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Clarkesworld Magazine, Issue 200, May 2023

Name: Clarkesworld Magazine, Issue 200, May 2023
Rating: 4.12 (105 reviews)
Author: Neil Clarke

Neil Clarke April 30, 2023

4.12 105 Ratings

Ongoing Status

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Synopsis

Our May 2023 issue (#200) contains:
– Original fiction by Naomi Kritzer (“Better Living Through Algorithms”), Harry Turtledove (“Through the Roof of the World”), Suzanne Palmer (“To Sail Beyond the Botnet”), Rich Larson (“LOL, Said the Scorpion”), Parker Ragland (“Sensation and Sensibility”), Megan Chee (“The Giants Among Us”), An Hao (“Action at a Distance”), and Jordan Chase-Young (“The Fall”).
– Non-fiction includes an article by Carrie Sessarego, interviews with Premee Mohamed and Megan O’Keefe, and an editorial by Neil Clarke.

Books similar to Clarkesworld Magazine, Issue 200, May 2023

Nyssa Glass and the Caper Crisis

★ 4.25

H.L. Burke

Orphaned cat burglar Nyssa Glass intends to outwit her rotten fate.

“Adopted” by her incarcerated uncle's gang of thieves, she breaks into homes and picks pockets to repay her family debt and one day buy her freedom from their dark enterprise. Mechanically adept and determined, Nyssa longs to attend Miss Pratchett's School for Mechanically Minded Maids and make an honest life she can take pride in.

She wasn't made to steal things. She was made to create and fix them.

However, before she can make her escape, the head of the gang taps her for a new assignment, one her conscience cannot bear. Nyssa is faced with a heartrending decision: sacrifice everything or become the very thing she's desperate to escape.

A Prequel Short for the Nyssa Glass Steampunk Series.

Emergency Skin

★ 4.01

N.K. Jemisin

What will become of our self-destructed planet? The answer shatters all expectations in this subversive speculation from the Hugo Award–winning author of the Broken Earth trilogy.

An explorer returns to gather information from a climate-ravaged Earth that his ancestors, and others among the planet’s finest, fled centuries ago. The mission comes with a warning: a graveyard world awaits him. But so do those left behind—hopeless and unbeautiful wastes of humanity who should have died out eons ago. After all this time, there’s no telling how they’ve devolved. Steel yourself, soldier. Get in. Get out. And try not to stare.

N. K. Jemisin’s Emergency Skin is part of Forward, a collection of six stories of the near and far future from out-of-this-world authors. Each piece can be read or listened to in a single thought-provoking sitting.

So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction and Fantasy

★ 4.00

Nalo Hopkinson

So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction & Fantasy is an anthology of original new stories by leading African, Asian, South Asian and Aboriginal authors, as well as North American and British writers of color.

Stories of imagined futures abound in Western writing. Writer and editor Nalo Hopkinson notes that the science fiction/fantasy genre “speaks so much about the experience of being alienated but contains so little writing by alienated people themselves.” It’s an oversight that Hopkinson and Mehan aim to correct with this anthology.

The book depicts imagined futures from the perspectives of writers associated with what might loosely be termed the “third world.” It includes stories that are bold, imaginative, edgy; stories that are centered in the worlds of the “developing” nations; stories that dare to dream what we might develop into.

The wealth of postcolonial literature has included many who have written insightfully about their pasts and presents. With So Long Been Dreaming they creatively address their futures.

Contributors include: Opal Palmer Adisa, Tobias Buckell, Wayde Compton, Hiromi Goto, Andrea Hairston, Tamai Kobayashi, Karin Lowachee, devorah major, Carole McDonnell, Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu, Eden Robinson, Nisi Shawl, Vandana Singh, Sheree Renee Thomas and Greg Van Eekhout.

Nalo Hopkinson is the internationally-acclaimed author of Brown Girl in the Ring, Skin Folk, and Salt Roads. Her books have been nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, Tiptree, and Philip K. Dick Awards; Skin Folk won a World Fantasy Award and the Sunburst Award. Born in Jamaica, Nalo moved to Canada when she was sixteen. She lives in Toronto.

