Science Fiction & Fantasy

There was no need for talk in Tokyo, so the streets were silent.
The loudest features were the colors of the electric motorcars and the styles of the eclectic fashions—polychromatic shells that switched from lip-pucker lemon to cut-grass green and double-cut polymer skirts alongside old-fold silk suits.
Shinsuke Takinami stood above and apart from it all, teetering [...]

Our first podcast for March is “Slowly Builds An Empire” written by Naim Kabir and read by Kate Baker.

 

 Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 102 - Slowly Builds An Empire by Naim Kabir [50:54m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (5967)

πόλλ’ οἶδ’ ἀλώπηξ, ἀλλ’ ἐχῖνος ἓν μέγα
The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.
—Archilochus
“Just doing my job.” He mugs for the cameras, that magnificent smile, that ridiculous cape and costume, that stupid quirk of the brow. Behind him is the unharmed research center building. Overhead the brilliant fireworks [...]

Continued From Part One.
3. Green
The place between the Blue Country and the Green Country is full of dinosaurs called stories, bubble-storms that make you think you’re somebody else, and a sky and a ground that look almost exactly the same. And, for a little while, it was full of me. My sorrow and me and [...]

0.
My mother told me about a Buddhist monk she and I met while shopping on my first birthday.
The monk caressed my head—back then as bald as his—and chanted a few lines that sounded like poetry.
After we returned home, my mom recited a few fragments to my father. Dad, who had had a few more [...]

Gonzo arrived in an assault of brass music and spilling banners rippling the pelt of cannon smoke where her feet would’ve been, taking up the hotel entrance in all its marble and chrome—its expensive anachronisms and the people paid to stand next to them in red vests—filling it up as I probably had, Mitchum thought. [...]

You know many things, but what he knows is both less and more than what I tell to us.
Or especially, what we all tell to all those others—those simple humans, who are like him in their limits.
I cannot be what you are, you the larger.
Not that we are not somehow also the same, wedded to [...]

Achimwene loved Central Station. He loved the adaptoplant neighborhoods sprouting over the old stone and concrete buildings, the budding of new apartments and the gradual fading and shearing of old ones, dried windows and walls flaking and falling down in the wind.
Achimwene loved the calls of the alte-zachen, the rag-and-bone men, in their traditional passage [...]

Our fifth podcast for February is “The Osteomancer’s Son” written by Greg van Eekhout and read by Kate Baker.

 

 Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 101 - The Osteomancer's Son by Greg van Eekhout [39:27m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (6814)

Our fourth podcast for February is “Meshed” written by Rich Larson and read by Kate Baker.

 

 Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 101 - Meshed by Rich Larson [31:39m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (8418)