2017 short fiction - Clarksworld Apr-Jun

Some Remarks on the Reproductive Strategy of the Common Octopus, Bogi Takács. What if instead of uplifting dolphins...

Sunwake, in the Lands of Teeth, Juliette Wade. This is a classic "political intrigue with human explorers mixed up in it, from the point of view of the aliens" story. Took me a little while to warm up to it but I ended up pretty into it. NOVELLA.

We Who Live in the Heart, Kelly Robson. I didn't love this and didn't entirely get the ending but it had some interesting stuff. NOVELETTE

My Dear, Like the Sky and Stars and Sun, Julia K. Patt. A near-future biopunk retelling of Allerleirauh/Donkeyskin. NOVELETTE.

The Ways Out, Sam J. Miller. Surveillance/superpowers story.

movies and a book that I think won't be a movie, but I had to think about it

I have now seen both the fishfucking movie and the peachfucking movie, and enjoyed both. Er, that would be The Shape of Water and Call Me By Your Name, respectively. There is an unmolested fish briefly in CMBYN; I don't think there was any fruit in SoW. Lots of eggs in both.

It probably says something about my psychology that I found anticipating social embarrassment, in CMBYN, more excruciating than anticipating violence in Shape of Water. In fact I thought CMBYN did a really good job of handling potentially super-humiliating stuff in a way that wasn't actually embarrassing. (Also scored a full "Magnetic Fields singalong" on the scale of how many feelings about My Long-Ago Youth I ended up with at the end, dang.)

I also read Andy Weir's new book Artemis, which is about what you'd expect. Like, obviously he wasn't going to have anything serious or respectful to say about sex work as a segment of the lunar economy, or opting for lunar gravity as a disability accommodation, when he brought those things up, but I do kind of wish his editor had sat down harder on the "heh heh, I said a word that could be interpreted in a sexual way" stuff. I was also dubious on a couple of scientific realism points - seriously not convinced that flames in pure oxygen work like that, or, uh, diffusion kinetics - but, I dunno, it's very possible that Weir knows more science than I do, and certainly has access to better consultants, he could be right. Anyways, If You Liked The Martian, as they say; it's a fast, fun read with airlock and chemistry hijinks. In some ways the most fun part for me was trying to predict which of the information we got early on was going to turn out to matter in some unexpected way, although there was at least one thing I was disappointed not to see taken off the wall.

But I'll be surprised to see it developed as a movie, for the reason that there's a lot of "jumping around in low gravity" stuff that I think might be hard to do convincingly. I mean, The Martian did make a lot, maybe they'll go for it, but I feel like this maybe has more in the way of annoying special effects?