Clarkesworld is a Hugo and World Fantasy Award-winning science fiction and fantasy magazine. Each month we bring you a mix of fiction, articles, interviews and art. Our April 2025 issue (#223) contains:

Fiction
"Through These Moments, Darkly" by Samantha Murray
"The Seed" by Sheryl Singerling
"Aegiopolis Testudo" by Gordon Li
"Still Water" by Zhang Ran
"Symbiotic" by Carolyn Zhao
"There Is No King in My Country" by Thomas Ha
"An Even Greater Cold to Come" by Rich Larson
Non-Fiction
"Climate Change and the Shifting Disease Landscape" by Victoria Brun
"Unreliable Characters: A Conversation with Ai Jiang" by Arley Sorg
"Unapologetically Strange: A Conversation with Natalia Theodoridou" by Arley Sorg
"Editor's Desk: Perhaps Light Gray?" by Neil Clarke
Cover Art
"Naï Naï's Arrival & Rituals" by Thomas Brissot

My Review:

This is the third short work in my personal Hugo Awards reading and this is another story that is interesting and thought-provoking rather than any sort of fun. Which in this case is definitely the point.

At first, it reads as if it’s set in a totalitarian country. And it would be an easier read if it were. I mean, it kind of is, but not in the way we think of such things. Because we think that totalitarianism tends towards uniformity of thought – or an attempt to force it.

(We also think of totalitarian regimes in the spirit of neighbors watching neighbors, government watching everyone, Orwell’s 1984 and “Big Brother is Watching You”. We do get that but it’s just different enough to speak to our moment rather than the usual idea about it. All the mechanisms are there, but they’re pointing in a different direction.)

In this unnamed country, there are blue houses in every neighborhood. The person who lives in the blue house is watching everyone, and has the technology to do so covertly. It’s still obtrusive because everyone knows that the person in the blue house is watching everyone all the time.

But what that person, and by extension the government is watching for, isn’t a particular opinion. What they’re watching and listening for is uncertainty. Ambiguity. Thoughts that go down rabbit holes and find multiple possible choices down in the dark at the bottom of the hole.

This government doesn’t care if you love it. Or, for that matter, if you hate it. Neither attitude is punished as long as you’re clear about where you stand. Because people who are certain in their attitudes and their thought processes don’t ask questions and don’t look for new answers.

What this government fears, punishes, and eliminates at any cost is ambiguity. Open-ended stories. Writing that is open to interpretation. Because interpretation invites questions, and questions invite exploration, and exploration has the potential to upset the status quo and change the certainties that keep the country on an even keel.

The story is told by one man, one father with two children, as he does his best to toe the party line. To tell his children what they need to know to survive in this world where everyone is watched and everyone must be clear every minute and no one can afford to ask questions of the world around them.

It’s only after his children are both gone, chewed up by the system that does not allow open-ended questions and less than 100% certain answers, that he realizes that his attempts to teach them not to ask him questions he didn’t want to answer clearly only led to their deaths. Because in his lack of clarity they learned that the system was clearly designed to keep people from thinking at all. And they couldn’t stop.

Escape Rating B: I listened to the podcast of this story, and it worked well as an audio experience because the story itself is all about the speaker’s attempt to teach his children through the words he couldn’t say and, at the end, his willingness to say the words that he was wrong to try to anyone who is willing to listen.

Under that, or over it, there’s the implicit message – again, what is not said – about the power of stories that don’t tie up neatly and don’t follow a prescribed format and don’t fit neatly into a box to engage the human mind and keep it worrying through the possibilities and the implications. The kind of story of which this story is itself an example. Because it too is open ended and that open ending is filled with possibilities. Some better, some worse but none of them either clear, or certain.