Reviews and Comments

An average issue, with interesting stories by L Chan, Andrea Kriz, Shi Heiyao and Rajan Khanna.

• "Re/Union" by L Chan: in a future where departed relatives are recreated digitally for a family reunion, arguments over the quality of meals made by descendents are still a flash point. But maybe not this time, courtesy of a 'ghost' in the machine.

• "There Are the Art-Makers, Dreamers of Dreams, and There Are Ais" by Andrea Kriz: in a future where art generating AIs are banned and only approved human artists can create original art, one to-be artist struggles to get approval to imitate an artist. But maybe imitating another artist may not be what the artist should stuff to do, after seeing what her house AI and other self aware AIs could do.

• "Rake the Leaves" by R.T. Ester: in a place that seems slightly out of kilter, a man has a conversation with a professor about hidden messages in a song by 'Dinah Ross'. It is only later when the man and others attempt a trick with a drone that sucks up raked leaves do they realise just what is off with the place they are in.

• "Keeper of the Code" by Nick Thomas: a person discovers a packet of data that should not be there. Upon reading it, he discovers it contains a plea for help but it may be over her may not have the power to fulfill.

• "Happiness" by Octavia Cade: all the various ways you could die happy, based on your choices.

• "Stranger Shores" by Gregory Feeley: a post human works on a document on humanity's journey to space in the past while it seems to complete its own journey in the present.

• "The Librarian and the Robot" by Shi Heiyao, translated by Andy Dudak: a librarian fleeing her destroyed home world goes to Earth to recover and preserve old books. There, she finds a war robot. Reactivated, the robot is given the task of helping her preserve and find more old books. The robot learns and, eventually takes over her job, ready to pass on knowledge to whoever comes next.

• "Voices Singing in the Void" by Rajan Khanna: on various planets and environments, builders create settlements for their Creators and send back queries to their Conductor for help and feedback. But the Conductor does not reply for reasons of its own.

A retelling of the story of David and Goliath, as told from the viewpoint of Goliath, who turns out to be mainly an administrator in the Philistine army, but was cast into the role of a Champion of the Philistines by a captain, eager to win the favour of the king.

Put into a badly made outfit of metal, he then has the task of sending his challenge to a battle with the champion of the armies of Israel, with the captain believing that the challenge would go unanswered due to Goliath's size. While waiting for a challenger, Goliath decides to stay in the desert, contemplating his life.

Of course, the challenge is finally answered and is a foregone conclusion. But the retelling, in excellent cartoon format by Gauld, shows that some stories may not be what they seem, and the characters involved may have been forced into their roles by others who may not have to suffer the life and death consequences.

An average issue with interesting stories by Tade Thompson, Jonathan Louis Duckworth, Nuzo Onoh, Eleanor Arnason, Mathew Lebowitz, Kathleen Jennings and an unusual urban fantasy piece by Peter S. Beagle.

• "The Sweet In The Empty" by Tade Thompson: a fantasy story involving a quest by a father and his son for a fabled oasis. But what they do there would involve freedom, sacrifice and, later, vengeance.

• "The Station Master" by Lavie Tidhar: a short episode in the life of a station master in charge of a small train station on Mars.

• "Spookman" by Jonathan Louis Duckworth: an interesting tale of a man who can see and talk to ghosts, who is given the job of finding the son of a local bullying leader in an unusual forest. In there, he finds plenty of horror, but also a boy who does not want to return home. Resolving the dilemma would take some violence.

• "The Weremouse Of Millicent Bradley Middle School" by Peter S. Beagle: a fascinating tale of a teacher whom the narrator believes is a witch. As it turns out, she is one and casts a curse on the narrator's sister after a confrontation. And now, they have to figure out a way to remove the curse and, possible, get rid of the teacher.

• "Piggyback Girl" by M. H. Ayinde: a story of a future where people will pay to get inside the head of social media influencers and other people, leading to consequences when the access is done illegally.

• "Mnemonic Longings" by Marlon Ortiz: set far in the future, a spaceship wakes up its passenger, a soldier, and together they try to find out what happened to the enemy they were fighting and what should they do if there is no more enemy to fight.

