![]() When a youth stumbles into his catacomb, he instinctively takes a bit of his essence as well, which causes the boy to relieve his most immediate trauma – losing his family to the dragons that are attacking the city above. He’s been surviving by stealing bits of life essence from rats and roaches. Unfortunately, the Saints came, convinced most people that ghosts don’t exist, and built up the city over his tomb. It is narrated by a Corna, a sage of his people, who elected to stay in the mortal realm as a ghost to help guide them. In February The Sunday Morning Transport has a beautiful story from Rachel Hartman, ‘‘ Ghost Story’’. It finds just about everything about him and his life repulsive and we get scenes from his life described in its loathsome terms, especially as he starts hallucinating scenes from his daughter’s sickbed and his failing marriage. ‘‘ Love is a Process of Unbecoming’’ by Jonathan Kincade features a much less positive relationship in a story told from the perspective of a sentient bacteriophage that has infected a senior member of a biotech firm. That’s the mystery that’s slowly revealed between the flashbacks and current time narrative. Told in interspersing sections, we also learn that later in life, midway through a completely successful career as Epsilon’s pilot, he appears to throw himself out an airlock. He grows up thinking of Ep as the sister he talks to inside his head. Kim tells of Zed, who grew up more or less as an experimental subject when his parents implant a connection to a ship-controlling AI into his brain as a baby. Two stories involve strange cases of symbiosis. She comes to appreciate Blue as an individual, but how can she help a desperate soul from such a different species? This pairs very well with the story ‘‘Larva Pupa Imago’’ by Eric Schwitzgebel in the previous issue. ![]() She gets much deeper insight into their lifecycle and his perception of it – they have a three-gender system that requires the deaths of all three to nurture the next generation, but they’re still able to pass down a thriving culture. He’s obviously depressed that he will miss the culminating event of his life. She names him Blue, and they start talking. She observes one male individual emerging early. Then in ‘‘ Love in the Season of New Dance’’ by Bo Balder, Leena is a solo researcher on a planet where a sentient species has a cicada-like lifecycle and awakens and comes to the surface only every 79 years. Her actions are depicted with an effective dispassionate tone, which leaves a lot of room for the reader to reflect on the weight of her choices. The past comes back to haunt Morag when an old colleague comes by to try to enlist her help through blackmail (never a good strategy to begin with). After two years of slowly dwindling self-sufficiency, the Big Man tries to coerce the town into accepting a feudal arrangement. In flashbacks, we learn that she had been a local recruited into the security force for a wealthy American who had purchased an estate in town specifically to ride out the inevitable worldwide economic collapse. Morag is an older woman living in a post-collapse community, and happens to be particularly adept at finding useful items in the communal midden (‘‘spoil heap’’) and fixing them up. The Sunday Morning Transport 2/19/23, 3/5/23Ī story in Clarkesworld that resonates nicely with the McAuley is ‘‘ The Spoil Heap’’ by Fiona Moore.
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