Uppinder Mehan is a scholar of science fiction and postcolonial literature. A South Asian Canadian, he currently lives in Boston and teaches at Emerson College.

The Tusks of Extinction

★ 3.82

Ray Nayler

WINNER OF THE 2025 HUGO AWARD FOR BEST NOVELLA

When you bring back a long-extinct species, there’s more to success than the DNA.

Moscow has resurrected the mammoth, but someone must teach them how to be mammoths, or they are doomed to die out, again.
The late Dr. Damira Khismatullina, the world’s foremost expert in elephant behavior, is called in to help.
While she was murdered a year ago, her digitized consciousness is uploaded into the brain of a mammoth.
Can she help the magnificent creatures fend off poachers long enough for their species to take hold? And will she ever discover the real reason they were brought back?

A tense eco-thriller from a new master of the genre.

At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Night of the Mannequins

★ 3.30

Stephen Graham Jones

Stephen Graham Jones returns with Night of the Mannequins, a contemporary horror story where a teen prank goes very wrong and all hell breaks loose: is there a supernatural cause, a psychopath on the loose, or both?

A Love Story from the End of the World: Stories

★ 3.86

Juhea Kim

From the acclaimed author of
Beasts of a Little Land
and
City of Night Birds,
an exquisite, globetrotting story collection about humans in precarious balance with the natural world

Spanning multiple locales and epochs, and rendered in fine detail and vivid color, this transportive collection shows what it means to live as human inhabitants on our one miraculous planet. Lyrical, at times hilarious, and always heartfelt, each of these ten stories is a reflection of individual choice in the face of man-made in a near-future Seoul, where air pollution has become so fatal that the city has been encased in a translucent biodome, a civil engineer charged with its upkeep contemplates an arranged marriage. A painter, disenchanted with New York City, travels to the South of France and falls into a dalliance with an entrepreneur who claims to have invented a new color. And on an island where the Indian and Pacific Oceans meet, upon which other countries have relegated their waste to form a mountain of landfill, a local boy facing daily privation gets internet famous for his K-pop-inspired dances.

With the clear-eyed reverence of Richard Powers and the sparkling sincerity of George Saunders, Juhea Kim’s first story collection views our broken world—and broken hearts—from breathtaking heights. A Love Story from the End of the World delivers an impassioned reminder that we are human—but without nature, we are nothing at all.

Extraordinary Engines: The Definitive Steampunk Anthology

★ 3.58

Nick Gevers

Extraordinary Engines: The Definitive Steampunk Anthology assembles original stories by some of the genre's foremost writers. Edited by Nick Gevers, this collection includes brand new stories from some of science fiction and fantasy's foremost writers.

Restricted Fantasies

★ 3.88

Kevin Kneupper

Are you living in a simulation?

If you aren’t now, you soon will be. The technology is fast approaching, and within our lifetimes the vast majority of humanity may be plugged into their own private worlds, living out dreams indistinguishable from reality.

It sounds like a paradise. But even paradise has its price.

Restricted Fantasies is a collection of short stories about lives lived inside and outside of virtual reality. The advent of simulated realities raises questions of philosophy and technology that drive at the core of our nature as humans—and in the tradition of classic sci-fi, the stories in this collection wrestle with these questions and with the shape of things to come.

You’ll meet a child protective services agent tasked with rescuing children being raised by Neo-Nazis in an illegal simulation of their own darkest fantasies.

You’ll meet a man who discovers the cheat code to our reality—and watch as it all goes horribly wrong.

You’ll go on a futuristic Rumspringa with an Amish woman who lives it up in virtual reality for a few years before deciding whether to go home to the last unplugged community on Earth.

You'll peek into the lives of virtual reality addicts, aliens, and mad billionaires.

And you’ll journey into Sim-Sing, a simulated prison with a very unpleasant jailer.

Whether you’re a fan of classic sci-fi or not, if you’ve ever wondered whether the things around you are real, whether The Matrix was just a movie, and where the line is between reality and fantasy, you’ll love this glimpse into a future that may yet come—and that may already be here.

Author Kevin Kneupper is an attorney and writer of various books, screenplays, and webcomics, including the bestselling They Who Fell series and Argonauts.