Publisher: Clarkesworld Magazine

Grade A #AudioBookReview: Never Eaten Vegetables by H.H. Pak

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A Reviews> audiobooks> book reviews> novelette review> podcast review> Short Story Review
Grade A #AudioBookReview: Never Eaten Vegetables by H.H. Pak“Never Eaten Vegetables” by H.H. Pak in Clarkesworld, Issue 220, January 2025 by H.H. Pak
Narrator: Kate Baker
Format: ebook, podcast
Source: podcast, supplied by publisher via Hugo Packet
Formats available: magazine, podcast
Genres: science fiction, short stories, space opera
Series: Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 226 July 2025
Pages: 39
Length: 1 hour and 42 minutes
Published by Clarkesworld Magazine on January 13, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org
Goodreads

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 January 2025 issue (#220) contains:

Fiction

"When There Are Two of You: A Documentary" by Zun Yu Tan
"Child of the Mountain" by Gunnar De Winter
"Never Eaten Vegetables" by H.H. Pak
"The Temporary Murder of Thomas Monroe" by Tia Tashiro
"Beyond Everything" by Wang Yanzhong
"Autonomy" by Meg Elison
Non-Fiction

"Do Termites Celebrate Holidays?" by Priya Sridhar
"Finishing the Read: A Conversation with Diana M. Pho" by Arley Sorg
"Humbled By Love: A Conversation with LaShawn M. Wanak" by Arley Sorg
"Editor's Desk: 2024 in Review" by Neil Clarke
Cover Art

"Landscape Painter" by Alex Rommel

My Review:

The title of this Hugo-nominated novelette didn’t give anything away. I mean that seriously as I came into this one with no idea what it was about. Some titles are spoilers but this one may have been the opposite. I certainly wasn’t expecting “Never Eaten Vegetables” to be the name of a tadpole. Or a ship. But it’s both.

This is a colony-ship story. It has echoes of Mickey7, not in the humor but in the predicament. In a scenario where there is no faster-than-light travel, colony ships are an expensive, iffy proposition. At best. Mickey7 played those possibilities with a lot of gallows humor. This story takes them very seriously, particularly in the human factors that result.

Not that technology doesn’t play a part in the mess, but the reasons the technology messed things up all end up right back in the lap of those human factors. Even though too many humans are doing their damndest – literally – to blame the tech for everything that went wrong. Because of course we do.

The colony ship technology of this particular universe is wrapped up in a megacorporation controlled space whose megacorps rival those of Murderbot’s universe in their rapacity AND in their expectation that their skullduggery won’t be uncovered because they’re smarter and more powerful than anyone who might try to take them to task for their misdeeds.

Which are legion,

The colony ship doesn’t send out humans in cryochambers. It sends out 10,000 barely germinating Petrie dishes of human blastocysts. (Not quite, but close enough). A whole colony’s worth of eventual test-tube babies, along with a platoon of mumbots and nannybots and service bots to raise them once they reach their new home.

It’s a tried and true method of creating new colonies in this universe, wholly owned by the megacorp, with those not-yet-people born indebted to the megacorp and committed from before birth to pay back their owner-progenitors for seeding them into the new colony. And a future of indentured servitude or worse if they fail to meet their quota.

Which is where “Never Eaten Vegetables” and Senator Luwa come in. Because something went very, very wrong on this particular colony-ship’s journey to their new home. 500 embryos came out of cryostasis early, and the poor NEV sacrificed everything she had to get those children to their new home. Even though 500 is not nearly enough people for a fledgling colony to make it to profitability. So NEV sacrificed her every resource, including the other 9,500 blastocysts, to make sure that her children survived.

Twenty-six years later, the megacorp intends to punish both NEV (technically NEV stands for “Natal Embryonic Vessel” but she prefers “Never Eaten Vegetables”) AND the 500 colonists for their so-called “poor” decisions. Senator Luwa has a better idea. At least a better idea for her, her family of fellow colonists, and “Never Eaten Vegetables”.

