Of the Clarkesworld issues I've read, this has so far been the strongest. [It's now about 1/3 new fiction, 1/3 reprinted fiction, and 1/3 non-fiction.]The Urashima Effect by E. Lily Yu is about the time and distance of space travel, dealing with one half of a couple "going ahead" with the second half to join later. My main response to the story was to be unclear as to why each journey could only involve a single person.This is Why We Jump by Jacob Clifton - a story about choosing to leave a particular social setting and family - and a rather icky way for that society and family to refuse to let a person go.Free-Fall by Graham Templeton - three scientists and a journalist are stranded halfway up a space elevator, and it looks like their only viable option is a risky high altitude jump. I guess you could call it a story about psychological types in stress situations. Or a story about people becoming story.Mongoose by Sarah Monette and Elizabeth Bear - the first of the reprints, and an immediate jump from okay stories right into AWESOME. Really liked this tale of what (in Touchstone Trilogy terms) would be freelance Setari with domesticated ionoth.Dead Men Walking by Paul J. McAuley - brief, vivid and very visual story of a dying man's last words.Beyond the Tracks: The Locomotive in Science Fiction Literature by Jason Heller - as the title says.Eccentric Relatives and Raw Grief: A Conversation with Susan Palwick by Jeremy L. C. Jones - focuses on Palwick's book "Mending the Moon". Didn't sound like my kind of story.Another Word: The Techs Can Do It by Daniel Abraham - yet another trade published author weighs in on self-publishing (with the usual caveat that he has every respect for people who self-publish) and says he thinks that people doing all the "tech stuff" for their books won't be able to focus on the writing sufficiently to produce writing as good as a trade published author ["I want to read the work of great writers, and so I want there to be great writers. ... I don't think that can happen when we look at all the different things that putting a book into the world requires, shrug, and say we can have the techs do it."] At this stage, all I can do is arch an eyebrow and shrug.Editor’s Desk: Publishing Turns Like a Battleship by Neil Clarke. Also talking about self-publishing and comparing the current self-publisher's plaint about not feeling respected with the lack of respect afforded to online magazines a few years ago. Concludes with belief that the medium/publishing will matter less in a few years.
