Reviews and Comments

An average issue of Clarkesworld, with interesting stories by M. L. Clark, Alan Kubatiev and Gregory Feeley, and a disturbing story involving family abuse by Thomas Ha.

• "Junk Hounds" by Lavie Tidhar: in space, there is a lot of junk. But one man's junk is another man's treasure. And one junk hound may have found the ultimate treasure, is he can get it.

• "Coding Van Gogh" by Elaine Gao: a programmer / artist is deep at work programmatically recreating a work of art when she suffers massive injuries. When she recovers, she discovers she has lost her old job under mysterious circumstances. Her attempts to recreate one last work of art would reveal what happened the first time.

• "Sweetbaby" by Thomas Ha: a disturbing story of a physically (and possibly mentally) deformed brother who does violent acts on his sisters while their parents try to keep them alive on a world with known ways to synthesize organic material. The sister suspects the parents to be hiding information from her about their history or why they came to the world and eventually finds a way to find it and, in a way, escape from their control.

• "Lost and Found" by M. L. Clark: a story that starts with an 'info-dump' but gradually builds into an interesting story of about a world being watched over by semi-sentient artificial spiders and forbidden to outsiders. To this world comes a patrol to rescue a civilian ship that should not have been there. As it turns out, the rescue mission will not be to rescue the civilians, but only after the patrol realizes the truth about why the ship came to the world and what the occupants request from the spiders.

• "Fly Free" by Alan Kubatiev, translated by Alex Shvartsman: an unusual tale set in a time when birds have taken over the world and humans serve them. The first to be sentenced by the birds are the writers who wrote bad things about birds and the poultry farmers. But even a human translator who now work for the birds is not immune when found to be harbouring an enemy of the birds.

• "Giant Fish" by Chu Shifan, translated by Stella Jiayue Zhu: a fairy tale like story about a giant fish which apparently dies and washes ashore on an island. A frenzy begins to harvest its flesh, which begins to have a strange effect on humankind, making them desire to be one with the fish, leading to an inevitable outcome witnessed by one who did not consume its flesh.

• "The Secret Strength of Things" by Gregory Feeley: about a cat-and-mouse game of life and death on Neptune's moon, Triton, between two artificial organisms: one a deadly hunter; the other, desperate to continue living.

• "Rondo for Strings and Lasergun" by Jared Oliver Adams: a young, brilliant musician is involved in an accident. As the price for operating on her hands, she has to serve time in space fighting against an alien organism. But after an attack, her musical skills would prove to be a weapon against the aliens.

An interesting bit of trivia mentioned in the book is this unusual soccer match, which was the unintended consequence of a change to the "Golden Goal" rule in this soccer competition. The final minutes must have been interesting.

[ en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbados_4%E2%80%932_Grenada ]: "On January 27, 1994, the national football teams of Barbados and Grenada played against each other as part of the qualification round for the 1994 Caribbean Cup. Due to an unusual scoring rule and the two teams' respective positions in the tournament, it became alternately in the best interest of each team to score an own goal. The result has been described as "one of the strangest matches ever".

The organisers of the tournament had imposed a rule requiring all matches to have a winner, and this was enforced with an unusual variant of the golden goal rule: the first goal scored in extra-time not only won the match, but was also worth two goals, emphasising the "golden" part of the rule. Barbados started the match needing to win by a margin of at least two goals to qualify for the final tournament, and after Grenada scored late in normal time to bring the scoreline to 2–1, Barbados deliberately scored an own goal to force extra-time, where they could get the two-goal winning margin they needed courtesy of the unconventional golden goal rule. This resulted in an unusual situation: for the last three minutes of the match, Grenada was trying to score in both goals, as either outcome (3–2 on points, or 2–3 via goal difference) would have advanced them to the finals, while Barbados had to defend both goals. Ultimately, Barbados was able to prevent Grenada from scoring, thus forcing extra-time, and scored the golden goal to win the match."

A fascinating book of maths based games for two or more players. Separated into various categories, there are more than enough here to keep more maths minded people happy. Most of the games can be played using coloured pens or pencils and paper with dice (on-line ones will do). The book might be a hit for families or groups who are interested in mathematical fun (and some disguised mathematical lessons).

Each game starts with an introduction to the game and its rules, then some notes on the games, a brief history of the games, why they are mathematically interesting, and closes with variations of the games that can be played.

You don't have to read the book from cover to cover, although that is the way to read it to discover all the games covered in the book. If you have an interest in a certain type of game, you can skip directly to it. A case could also be made to turn the book itself into a game by letting each person in your group choose a game to play (by choice or randomly).

Even if you don't play the games, the background material is sufficiently interesting for those into mathematics and discovering (or learning) some of the possibly strategies (if any) than be used to play the games.

An average issue, with interesting stories by Fiona Moore, Amal Singh, Lettie Prell and Ken Liu.

• "The Slow Deaths of Automobiles" by Fiona Moore: the story of two people who bond over their love of a vintage, sentient car. They 'upgrade' the car with enhancements and replacement parts, but get into arguments over what the car itself wants to be. An accident would bring matters to a head, over what the car itself desires for its future.

• "Border Run" by Octavia Cade: a story of a reporter in the future assigned to report on a patrol boat in a future where ecological collapse has destroyed most fishing area, and the last one is guarded jealously and with ferocity against intruders.

• "Sub-son" by Amal Singh: a son dies, to be replaced by a clone, and dismay by his jealous brothers, for the soon is the favourite of their ailing mother. Things take a surreal turn when the mother also dies.

• "Shining Bursa and the Listening Post" by Sarah Pauling: a strange tale of a conqueror who gave up his heart for the power to conquer, and a creature who wants to restore it to him, but only if he decides to do so.

• "Live Update" by Lettie Prell: a biochemist agrees to be 'instantiated', along with others, in a virtual environment. But the new environment feels wrong, their memories are scattered and requires effort to remain focused on their task: to find out how to fix it, and it may require her biochemical insights to solve this technological problem.

• "Timekeepers' Symphony" by Ken Liu: an interesting series of vignettes about passing time: how it is perceived on different levels and different scales by various aliens and by humans who have also changed their perception of time.

• "Rivers Bend" by James Sallis: a short short about a series of letter responses written by somebody who may not not be human.