A plan to make the megacorp – and its officers – eat something much less palatable. Crow.

Escape Rating A: There was a LOT in this story. So much so that at the end I went back and checked to make sure it really WAS a novelette – meaning under 15,000 words. Because those 15,000 words did a bang-up job of telling a story that was much bigger than the amount of space it took would suggest it had in it.

Even if the ending did wrap up a bit too neatly and quickly. This is one where the meat of the story is in the setup of the entire situation – and that setup takes up most of the word count. But really, really well.

What made the story work was the way that we saw the whole situation from Luwa’s point of view in the present, and then we got to tease out how it got to be that way from NEV’s perspective in the past.

NEV is sentient the way that Demeter is sentient in Of Monsters and Mainframes. She has her own independent thought-processes, she’s able to deal with ambiguity in her situation if not always well – BUT she also has core programs that she can’t control or even see that have the capability of controlling HER against her will.

Which is exactly the situation that led NEV and her colony into this mess in the first place.

Luwa’s side of the story is absorbing – even in its necessary fits and starts – because it’s her perspective on their small colony and isolated situation. Not just that it seems that no one can enter the colony from the outside for a reason we don’t actually see – because that would have solved the problem MUCH too easily. But also because the 500 were all raised together in a tiny community with no one else. They’re all each other has and they know each other all too well. It’s the whole small-town everybody knows everybody else’s business problem writ so large as to overwhelm them. It’s love and it’s stifling and there’s no privacy but there’s more support than anyone might want and there’s no possibility of a fresh start or even much change because there’s so much loving pressure to be who you need to be for the whole colony to keep functioning.

As you can tell, I got really into this one. Luwa’s perspective made the whole story work for me, even though she did keep all her cards REALLY close to the vest for 99% of the story.

Of the novelettes so far, this one is probably my favorite, with “Kaiju Agonistes” as a close second. “Kaiju” is more fun, but this one is more thoughtful and thought-provoking. At this point in my Hugo nomination reading, I have one novelette, “When He Calls Your Name” by Catherynne M. Valente left to go, only because there’s no podcast of that story as there was with “Never Eaten Vegetables”, read marvelously as always by Kate Baker.

#AudioBookReview: Missing Helen by Tia Tashiro

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | audio reviews> book reviews> C Reviews
#AudioBookReview: Missing Helen by Tia Tashiro“Missing Helen” by Tia Tashiro in Clarkesworld, Issue 226, July 2025 by Tia Tashiro
Narrator: Kate Baker
Format: ebook, podcast
Source: podcast, supplied by publisher via Hugo Packet
Formats available: magazine, podcast
Genres: science fiction, short stories
Series: Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 226 July 2025
Pages: 15
Length: 37 minutes
Published by Clarkesworld Magazine on July 11, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org
Goodreads

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 July 2025 issue (#226) contains:

Fiction

"Missing Helen" by Tia Tashiro
"The Walled Garden" by Fiona Moore
"Welcome to Kearney" by Gary Kloster
"Serpent Carriers" by K.A. Teryna
"Bits and Pieces on This Floor" by Eric Del Carlo
"A Land Called Folly" by Amal Singh
"Hunter Harvester" by Bam Bruin
Non-Fiction

"Wilderness Resurrection and Compromise" by Priya Sridhar
"Who Owns A Story: An Interview with Allison King" by Arley Sorg
"Diverse Bodies: A Conversation with Annalee Newitz" by Arley Sorg
"Editor''s Desk: Taking a Moment to Smell the Roses" by Neil Clarke
Cover Art

"Alone" by Matt Dixon

My Review:

Is this Helen talking about Elaine, or Elaine talking about Helen, or both of them observing Mark from a supposedly objective perspective? Is it all of the above? Or is it just narcissism all the way around?

If that’s a bit confusing, that’s fair, because that’s the way this story left me. Confused. Also entirely certain about the narcissism under the literary trickery – and maybe that was the point.

