I’ve expanded from two monthly short fiction posts to three, but we’re still starting with my monthly reads of Clarkesworld and GigaNotoSaurus. Let’s get to it. 

Clarkesworld

Clarkesworld often features eight stories in a month, but in the October 2024 issue, there are six short stories sandwiching a novella-length centerpiece.

It opens with A Space O/pera by Abby Nicole Yee, which envisions the Philippine space program in a late 21st century setting rife with inequality. It opens with epistolary segments referencing a lavish celebrity wedding punctuating the main story of a young aerospace engineering graduate student whose dog would be the first Pinoy in space. There’s a bit of intrigue with some secretive technology, a bit of classic adventure, and an eventual tie-in with the epistolary elements. It’s a whole lot going on in a short space, and I would’ve liked a little more time to let the elements breathe. The setting is fleshed out very well, but the adventure happens a bit quickly for my taste. 

The next story features another tremendous setting, as The Buried People by Nigel Brown follows a group through a post-apocalyptic Scottish Highlands seeking people who have modified their physiology to allow for hibernation through the snowbound winters. Brown builds a chilling world in a short amount of time, with a cast whose varying degrees of selfishness in pursuing the buried people reveal a little about the state of society, a little about their personal histories, and a lot about the inclination to use others for their own ends. It’s not a story that comes together for a conclusion I found especially satisfying, but a really strong buildup makes it well worth the read. 

The Children of the Flame by Fiona Moore is another entry in the small-scale post-apocalyptic series started in “The Spoil Heap” and continued in “Morag’s Boy” and “The Portmeirion Road.” Like the other three, “The Children of the Flame” mostly features the main character trying to solve a particularly vexing problem—in this case, as in most of the cases, an interpersonal one—in a society that has lost most of its previous institutions and technology. These don’t necessarily have to be read in order, but those who have read the first three should know pretty much what to expect by now: an engaging small-scale story with a well-realized setting and a satisfying finish. 

The issue’s extended centerpiece is the novella Fractal Karma by Arula Ratnakar. I’ve read Ratnakar a couple times at this point, and she tends to publish novella-length pieces with a ton of ambition and plenty of math. “Fractal Karma” is no exception, as a lead who’d lost her job due to drug abuse tries to put together some rent money by finagling her way into an experimental program that alters the minds of mathematicians for military purposes. It’s just as wild as it sounds, and those who loved the trippiness of “Axiom of Dreams” are bound to enjoy this one as well. Personally, I had a harder time emotionally resonating with the lead, which coupled with the tendency of secondary characters to infodump at the slightest provocation kept this from hitting quite that level in my eyes. 

The back half of the issue opens with Fishing the Intergalactic Stream by Louis Inglis Hall, in which a renowned fisherman is given the opportunity to be the first to discover what lurks in the depths of a freshly terraformed and vaguely foreboding world. The first-person narration slips back and forth between the present and various bits of the lead’s history, delivering an utterly compelling voice and a complicated lead whose layers unfold slowly over the course of the story, all building up to an ending that leaves the reader with a real punch on the way out. 

Midnight Patron by Mike Robinson is a bit more straightforward, a post-apocalyptic story (a bit of a theme for this issue, isn’t it?) told from the perspective of a crow picking through the remains of an art museum and finding itself strangely moved. It’s not a story that’s going to wow with the plot, but the non-human perspective makes for an enjoyable read. 

Finally, The Face of God: A Documentary by Damián Neri closes the fiction section with a short piece styled as an oral history of humanity responding to a giant body with numerous magical properties hurtling through the solar system—a body believed by many to be that of God the Creator. I enjoy stories that build strange narratives through an exploration of various, often conflicting perspectives, and this is no exception, though I found myself expecting certain questions that were not explicitly highlighted in the narrative, perhaps due to the difference in religious background between myself and the author. 

The non-fiction section of this issue includes a discouraging editorial on the decrease in international submissions to Clarkesworld—likely because of its very public closing in response to the AI spam issue last February and a much-less-publicized reopening. It’s not so much doom and gloom as it is yet another knock-on effect of an old problem. 

The science article is perhaps the nonfiction highlight, with Octavia Cade discussing grief over the deaths of beloved species or habitats, both in fiction and in real life. Collapsing ecologies are a theme in some of the fiction that I’ve read of hers, so perhaps it’s no surprise to find a thoughtful nonfiction treatment of the subject. 

The two interviews are with Indrapramit Das and R.S.A. Garcia, both authors I’ve enjoyed reading in the past. Das discusses the short fiction anthology he’s edited with MIT Press—including an extremely bold claim that the first story is Vajra Chandrasekera at his weirdest—which was already high on my TBR and remains so. Garcia discusses her new fantasy series, and as happens so often with these interviews, makes me intrigued by a book that otherwise wouldn’t have been on my radar. 

GigaNotoSaurus 

The one longish story in this month’s GigaNotoSaurus is the novelette To Sacrifice Others by R.Z. Held, featuring an absolutely fascinating premise, in which a conquering empire has the technology to control the desires of the conquered people, essentially creating pliant slaves. Only the main character’s implant never totally worked, effectively making her a completely isolated spy in enemy territory, trying to blend in while also resisting in whatever ways she can. 

The element of the premise that jumps out to me is the psychological toll that such a role would take on an ordinary civilian with no real preparation for participating in such horrors, all the while knowing she could act to stop it, but also that any such act could well mean her own death and the death of the person she’s acting to save. But while the story certainly dwells a little bit on the psychology involved, it’s much more the tale of one particular decision to try to undermine her captors—an entertaining story, but more space opera than character study. 

October Favorites

• Fishing the Intergalactic Stream by Louis Inglis Hall (short story, Clarkesworld)