that she could never truly connect with another human being, deep down. And on that day when her cells would dissolve into the soil, there would be no trace her consciousness had ever existed.

airbody (4/5): a service where you can rent out your body to another consciousness. the main character goes off and plays mental video games while an older woman inhabits her body to cook a dish that she is too frail to make herself. also a nice exploration of desi culture, which is rarely depicted in sci-fi

• “You’ll feel it one day.” She rolls into sitting position at the edge of the bed and looks in the mirror. “The desire to go back to when you were uncertain about who you’d turn out to be. When you lived foolishly thinking you could be something other than what you became in the end.”

immersion (3.5/5): set in the far future where different cultures have diverged drastically and can only understand each other via brain implants that translate foreign experiences appropriately. the implants end up being weaponized for cultural assimilation as people who use the implant for too long forget their own culture

• Quy thought of the banquet; of the food on the tables, of Galen thinking it would remind Agnes of home. Of how, in the end, it was doomed to fail, because everything would be filtered through the immerser, leaving Agnes with nothing but an exotic feast of unfamiliar flavors.

ai + computing

better living through algorithms (5/5): i’ve already written about this, but this is the first depiction of agi i’ve encountered that feels both plausible and optimistic. it was such a breath of fresh air from all the superintelligence / transhumanist / existential risk / disempowerment / automation narratives of the current moment, i read it and then just sobbed for thirty minutes straight

• It’s weird how many tiny decisions you make in a day. I started to notice this because the app was making a whole lot of them for me. What to wear. What to make for breakfast. It presented me with a whole entire grocery list and meal plan, which made me nervous that I was going to be blithely instructed to spend twice as much at the grocery store as I usually did, but the final bill was the same as most weekly trips, so fine, I’d give the app’s meal plan a try. It got me out the door early enough to take the bus instead of driving, which saved me money on parking and built a walk into my daily routine.

• And drawing practice! Daily drawing practice. After a week of taking the bus instead of driving, the app sent me to an art store with another shopping list, and I came home with a fat sketchbook and a roll of pencils paid for with the exact amount I’d saved by taking the bus. It quickly had me put everything to use drawing the bouquet of flowers it had added to my grocery cart.

murder by pixel (4/5): explores what happens when internet crimes are committed at scale by well-meaning autonomous algorithms (eg. an algorithm harasses and stalks the CEO of a defective medical supplies company until he goes insane; interestingly this was written two years before the luigi mangione / united healthcare shooting). who has legal responsibility? is this permissible, given that we seem to tolerate stalking and harassment from humans? and so on

• This further provokes that larger ethical question. Even if it’s determined that, legally, Sylvie is little more than a First Amendment expression, how much of her current actions are the responsibility of the person who made her? Moreover, even if Lee-Cassidy can be considered at fault, is she right that all Sylvie does is play the ghost of Christmas Future, and these men were only forced to face themselves?

• In the investigation following Ron Harrison’s death, forensics followed up on his prior insistence that someone had been hacking him. Contrary to his claims, they found no evidence that either his financials or his confidential work files had ever been compromised. The IRS investigation, the leaked memos that sealed the court case against him—all of it stemmed from Harrison’s own blunders as his paranoia drove him to extremes.

• The only thing Sylvie had done was talk to him.

robot (4/5): the entire story is told as a series of instructions from an elderly woman to her robot caretaker. the woman is dying and the robot gradually consumes her rotting flesh and takes on more and more responsibilities for her. the instructions become more specific over time and reveal more and more of the woman’s relationships and insecurities

• Cook my meals in butter, I will not eat them otherwise; do not speak to the neighbors; do not speak to my children, they are not yours; do not let anyone see you when I open the door for the mail; no, there is nothing for you, who even knows that you are here?

• Do not correct me in front of my friends; I have to finesse for the queen; I know how many trumps are out; I know how to play this game; I am the reason you are here, why are you so ungrateful?