As I keep saying in these Hugo readings, the shorter works this year have been more interesting and/or clever and/or thought-provoking than they are fun. “Kaiju Agonistes” in the novelette category is standing out more and more, as it is both thought-provoking AND fun – which doesn’t seem to have been what this year’s nominators were going for AT ALL. Dammit.

Let me back up a bit. The idea of “Missing Helen” is very SFnal. This story is set in a future where human cloning is feasible, successful, and so far seems to be successfully regulated so things don’t get too weird. (There’s already plenty of SF about runaway human cloning for nefarious purposes, but this isn’t that. Which is good because that’s been DONE. The Heist of Hollow London did it well and went to more places than just the cloning if you’re curious).

This is more about the human issues of cloning – not the scientific issues, the social and psychological issues. Which is also where narcissism comes in.

Helen sold her cloning rights as soon as she was legally able to do so. She needed the money to fund a future better than her “original” life would have allowed her. As that original life was uncertain, chaotic and poor (it’s never stated but her parents were either addicts or abusive or both). Helen wants a better start for her “other self” and needs money for education to catch a rung on the ladder of training and self-sufficiency.

But it’s left her with a whole host of emotional baggage – insecurities, control issues, paranoia, fear of abandonment, etc., etc., etc. Anxieties that lead to the break up of her marriage – because she needs to leave before she gets left.

Which is where her clone comes in. And Helen’s ex-husband Mark gets engaged to Helen’s alternate self, Elaine. It’s not just trading his middle-aged wife in for a younger model, but that Elaine is a younger model without the terrible baggage that Helen carried which destroyed their marriage.

It all sounds icky and squicky and it kind of is. But Mark isn’t the story. It’s not his story. He’s just the vehicle that allows Helen and Elaine to finally meet. To see each other through a mirror, however darkly, and realize that they are all they either want or need.

Escape Rating C: This one didn’t work for me. Obviously. It’s trying to be clever about using second person perspective, as though Helen and Elaine are describing each other to themselves AND each other, and it ended up being more clever than interesting. A trick that didn’t land, at least not for this reader. (As always, your reading mileage may vary.)

So far in my Hugo readings in the Short Story category, “Missing Helen” is the fourth of six, and it’s my least favorite, with “In My Country” still leading the pack for me. Two more, “Laser Eyes Ain’t Everything” and “10 Visions of the Future” to go.

#AudioBookReview: Wire Mother by Isabel J. Kim

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | audio reviews> audiobooks> B Reviews> book reviews> Short Story Review
#AudioBookReview: Wire Mother by Isabel J. Kim“Wire Mother” by Isabel J. Kim in Clarkesworld, Issue 229, April 2025 by Isabel J. Kim
Narrator: Kate Baker
Format: ebook, podcast
Source: podcast, supplied by publisher via Hugo Packet
Formats available: magazine, podcast
Genres: artificial intelligence, science fiction, short stories
Series: Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 229 October 2025
Pages: 9
Length: 23 minutes
Published by Clarkesworld Magazine on October 23, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org
Goodreads

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 October 2025 issue (#229) contains:

Fiction
"Wire Mother" by Isabel J. Kim
"The Cancer Wolves" by Fiona Moore
"Crabs Don't Scream" by H.H. Pak
"Understudies" by Greg Egan
"Giant Grandmother" by Liu Maijia
"The Job Interview" by Carrie Vaughn
"In Luck's Panoply Clad, I Stand" by Phoebe Barton
Non-Fiction
"Space Bears and Engineering the Next Generation of Astronauts" by Gunnar De Winter
"Memory, Loss, and Memory Loss: A Conversation with Rich Larson" by Arley Sorg
"Technology as a Language: A Conversation with Ken Liu" by Arley Sorg
"Editor's Desk: Nineteen" by Neil Clarke
Cover Art
"Overgrowth" by Quentin Stipp

My Review:

Cassie does not get along with her mother. She’s not thrilled with her dad when the story begins, either. Then again, she’s a teenager and those attitudes are not that uncommon. Which is why there are plenty of jokes about how much our parents learn between our ages of 17 and 21 or thereabouts. Not because they learn stuff, but because we start seeing the world as it really is.

