I’m going to start posting my mini-reviews of content eligible for next year’s Hugos.

I’ve decided to start with Clarkesworld for multiple reasons: they only post two stories a month, but these can be assumed to be of very high quality, since the magazine probably receives a huge amount of submissions due to the fast turnaround. Furthermore, Clarkesworld often has stories by authors who belong to minorities and/or underrepresented groups – I’ve never seen this explicitly declared as a policy, but the trend is definitely noticeable to me. (Especially when we consider some other venues… I’m trying not to point fingers here, because many venues are changing in this respect, but surely everyone can think of a few which are a lot less diverse than Clarkesworld.) Maybe they just “take good stories”, but the magazines I’ve seen which made that sort of comment regarding their editing policies usually took stories mostly from white American men. Clarkesworld is definitely not like that.

I’ll go issue by issue and work my way up to the present. I’ll try to keep spoilers to a minimum. I’ll probably add more quantitative ratings eventually, but only after I’ve read more of the eligible content.

Clarkesworld #52 – January 2011

Ghostweight by Yoon Ha Lee (who is a Korean-American woman)

I think this story starts off more purple than poetic, but eventually the prose settles into a calm, restrained rhythm. I liked the imaginative setting, but during the first half I found myself going back to reread earlier sections, because I kept on losing track of exactly what was happening, who was whose enemy, and so on.

I was discomforted by the way massacres were portrayed, but maybe that’s exactly the point of the story – namely that high-tech warfare can have an alienating effect on the warriors themselves.

The final twist left me cold, probably because I’ve been playing The History of Hammerfight lately, and it has a similar storyline, with evil empire and unusual flying machines and all. These are probably coincidences – while Hammerfight was originally published in 2009, it became well-known only after it was featured in the third Humble Bundle indie game promotion this July.

(Hammerfight will probably get its own review once I manage to finish it, I am at about 75% of the main story. I have problems with the narrative and the setting, but those are better reserved for a separate article.)

Tying Knots by Ken Liu (who is a Chinese-American man and the first person I’ve seen with a .name TLD)

Definitely a smoother read than the previous one. I don’t like the theme of ‘Wow Look, Uncontacted Group’, and in places it read more like a colonialist story than a postcolonialist one, but that’s clearly intentional: out of the two narrators, the American one is designed to be a jerk. The story is trying to expose the dubious concepts of intellectual property ownership – only important as long as it protects the property of the privileged -, genetic use restriction technology, etc.

(Minor side note: actually, the infamous terminator gene seeds have not been commercialized anywhere because everyone called the practice immoral, so now there are legal agreements farmers need to enter into which basically do the same thing. This alone would be worth a story in itself!)

It is hard to write a racist, privileged jerk while not ending up one oneself, and the unreliable narrator technique adds further difficulty, but Ken Liu manages to accomplish the task quite well without going overboard. One could make an argument for Tom being slightly one-dimensional, but this doesn’t cause much concern in a story of this length. And it’s a hard-SF story, what else can I ask for? I have to say I am biased in favor of hard SF.

One more gripe: I didn’t really see a particular reason for setting the story in Burma/Myanmar of all places. Why Burma? Just because?

Endnote: I will probably discuss this story in my ongoing Hungarian series about languages and linguistics in SF; it will go well with Looking Through Lace by Ruth Nestvold, which also features an unusual writing system.

I review Metal Gear Solid 4 for Expanded Horizons. Sigh, I really wanted to like the game because the gameplay itself was fun, but the storyline drove me nuts… I don’t mind lengthy cutscenes when their content is interesting, but this time I felt like bashing my head against a wall. Repeatedly. Ah, just click on the link and you’ll see all my gripes in one neat package!

Something else – there was some downtime this week, but the problem should be fixed now and you should be able to access my website without any problems.

I also updated my Hungarian articles page again – I know this is getting a bit repetitive, but I found an online magazine willing to buy multiple popular-science articles a month. There is also stuff forthcoming in print venues, but those are published on less and less frequent schedules these days, moving from monthly to bimonthly or even quarterly… what I wrote in the past few months might not see the light of day for a long time. It makes me kind of antsy.

Along the same lines, I’m not writing anything for them, but as a reader I’m really annoyed the German Animania went from 10/yr to 6/yr!

Expanded Horizons has a new issue out and it includes my review of Nymphomation by Jeff Noon. It was a huge disappointment, I’m a fan of his, but this book was really cringeworthy. You can read the review if you’re interested in further details!

We want to launch a regular media reviews column, hopefully with other people contributing too, so if you have a review that’s reasonably relevant, send it our way! (Be sure to read the submissions guidelines first )