Science Fiction & Fantasy
by Sarah Pauling
You kissed her while Mom’s broken-down dishwasher roared from the next room over. Lucia had said it would be romantic: You, her, and a pitcher of tinto de verano whipped up from your brother’s old wine stash and a flat Sprite from the back of the fridge. Like it was still springtime. Like you were still at the fair in Sevilla, sketching each other dancing.
What would be
really romantic, you told her, would be making out on a sofa that didn’t have a dubious history re: cat vomit. A sofa you could call your own, down Avenida Manolete, where the apartments were spaced farther apart and the mall theater didn’t play ads before American movies.
Science Fiction & Fantasy
The Trouble with Finding (Alien) Life by Julie Nováková
Last month, NASA’s
Perseverance rover successfully landed on Mars to investigate current and past conditions on the Red Planet and search for life. With it, an old but still burning question inevitably arises: when
if we find alien life somewhere, are we going to recognize it?
The question is far less trivial than it sounds. The odds are we won’t encounter a technological civilization or travel beyond our solar system anytime soon. There are tantalizing environments in our own backyard: Mars, which had liquid water long ago and still has large amounts of water ice with potential lakes underneath its polar ice caps, and possibly hydrothermal systems under ground; Venus, whose past remains mysterious to us and which may have possessed water oceans once, too; moons such as Europa or Enceladus, with vast amounts of liquid water hidden underneath their icy shells; Titan’s exotic metha
Science Fiction & Fantasy
There aren’t actually fifty-five plaques. I’ve found this to be a pretty common misconception in children, especially when parents neglect to talk about it at home. That’s why it’s one of the first points I go over when we begin our unit on the Didacts. There are only nine plaques that have arrived on Earth so far; 55 comes from the number of years between the ninth plaque and this coming tenth one, a number that follows a very special pattern called the Fibonacci sequence.
Fibonacci, I say again slowly, spelling it out in big letters on the whiteboard.
When I reviewed Karin Tidbeck’s story collection
The Barnes & Noble Review, I said that it distilled and hybridized “almost every writer in the VanderMeers’ massive anthology
The Weird. A century’s worth of potent surrealism and estrangement surge through her veins and onto the page.” With the publication of her new novel, I’ll have to refine my description of her work, at least in this instance, because the book reveals that it is the sharp arrow tip of one particular lineage of fantastika, not inclusive of every possible type. (And really, how could a novel, as opposed to a short-story collection, aesthetically incorporate a million different styles and emerge organically whole?)
Subscribe to Clarkesworld and never miss an issue of our World Fantasy and Hugo Award-Winning Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine. This page: Mamaborg’s Milk and the Brilliance of Gems by D.A. Xiaolin Spires