But Cassie’s particular issues with “the ‘rents” aren’t about the usual things. Or at least not about our usual things – although we’re getting there faster than we like to think.

Cassie’s issue with her mother is that her mother isn’t really her mother. Well, not her biological mother. Not because Cassie is adopted or her parents used a surrogate or whatever you might be thinking of. Cassie’s mother isn’t really her mother in the biological sense because Cassie’s mother isn’t a biological entity. She’s a digital person that her dad created to his specifications.

Or, as Cassie refers to her, a ‘wife simulacra’.

Cassie’s not alone in having a digital person for a parent. But she is singular among her peers for having been diagnosed with Emotional Contagion Deficit or ECD. Cassie can’t emotionally connect with digital people as people. In other words, she doesn’t love her mother because her mother is a collection of ones and zeros and binary programming, and Cassie is unable to lose her awareness of that to accept her mother as a person.

So when one of her few friends turns her own diagnosis against her, and she learns one of those painful lessons about adulthood that we wish we could turn to our parents for even if we don’t, Cassie decides to make her reality real for everyone around her. Whether because she’s lashing out, because she’s certain she’s the only keeper of the truth, or because misery demands company.

We don’t know, and neither does she.

Escape Rating B: This, like many of the shorter works in my Hugo Awards reading, was both a thoughtful and an uncomfortable read. And not just in the ways that were obvious on the page. Or in listening to the podcast (read well as usual by Kate Baker) which is how I experienced the story.

Because it’s not just about Cassie’s uncomfortable situation – although that was plenty. She is rebelling in what seems like a typical teenage way – until the story reveals that she really isn’t.

In science fiction, we often not merely accept, but outright enjoy and even empathize with AI characters. The central characters of Emergent Properties and the recent Ode to the Half-Broken are both artificial intelligences and we accept them as persons in their own right and feel for them when their rights are threatened because they are AI.

So it’s a bit uncomfortable reading/listening to “Wire Mother” from Cassie’s point of view because AMY the digital person isn’t just not the mother Cassie wishes she was, but she’s not her mother. And we feel that too, that the digital person in the box can’t really be her mother no matter what Cassie is told because that’s just not what mothers are. Or because we’re still cognizant that digital personas aren’t ‘real people’. Siri and Alexa may be terribly helpful but they’re not actual persons – at least not yet.

And then, on my other, digital hand, there’s the place where the concept of ‘wire mothers’ came from, not in science fiction but in actual science. It was part of a psychology experiment in the 1930s with infant rhesus monkeys using mother-shaped figures made out of wire to study the monkeys’ reactions to fear and whether they could derive comfort from a mother-shaped object if they were raised with it. It’s all pretty horrific both for the actual research methods and the way it was used to study questions about attachment and isolation and social deprivation that were applied to human children as well.

It’s clear that THIS Hugo nominated short story is related to those experiments. If only to stand all the concepts on their tiny little heads. This is an uncomfortable story, as many of this year’s nominees in the short works categories are, and it is also in dialogue with the past as the author’s Hugo nominated story from 2025, “Why Don’t We Just Kill the Kid in the Omelas Hole” was. Although that was in dialogue with science fiction of the past, while this one is in dialogue with real science of the past. (The picture at right is a ‘wire mother’ with its baby and it’s still heartbreaking. If you’re curious, check out this entry in Wikipedia.)

What makes this story relevant for TODAY is that it turns the study about ‘wire mothers’ and infant/maternal attachment on its head by introducing AI and 21st century (possibly even later) into the mix and centering the story around a teenaged girl who can’t attach to the future’s version of a ‘wire mother’ because she’s old enough and logical enough to know that it’s not real.