• "Moonlight, Wing-Wake In Fog" by Rick Hollon: a short tale telling an episode of a violent encounter between men and various shapeshifting inhabitants on an island who choose to fight back, rather than hide.

• "The Madding" by Nuzo Onoh: the story starts with a cursed area in a town before going back to tell the story of how it came about from the point of view of a child with unusual hair. As the story progresses, we learn of the tragedy that would come that would be the result of witchcraft of a dark kind.

• "Mr. Catt" by Eleanor Arnason: a light fantasy piece about a wealthy cat named Mr. Catt who decides one day to get a dragon. The search who lead to finding a dragon in a dangerous part of town and make Mr. Catt relook his desire for a dragon as a pet.

• "Escape Velocity" by Amanda Dier: a degenerative disease robs a pilot of a role in a spaceship. A radical solution resolves the problem, but only time will tell if it also robs the pilot of her ability to still make friends with her crew.

• "Pantoum On A Generation Ship" by Lauren Bajek: on a ship travelling through space, a worker prepares for the arrival of another generation.

• "The Subway Algorithm Is Half-Constructed" by Marie Vibbert: a socially awkward graduate student working on an AI for train routing meets another student working on another AI. A misunderstanding leads to a falling out. It would require an explanation by a professor involving another AI to let to a better understanding.

• "Solar Boy" by K. C. Ahia: a deckhand on a solar sailing spaceship comes up with a solution to save the launch of a ship and, perhaps, some people's dreams.

• "Ouroboros" by Mathew Lebowitz: a virtual reality headset, possibly coupled with hallucinogenics, sends a user into an alternate possible virtual reality. Or perhaps it is the real reality and his real life was just a dream.

• "The Five Lazy Sisters" by Kathleen Jennings: a fairy tale about five sisters who don't wish to continue doing what their grandmother does. So they go into the woods to entice a giant to do their work for them.

• "Remembered Salt" by E. Catherine Tobler: a house with chicken legs for in search of her witch, based on her longing for a place with salt.

An exciting and emotional conclusion to the story that continues some time after the conclusion of the previous book. Xingyin, the daughter of the Moon Goddess, leads an idyllic existence on the moon with her mother while being assiduously courted by the prince of the Celestial Emperor. But she is also occasionally meeting with the man who betrayed her in the previous book, leading to conflicted feelings in a three-way love triangle.

But that existence swiftly comes to an end when an antagonist moves against her and her family to gain control of an unusual form of magic on the Moon. They are forced to flee and later discover what the magic can do. Old enmities have to be put aside as they put together a desperate plan to get rid of the magic and to stop a madman who may destroy both the mortal and immortal realms.

Much of what takes place in this book (the situations and relationship between Xingyin and various other characters) develops from the previous book, especially her conflicted feelings with the two people who are the most important to her in the book. Her character is further developed and changed as she witnesses the death of people close to her. She is also forced to examine the actions of her father, who caused the death of the sunbirds, beloved of the Sun goddess, to save the Mortal realm as mentioned in the previous book.

In the end, her heart is settled. But in a fitting close, the peace and happiness that she seeks will have to wait for another time.

An excellent book that introduces the Rust programming language and why its features can make it a compelling systems level programming language. The book assumes the reader has some programming experience, so it doesn't go into basic programming concepts, but instead shows how Rust handles some standard programming tasks in a safer (and maybe better) way than other systems programming languages.

Rust's explicit use of ownership and keeping track of lifetimes enable the language to detect and alert programmers at compile time about issues with their code that would lead to memory access problems that are a major source of bugs in programs. Rust does not eliminate all bugs, but getting rid of memory access related bugs would be good for programming in general.

After covering those essential aspects of the language, the book then goes into some details about the ecosystem around Rust: separating code into libraries, producing test cases and documentation and adding dependencies and external libraries. The book also goes into some more advanced language features that can support object-oriented programming and use 'unsafe' features, where the programmer, instead of the language, has to take some responsibility to ensure the code is safe to use.

By the end of the book, you should have a good understanding of the language features and ready to produce code. The book also gives some pointers for those looking to use the more advance language features in their coding.

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.

A better than average first issue of Interzone under new management. Some interesting stories here by J.F. Sebastian, Kat Clay, Daniel Bennett and a possible non-fiction piece by Liviu Surugiu.

