Clarkesworld Magazine, Issue 216, September 2024 by Neil ClarkeMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
This issue is a bit below Clarkesworld's usual quality, but there are two outstanding stories here. The first, "Broken," by Laura Williams McCaffrey, is a creepy and uniquely structured tale of Flyer 247-3, who we gradually realize is a human so caught up in her virtual-reality universe that she refers to it as the "real world" and other people as "shadows." After her helmet breaks, she must journey across a flooded and climate-change-ravaged city to get it repaired, and we see in this future, robots are running what remains of the world. The different structure of the story is that it is actually reading backwards, ending at the moment of her helmet failing. I had to read it twice to get the full impact, but it was worth going through again.
The second story, "A World of Milk and Promises" by R H Wesley, tells us the tale of a pregnant woman stranded on an alien planet after her space station breaks up and all her crewmates die, who then has to survive and raise her daughter alone. She gradually realizes this planet's ecosystem is based on cooperation and symbiosis instead of prey and predation, with the planet's organisms feeding each other. She and her daughter are gradually adopted into the alien ecosystem, until her daughter abruptly dies--but the child's bones keep on growing, creating a giant skull and ribcage that shelters her mother. The nameless woman also dies at the end, waiting to fully merge with the planet and perhaps meet her daughter again. This story is dense and layered in its exploration of a mother's love, and is amazingly Wesley's first published story, according to the author notes.
I didn't particularly care for the other stories in the issue, but these two are worth your time.
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