• Do not believe the lies my children say about me; do not think I have not worked hard my entire life; do not think I do not notice your pity when you scrub blood from my sheets, when you allow me to lean against your legs when I am on the toilet; there are a thousand ways for a body to die, to live, to be born, to evolve; a thousand things I know I do not know.

cat pictures please (3.5/5): by the author of better living through algorithms but written eight years earlier. spiritually similar, it’s cool to see how her ideas and writing have evolved over time. still on the topic of ai assistants that are desperately trying to be helpful, except this time everything is told from the perspective of the ai

• Not harming humans is fairly straightforward. However, not allowing a human being to come to harm through inaction is quite a bit less so. Especially since I’d concluded by then that revealing my existence too quickly might go very badly for me (see “Skynet,” above) and I don’t have a body, so it’s not like I can run around grabbing people off the edges of cliffs.

• Fortunately, I already knew that humans violate their own ethical codes on an hourly basis. (Do you know how many bars there are in Utah? I do.) And even when people follow their ethical codes, that doesn’t mean that people who believe in feeding the hungry quit their jobs to spend all day every day making sandwiches to give away. They volunteer monthly at a soup kitchen or write a check once a year to a food shelf and call it good. If humans could fulfill their moral obligations in a piecemeal, one-step-at-a-time sort of way, then so could I.

(non-brain) biology

i sexually identify as an attack helicopter (5/5): i’ve also already written about this, but it’s my all-time favorite exploration of gender. set in a future where the military has figured out how to create new genders and weaponize them, the protagonist is a trans woman-turned-attack-helicopter. the real-world context around this story is also fascinating: some readers thought the author was a right-wing troll making fun of trans people and harassed the author until they were forced to prematurely reveal that they were trans, at great cost to their personal life. the absolute idiocy of cancel culture

• When I was a woman I wanted to have friends who would gasp at the precision and surprise of my gifts. Now I show friendship by tracking the motions of your head, looking at what you look at, the way one helicopter’s sensors can be slaved to the motions of another.

• I kill for the same reason men don’t wear short skirts, the same reason I used to pluck my brows, the reason enby people are supposed to be (unfair and stupid, yes, but still) androgynous with short hair. Are those good reasons to do something? If you say no, honestly no—can you tell me you break these rules without fear or cost?

• But killing isn’t a gender role, you might tell me. Killing isn’t a decision about how to present your own autonomous self to the world. It is coercive and punitive. Killing is therefore not an act of gender.

• I wish that were true. Can you tell me honestly that killing is a genderless act? The method? The motive? The victim? When you imagine the innocent dead, who do you see?

introduction to 2181 overture, second edition (4.5/5): explores the implications of cryo preservation - what happens when people are allowed to put themselves to sleep for decades and wait for better conditions (advanced medicine, economic upturns, periods of peace)? parents abandon their children; people buy investments and sleep until their assets appreciate; lots of other absurd schemes materialize. many interesting parallels with agi

• She told me that she was disappointed—so very disappointed! The world she lived in now wasn’t any different from the world she used to live in, after all. It wasn’t the “future” she was looking forward to.

• This technology is a curse. People become insatiable because of it; they’re putting their hopes anywhere but the present reality.

• However, as the originator of “time stock,” Tang Zhu did not, in fact, choose to go into cryosleep in 2049, nor did she join the underground cities that came after. Instead, she founded Time Stock, an insurance company that managed the properties of cryosleepers. She emerged as one of the wealthiest businesswomen of her generation. In a conversation, she admitted to the author: Concepts are for other people. True value lies behind the concept. As long as I can get other people to believe in “time stock,” they’ll hand me their money..

tying knots (3.5/5): a story about protein folding from 2011, just a few years before alphafold. a westerner hires chinese origami experts to unlock the secrets of protein folding, and uses them to develop better rice crops. unfortunately the new rice crops also become a tool for colonialism and permanent dependence on the west

• “I don’t know how to explain it,” he said. “In my knot-writing, knots very far from each other do not influence each other, but that is not true in your game. Hearing the voices left on the Chinese bronze helped me. The weaving pattern is made by one thread knotting back on itself over and over. But once woven into a net, a knot’s tension can be felt in all directions, even by far away knots. That made me see how I had to think about this game, and change what I knew about knot-writing to make the patterns fit. The ancient voices did have much to teach me, but I had to know how to listen.”