Cassidy can’t make herself feel what her society has decided are the “right” feelings for digital people. Because a digital mother can’t give her a hug without using a body surrogate – which is a whole other bundle of wrongness. Because she’s a programmer and she knows what goes into creating a digital person and she knows that programming can’t create a real person.

And that just because her dad is in love with the wife simulacra that he created to his own specifications – it does not mean that the program loves him back. Or that it’s capable of loving anyone, even its own daughter, at all. Or that Cassie can close off the truth of her own mind to let herself believe that it does. Even when she wishes she could.

#AudioBookReview: In My Country by Thomas Ha

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | audio reviews> audiobooks> B Reviews> book reviews> podcast review> Short Story Review
#AudioBookReview: In My Country by Thomas Ha“In My Country” by Thomas Ha in Clarkesworld, Issue 223, April 2025 by Thomas Ha
Narrator: Kate Baker
Format: ebook, podcast
Source: podcast, supplied by publisher via Hugo Packet
Formats available: magazine, podcast
Genres: dystopian, science fiction, short stories
Series: Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 223 April 2025
Pages: 16
Length: 39 minutes
Published by Clarkesworld Magazine on April 1, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org
Goodreads

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.

Grade A #AudioBookReview: Why Don’t We Just Kill the Kid in the Omelas Hole by Isabel J Kim

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A Reviews> audio reviews> audiobooks> book reviews> Short Story Review
Grade A #AudioBookReview: Why Don’t We Just Kill the Kid in the Omelas Hole by Isabel J Kim“Why Don't We Just Kill the Kid in the Omelas Hole” by Isabel J. Kim in Clarkesworld, Issue 209, February 2024 by Isabel J. Kim
Narrator: Kate Baker
Format: ebook, podcast
Source: podcast, supplied by publisher via Hugo Packet
Formats available: magazine, podcast
Genres: dystopian, science fiction, short stories
Series: Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 209 February 2024
Pages: 10
Length: 22 minutes
Published by Clarkesworld Magazine on February 10, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo
Goodreads

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 February 2024 issue (#209) contains:
Original fiction by H.H. Pak ("Scalp"), Rajeev Prasad ("The Flowers That We Intend To Share"), Zohar Jacobs ("The Enceladus South Pole Base Named after V.I. Lenin"), David Goodman ("Kardashev''s Palimpsest"), Yang Wanqing ("The Peregrine Falcon Flies West"), Isabel J. Kim ("Why Don''t We Just Kill the Kid In the Omelas Hole"), Ryan Marie Ketterer ("The Beam Eidolon"), and Meghan Feldman ("Lonely Ghosts").
Non-fiction includes an article by Ben Lockwood, interviews with Wole Talabi and Bogi Takacs, and an editorial by Neil Clarke.

My Review:

Once upon a time – back in 1973 – Ursula K. Le Guin published a short story that exists on an uncomfortable border between science fiction and philosophy titled “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.” It’s one of those stories that rips you to pieces on first reading and keeps swirling around in your head well after you’ve read it.

Which I never did. Not back in the day, not in the intervening years since. At least not until I set out to read THIS short story and learned that “Why Don’t We Just Kill the Kid in the Omelas Hole” is in dialogue with Le Guin’s original story. Or it’s in dialogue with all of the commentary about the original story and all of the other stories that have been written in dialogue with the original story.

The reading jury is still out on that last bit but I knew I needed the foundational story to get why it’s still being written about and towards and against more than fifty years later.

(If you want to listen as well, there’s an audio collection of Le Guin’s short stories titled The Unreal and the Real available through Kindle Unlimited. That’s how I finally read – or had read to me – the original story. And it’s still a hell of a story fifty years later. There’s a reason Le Guin became a Grand Master of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, among many, many other awards.)

What makes this story so searing is that it’s a ‘greater good’ story where “the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or of the one” that explores just how problematic and even false those beliefs are when the one has no choice in the matter.

The problem with both of those philosophies, the way that they can and often do so horribly wrong, is rooted in the problem of ‘who decides?”.