• "The Disappeared" by J.F. Sebastian: a story that starts with a migrant that survived a boat disaster but mourns the deaths of his family. Then things begin to turn strange as the people in his camp (and the world) 'forget' about his dead family and then his relatives. Finally, only he remembers anything about them, and he fears to go to sleep and end up forgotten.

• "Murder by Proxy" by Philip Fracassi: a gruesome murder investigation by a detective leads to an unusual suspect who may have hidden plans to do more murders by proxy unless they can be stopped.

• "The Black Box Killer" by Kat Clay: in the future where committing a crime gets your name redacted from history, and you have to walk around with your face obscured, a detective in the Redaction Bureau has to track down a killer. Figuring out who is who in a story where names are "---------" makes for a challenging read.

• "The Coming of the Extroverts" by Daniel Bennett: a musician becomes incensed when an act, the Extroverts, steals his limelight. The musician then comes up with a conspiracy theory-like explanation for the success of the Extroverts and a plan to expose them.

• "Seven Shots at the Ultimate High" by Marisca Pichette: a group of youngsters aim for the ultimate group dance high at a dance club.

• "The Building across the Street" by R.T. Ester: a man is given the task of entering a building and reading a series of faxes that tell a story of an alien searching for life in space. The ending would reveal what the faxes are really for.

• "Last Act of the Revolution" by Louise Hughes: when the revolution is won, what is the person who started it to do? A reporter tries to find out, only to be nearly involved in one final act before the revolutionary disappears.

• "Neostalgia" by Liviu Surugiu, translated from the Romanian by Teodora Vidrean, Ana Maria Bancea, Alexandru Maniu and Irina Mocanu: an apparently true non-SF story by the author, starting with Operation Tidal Wave to bomb Romanian oil refineries. One bomber goes astray, accidentally dropping bombs on a civilian target. One would-be victim survives by what some consider a miracle, and whose descendant would become the author, who now narrates the story with nostalgia for what might have been.

A good issue of Clarkesworld, with fascinating stories by Samantha Murray, Eric Schwitzgebel, R. P. Sand and Gu Shi.

• "The Portrait of a Survivor, Observed from the Water" by Yukimi Ogawa: on a beach, a 'person' watches over a collection of artefacts and collects debris that are (deliberately?) released by a derelict ship. It is only towards the end that the purpose of collection of debris and the nature of person is revealed.

• "Somewhere, It's About to Be Spring" by Samantha Murray: the computer on a spaceship, which has lost its crew, begins to find a new purpose. And it may have something to do with samples that were taken earlier by the crew from a lonely planet found in space that may harbour life.

• "Larva Pupa Imago" by Eric Schwitzgebel: a fascinating tale set in a world where insect larvae (and other animals) are self-aware and can exchange memories and thoughts with each other via fluids. We follow the life of one particular larva as he grows up, gains knowledge of the world, and prepares for one final flight as an adult to pass on his genes and his memories to another.

• "An Ode to Stardust" by R. P. Sand: the story starts with a new station manager on a moon who lives with chronic pain, whom he hides from all, getting to know the alien species that mines an important mineral on the behalf of man. As the story progresses, he gets to know the aliens better and becomes their friend. But a trip to another moon to show off his improved mining processes as a result of the friendship results in an unexpected revelation that changes the situation and makes him willing to defy his supervisors to let the aliens achieve their goal.

• "Introduction to 2181 Overture, Second Edition" by Gu Shi, translated by Emily Jin: a story about an introduction in a book about a new form of technology that enables people to hibernate for years and the effect that has on society as a whole and on individuals who have to make and break relationships and people go into and out of sleep at different times for different reasons.

• "Silo, Sweet Silo" by James Castles: after a war, one remaining missile in a silo lets some survivors in for shelter. Together, the intelligent missile and the survivors begin to make a home out of the silo, until the time comes when the missile has to fulfil its mission.

• "Going Time" by Amal Singh: in a future where people wait to go on to a better life while eating processed food bars, one person is suddenly confronted with food from the past, discovered by her daughter. Now she has to choose whether to try it or to stick to the life she now knows.