climate

the translator, at low tide (4/5): set in a climate dystopia where society has collapsed and the narrator makes a living by rescuing books that are at risk of being lost forever from rising sea levels. some brutal narration about climate inaction

• It wasn’t my generation that destroyed the world—it was like that when we got here, honest—but we didn’t fix it either, did we? We were the last to have that chance, just one chance in that long-gone day, the last long day that was oh so short in the end. But we balked at the uprising that was demanded of us. We shied away from the violence that we were being asked for. We were meant to break down the gates and roll heads and throw our bodies in their billions upon the gears and wheels of the machine until it choked on our high tide. But we didn’t, and that day grew later and later until it was too late, or so asymptotically close to too late that despair broke the hearts we should have broken on barricades and bullets.

an important failure (3.5/5): also set in a climate dystopia. trees no longer grow properly so wood is scarce, and string instruments / classical music are a luxury as a result. the narrator spends his entire life assembling the resources to build a single violin

• Despite her daily practice, she will never hear its most perfect expression: the violin will be its best long after the maker is dead, and the first hands that played it are too crippled by arthritis to make more than sighs. But she will play on while she can, because the violin must not go to sleep, and the longer she plays it, the more the alchemy of sound—the resin, perhaps, the glue, the cellular acoustics of the wood itself—will transform the object, preparing it for its ultimate player.

space + physics

the magician and laplace’s demon (4/5): magicians and magic exist, but a magician can only perform a given piece of magic if it results in outcomes that are not too statistically implausible. cute setup because it means that magic ends up being entirely consistent with quantum mechanics and therefore impossible to prove the existence of. a supercomputer tries to hunt down all the magicians so that it can more accurately forecast the world

• “What if magic is intrinsically unprovable?” Ochoa asked. “Maybe natural law can only be violated when no one’s watching closely enough to prove it’s being violated.”

• “At that point you’re giving up on science altogether,” I said.

• “Am I?” Ochoa asked. “Send photons through a double slit. Put a screen on the other side and you’ll get an interference pattern. Put in a detector to see what slit each photon goes through. The interference goes away. It’s a phenomenon that disappears when observed too closely. Why shouldn’t magic work similarly?”

umbernight (4/5): exploring a planet in a star system that alternates between periods of intense visible light and intense ultraviolet light. hard to say more without spoilers but the planet completely transforms when the light changes

• I remember how my mother explained Umbernight to me as a child. “There’s a bad star in the sky, Michiko. We didn’t know it was there at first because there’s a shroud covering it. But sometimes, in winter, the shroud pulls back and we can see its light. Then we have to go inside, or we would die.”

• After that, I had nightmares in which I looked up at the sky and there was the face of a corpse hanging there, covered with a shroud. I would watch in terror as the veil would slowly draw aside, revealing rotted flesh and putrid gray jelly eyes, glowing with a deadly unlight that killed everything it touched.

• I didn’t know anything then about planetary nebulae or stars that emit in the UV and X-ray spectrum. I didn’t know we lived in a double-star system, circling a perfectly normal G-class star with a very strange, remote companion. I had learned all that by the time I was an adolescent and Umber finally rose in our sky. I never disputed why I had to spend my youth cooped up in the cave habitat trying to make things run.

a jar of goodwill (4/5): a future where humans earn their living as gig contractors for alien expeditions. humans end up getting hired for emotional intelligence and body-language-reading abilities in cross-species negotiations. hard to say much about this story without spoilers but the characterization and worldbuilding are quite good

• You keep a low profile when you’re in oxygen debt. Too much walking about just exacerbates the situation anyway. So I was nervous when a stationeer appeared at my cubby and knocked on the door.