SpockView Post’s sacrifice in The Wrath of Khan was both noble and heartbreaking because he made the decision. He CHOSE to sacrifice his life to save the crew of the Enterprise. If someone had shoved him into that chamber and forced him to fix the reactor at the cost of his own life, it becomes something else altogether.

That second version is the story in the original “Omelas” story. That the Omelas can have a beautiful utopia if they are willing to neglect, abuse and torture a child in order to ensure it. The story was searing enough in 1973, but this story, written in a much more cynical 2024, strips away the fig leaf of whether or not the child’s unwilling, unwitting sacrifice actually achieves the goal – or whether the child is merely a scapegoat and sin eater for the Omelas’ very real human behaviors and failures.

Because humans are gonna human, and they certainly do in this story, and their behavior is even more horrific than any of them want to think about, let alone believe.

Escape Rating A: What makes this story work, so many decades after the original, is the way that it grounds the Omelas in the here and now as it strips the mask of the Omelas themselves bare.

In the original story, the Omelas and their city are a thought experiment. We don’t know where or when they are, just that their behavior is reprehensible and that they feel justified because it’s for ‘the greater good’.

This story sets the city of the Omelas in the here and now, in a world where everyone knows about the Omelas, the internet is watching and commenting on the Omelas, and the people who rise up against the Omelas’ treatment of the “load-bearing, suffering child” are determined to stop the practice because whatever is going on isn’t achieving anything except suffering.

Even as the internet, and the world at large, watch and comment and invent conspiracy theories while being gleeful that the awful Omelas are not themselves – even though from a certain perspective, they absolutely are.

I may have made a mistake in finishing this story right before going to bed, but I’m glad that it was the final story in my Hugo Readalong. Clearly, between this story and “We Will Teach You How to Read | We Will Teach You How to Read”, I saved the best for last.

It also made this story – as well as Le Guin’s original story – more affecting in audio than they would have been in text. Particularly this contemporary written story, as there was a wry archness to Kate Baker’s reading that was perfect for this story. I could hear the inflections and the eye rolls, and it made the story just that much better.

And this completes my personal Hugo nominee read along. The stories were mostly good to great, and I had a great time reading and/or listening to them. THIS STORY recently won the Nebula for Best Short Story. We’ll see if it wins the Hugo as well when the winners are announced this coming Saturday, August 16, at the Seattle WorldCon. I can’t wait to find out who won!

A- #AudioBookReview: The Brotherhood of Montague St. Video by Thomas Ha

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A- Reviews> audio reviews> audiobooks> book reviews> novelette review> Short Story Review
A- #AudioBookReview: The Brotherhood of Montague St. Video by Thomas Ha“The Brotherhood of Montague St. Video” by Thomas Ha in Clarkesworld, Issue 212, May 2024 by Thomas Ha
Narrator: Kate Baker
Format: ebook, podcast
Source: podcast, supplied by publisher via Hugo Packet
Formats available: magazine, podcast
Genres: dystopian, science fiction, short stories
Series: Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 212 May 2024
Pages: 20
Length: 50 minutes
Published by Clarkesworld Magazine on April 29, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo
Goodreads

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 May 2024 issue (#212) fiction by Alice Towey ("Fishy"), Fiona Moore ("The Portmeirion Road"), Carolyn Zhao ("In Which Caruth is Correct"), Thomas Ha ("The Brotherhood of Montague St. Video"), Samara Auman ("The Texture of Memory, of Light"), Rajeev Prasad ("The Blinding Light of Resurrection"), Carlie St. George ("The Weight of Your Own Ashes"), and K. J. Khan ("Our Father").Non-fiction includes an article by D.A. Xiaolin Spires, interviews with Andrea Hairston and Andrea Kriz, and an editorial by Neil Clarke.

My Review:

I came into this story not quite sure what I was getting into. Probably not helped by reading the “St.” in the title as “Saint” instead of “Street”. I think the “Brotherhood” bit led me astray.

But only a bit.

