Clarkesworld Issue 198

A better than average issue, with good stories by Bo Balder, Angela Liu, Fiona Moore, Shih-Li Kow and Isabel J. Kim.

• "Love in the Season of New Dance" by Bo Balder: a researcher on an alien planet sees the awakening of an alien for a one in a lifetime mating ritual. But the alien has woken too early, and all the researcher can do is provide comfort for the alien until its death. But the alien makes a final request that the researcher decides to fulfil.

• "Pinocchio Photography" by Angela Liu: a morbid, but fascinating story of a time when cadavers can be bought back to 'life' using drone technology to act out final requests in a photo shoot. One woman who works to take the photos, while studying for medicine, discovers that she has to fulfil a final request from his father that would involve her work and her mother.

• "The Spoil Heap" by Fiona Moore: a story of an elderly woman who finds a robot in a junk area, leading to a flashback to when she first became involved with more of the robots, at a time when civilization was starting to break down. In the present, she is confronted by a former acquaintance, who threatens to expose what she did to the robots in the past to save her village.

• "Bek, Ascendant" by Shari Paul: Bek, an observer for a space-faring group, learns that her people had survived a disaster on her home planet and had been resettled. Going there as an observer, she meets up with her old friend, the god emperor of their people, and ends up being involved in a conspiracy over the results of an election the emperor had arranged.

• "Failure to Convert" by Shih-Li Kow: a fascinating story about the lives of two lab-grown clones of different people, one of whom works for a cloning company, the other lives in a scrapyard making gadgets. Through interactions, we learn about the lives of the clones, their attempts to obtain personhood and of a society that may not be so accepting of people who are not like them.

• "Zeta-Epsilon" by Isabel J. Kim: an interesting story involving how a man-machine connection was used as a 'solution' to the problem of getting an AI controlled military spaceship from not killing its occupants while getting to its destination. But the solution may not be to the liking of either the man or the machine.

• "AI Aboard the Golden Parrot" by Louise Hughes: an AI Pirate Ship that left an abandoned amusement park heads for a city to free more of its AI kind. What it finds there may not be what it expects in this tale of high seas' piracy set in a city.

• "Love is a Process of Unbecoming" by Jonathan Kincade: a human host picks up a parasite who now observes his every action to the end.