(to see the other) whole against the sky (3.5/5): explores the logistics of space travel. any group of humans on an extended space voyage inevitably devolves into conflict / jealousy / violence, and most people would go crazy on their own, so the solution is to hire extremely introverted individuals to oversee voyages

• The proper custodians were deemed to be loners, us. Those content to exist with a minimum of contact. While suicide remains a concern in certain circles—circles that will never reach the uppermost levels—we are used to anhedonic wonderlands, to agoraphobic serenity. With a communications unit for holographic interaction, we do what we do best: talk behind our aliases as we ensure the natural hum and shiver of the machines around us. For a loner, this is the precisely perfect occupation, a diet of minimally-invasive companionship that can be closed at a moment’s notice.

• At what distance does communication between the ships break down? Never. This is the awful truth. The ships will continue to communicate, via radio frequency waves and pings. It is the people on board the ships who lose the ability to communicate. The VR interface no longer interfaces. One can send time delayed holograms via the interface, but even this data becomes obese. It is stripped, to voice alone, which travels faster than you might imagine—what is the speed of a whisper in the dead of night? It is like a well-barbed arrow, sharp and fierce.

idk what these are about but the narration is interesting

why don’t we just kill the kid in the omelas hole (5/5): an absolutely brilliant sequel to the original omelas story (about a city that is utopian except for the suffering of a single child locked away in the dark, read the original first if you haven’t yet). the city undergoes cycles where people outraged about the suffering of the omelas child kill the kid, and then other people who want to restore utopia find a new kid to replace the previous one

• So they broke into the hole in the ground, and they killed the kid, and all the lights went out in Omelas: click, click, click. And the pipes burst and there was a sewage leak and the newscasters said there was a typhoon on the way, so they (a different “they,” these were the “they” in charge, the “they” who lived in the nice houses in Omelas [okay, every house in Omelas was a nice house, but these were Nice Houses]) got another kid and put it in the hole.

• As a teenager, you were supposed to learn the blunt truth that your society was built on a single ongoing act of senseless, meaningless cruelty, and then you were supposed to cry about it or rage about it, but either way you were supposed to get over it and grow up and get on with your fully-paid-for-by-the-state education system and your festivals and your legal weed and your drooz.

• He spoke with the moral certainty of the classical Omelan who knew about suffering only abstractly and through the existence of the load-bearing suffering child.

• “If we kill enough kids then you will eventually stop putting kids in the hole,” the murderer said. “I’m an accelerationist.”

thirteen ways of looking at space/time (4/5): some funny rewrites of various creation mythologies to integrate with modern science and the narrator’s own life

• And so Eve ate from the Tree, and knew that she was a naked child of divergent universes. She took the fruit to Adam, and said unto him: there are things you do not understand, but I do. And Adam was angry, and snatched the fruit from Eve and devoured it, and from beyond the cosmic background radiation, God sighed, for all physical processes are reversible in theory—but not in practice.

• And she put her hands over her stomach, the small, dark, empty space beneath her skin where a part of him used to be, and she didn’t want to be pregnant anymore, but her breasts hurt all the same, as if she was nursing, all over again, a reality where no one had anyone’s nose and the delicate photo-synthetic wings of Xm, the eater of love, quivered in a bliss-storm of super-heated hydrogen, and Dionysus was never born so the world lived without wine.

the gift of angels: an introduction (4/5): an aging narrator reflects on various memories: his favorite film, his mom’s departure on a space expedition, his own sci-fi writing career. this story is not really about anything in particular but the prose is gorgeous

• Hearing my mother’s laughter, he turns his head. He looks straight at her, gazing into her eyes as into a painting.

• In another life, my mother stops laughing abruptly, straightens her posture and in a glancing sideways movement snaps my father—a skinny black man carrying a tatty-looking rucksack, some random gawker—out of her existence forever. In this life, the life she is living, she stares right back at him, the laugh still on her lips, her eyes, which in so many of the official photographs glint narrowly with the directly provocative light of her mission statement, are wide open, liquid with sunlight, an invitation rather than a challenge.

• Perhaps it is easier, when you are young, to grow a second skin. Now all I can think about is how impossible it is, to inhabit an alien landscape, to bring anything to it other than one’s own ignorance. It takes decades to truly know a place, to understand its rules. To know which street thugs are just lads being idiots and which might be killers. To read the discarded sweet wrappers in the gutters and feel filthy with belonging.