The opening of this story was a bit jarring, when the unnamed narrator goes to the library and picks up what he calls a “dead book” and is so surprised about it. It’s an interesting opening for a story that winds its way around to the idea that “dead books” and any other media that is fixed in time and can’t be “fixed” in content is more alive – or has more life in it – than the reverse.

The way that it gets there is a story about what we remember vs. what really happened, about what we hang onto vs. what we keep, and the idea that stories are not meant to make us comfortable, they are meant to make us think.

But the way that it gets there is through one young man’s grief over the death of his mother, his desire to remember her and their relationship as it really was and not “enhanced” or “improved” or “optimized” to make the “story” come out better than it really happened.

The protagonist’s desire to preserve his true memories is set against his discovery of that supposedly dead book. Just as nearly all the services to preserve his mother’s collection of keepsakes and memorabilia includes optimization whether he wants that service or not, the same is true with books. That’s how he makes his living, by turning dead books into “living” ones.

Meaning that all books are electronic and updated constantly according to formulas about what is popular, comfortable and desirable. Except that dead book he found in the library. It can’t be changed, or altered, or improved. It’s dead ink on dead paper.

But the story lives in his thoughts in a way that no “living book” ever has. He’s intrigued by both the story and the concept. He’s also frightened, very nearly but not quite completely out of his wits, that there’s someone following him and interfering with his digital access to EVERYTHING in order to coerce him to give up the book.

Fortunately for the protagonist, one of the things that his mother taught him, that he needs to remember, is how to get around the ubiquitous electronic surveillance and need for electronic access in order to get himself to the one place that might just take him – and his memories and his dead but still dangerous book – in.

Escape Rating A-: I was able to listen to this as a podcast, read by Kate Baker, and it did help to put me inside the main character’s head – even if said main character wasn’t always sure where his head was at and whether or not he was seeing things. Howsomever, this is a hard story to encapsulate – see above effort – because it’s hitting a lot of different and interesting themes in a relatively short space. Also, the unnamed protagonist just makes describing the story even more awkward.

The story that this reminded me of most turned out to be “The Boy from Elsewhen” by Barlow Crassmont, part of Writers of the Future 41. Both are stories about the value of the unchanging printed word versus the endless mutability of electronic documents although they take that concept in different directions. In the Crassmont story, it starts out as a quirk that is subject to mockery, but ends with a realization that having to deal with material that isn’t homogenized for the reader stimulates intelligence and creativity. In this story, that idea is taken a step further as the villain of the piece actively works to remove the book from circulation because they are afraid of what the thoughts it engenders might lead to.

There’s also a bit of Notes from a Regicide by Isaac Fellman as both are stories about sons trying to preserve the memories of their late parents through the preservation of the materials and artifacts they left behind.

The part of the story that was really difficult to include was the way that the whole society seems to have turned into a culture that preserves nothing and hangs onto very little. It seemed a bit like the result of the societal collapse in Down in the Sea of Angels, but we don’t know how they got there in this story so the characters who are coming from that perspective, the protagonist’s weird girlfriend Elii, feel false and weird.

At the same time, the plot elements, the story that he’s reading, the way it affects him and how much it feels to this reader as if the protagonist of the story is an avatar for the protagonist of the story he’s reading or vice versa, felt, well, real. We do see ourselves in stories, whether our actual selves or a person we might have been or might want to be. The equivocal, uncertain ending of the story within the story is exactly the kind of ending that opens the mind and makes the reader think because it IS disturbing and sometimes we need that even if we don’t want it.

While the mysterious figure chasing after the main character, the clearly dangerous but not-quite-exactly-human Caliper John, adds tension and a chilling sense of danger that moves the story forward even as it further enmeshes the story on the surface with the story inside it.

I have one more novelette to go in this year’s Hugo reading, unless I decide to reread Lake of Souls because it’s been a while. In any case, I’ll be back in a week or two with the next installment!

#BookReview: Better Living Through Algorithms by Naomi Kritzer

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | B+ Reviews> book reviews
#BookReview: Better Living Through Algorithms by Naomi Kritzer“Better Living Through Algorithms” by Naomi Kritzer in Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 200, May 2023) by Naomi Kritzer
Narrator: Kate Baker
Format: ebook, podcast
Source: podcast, supplied by publisher via Hugo Packet
Formats available: ebook, magazine, podcast
Genres: hopepunk, science fiction, short stories
Series: Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 200
Pages: 13
Length: 36 minutes
Published by Clarkesworld Magazine on May, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo
Goodreads

Clarkesworld Magazine, 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.

My Review:

This story was simply adorable – if both realistic and a bit sad. And sad because it was realistic and realistic because sad. With just the right tinge of hope to lift it up at the end.

It’s also surprisingly SFnal for a situation that sits in the uncanny valley where what used to be SF has become the real. It feels like it’s part of the lab-based SF tradition but there’s no actual lab. Or we’re all the lab. Or a bit of both.

Let me explain – or at least try.

Better Living Through Algorithms is set either in the RIGHT NOW or at a point in time so close that it might as well be now. It doesn’t need any aliens or space ships and there’s no computer virus running amuck.

What there is is an app. Just like now. But the app isn’t exactly like any of the usual suspects – although it’s perfectly capable of seeming like any or all of them.

Abelique combines elements of a productivity app, and a time management app, and a health monitoring app, wraps the whole thing up in a self-reflective little bow and ties it off with a bit of mystery.

When Linnea first hears about Abelique from her early-adopter friends, it sounds like a cult and she’s NOT INTERESTED. When her boss pushes her to try it – at work – he makes it sound like a productivity app. He also makes it sound like she’d better just do it.

So she does – to the point of doing the long and somewhat intrusive setup on work time – because if her boss is making references to her last and next evaluations as he’s “encouraging” her, it is. But Linnea gets hooked on Abelique the minute that it tells her it will help her lie to her boss. Because that’s clearly not the hallmark of a productivity app. At all.

And she’s in.

Through Linnea’s adoption of Abelique we see the whole life cycle of a viral app, as well as more than a bit of the nitty-gritty about how that sausage gets made. Abelique structures her day and her time – but in really good ways. It encourages her to connect with both new people and old dreams. It keeps her from becoming a drone of a worker bee.

All of which happen because she lets it invade her privacy – all for her own good. Which it actually is. At least until the inevitable end of the life-cycle comes and she stops using Abelique, gives up all of those good habits and goes back to her old routine.

But something remains, not of Abelique but of the person she leaned into while she used it. And that gives the story a much-needed little uplift at the otherwise sad but expected ending.

Escape Rating B+: I really did love this – not because the AI behind Abelique knows better than we do – but because it knows exactly what we know and just don’t pay attention to. None of the things that Abelique asks – and it’s always an ask and not a demand – are news.

People are happier when they have fewer small decisions to make. People are happier when they get outside more. People are more productive when they get enough sleep. People do feel better when they have space for a bit of creativity in their lives. Etc., etc., etc.

Abelique just puts all of those things that are already known into a package that seems cool and goes viral – for a little while. Because viral apps are only viral for a little while. It can’t last because of other predictable bits of human behavior – but it is lovely while it does.

In the end, this is a bit of hopepunk, in that some of what Linnea learns while she’s participating in Abelique remains – and not just for her – even after the app’s inevitable ending.

This was a story that I enjoyed while I was listening to it, but it wasn’t terribly deep and left me more than a bit sad at the end. As much as I liked it while I was listening, it doesn’t overtake How to Raise a Kraken in Your Bathtub on my Hugo ballot.

But reading it did leave me with a habit that I don’t plan on letting go of. I listened to this story from the Clarkesworld podcast reading. They read all the stories they publish in the magazine – as does Uncanny Magazine. I’ll definitely be looking for more of those podcasts, not just for the Hugo nominations, but for whenever I’m searching for excellent stories to listen to, even though there isn’t an app to tell me to.