M. L. Clark, Canadian by birth, is based in Medellín, Colombia. Along with stories in Clarkesworld, Clark is the published author of speculative and science fiction in magazines including Analog, F&SF, and Lightspeed, and the occasional year’s best anthology. Clark also writes global humanist articles twice-weekly at OnlySky.
Website
M. L. Clark has the following works available at Clarkesworld:
The uniform’s design was out of date by the time Essen made orbit over Drasti Prime—but then, so was Essen, so she kept it as is, fiddling in sequence with the pocket flaps and interface protector while the autofeed caught her up on twenty-three years of Partnership intel: personal, professional, interplanetary, and puerile. The inner […]
1 Doc tried to keep a straight face until the other human had left the examination room to complete annual license renewals. Zeddi Bobeddi, her wagging tail threatening to helicopter her off the low-G table from familiarity with these routine checkups—the treat! the impending treat!—was not making this easy. “Okay,” said Doc, once the coast […]
1. The Eggs The man woke on the wrong side of the shell and had to extricate himself carefully, lest he get any of the Oomu’s mucus over his nostrils and mouth. This was easier said than done, on account of all the bugs still hanging around topside. In his ride’s more amorous phases, its […]
Jess: That myth’s as old as Earth, babe. Maybe it’ll take longer, but you can translate anything. Kap: Sure, but with the same efficiency? Jess: Ha! Haven’t you ever heard Seli? When’s language ever been efficient? Kap: No, but, see, that’s the dream—the idea that another culture, in just a handful of syllables, can describe […]
1 Hey Silv, Leni here— I ever tell you about the time I made first contact after one of our breakups? I didn’t, I’m sure I didn’t, because, stars, is it ever embarrassing, and you know how I get when I’m embarrassed. That was, like, Reason #3 for most of our breakups, and we both […]
1 In the giant arachnid’s shadow, her silken face mask—Uranian-blue, luminescent, and vaguely human in countenance—was always a welcome focal point. With my first mate at my side, I spoke slowly in the direction of that glow to compensate for the wobble in my voice—a wobble for which the Spinners of Drasti Prime, for once, […]
When a liquid-oxygen tank explodes at the summit of his space elevator, Stanley Osik is in Poland burying his father. His hands prove poor workers in the coarse-loamy soil on his grandmother’s acreage outside the city of Lublin, but even as he reaches its iron-clotted depths, Stanley does not regret refusing a neighbor’s offer of […]
Though July 9, 1937 was a warm Friday, and all the warmer for events in its early morning, Mouse shivered as he stood before the roaring 2 a.m. blaze in Little Ferry, New Jersey, and considered (not for the first time) that there was no time machine, not really—just the desperate will of his quickly […]
On impact you start to lose the details. The smell of the bright white room you were first held in. Its shape. Its size. The way that parasitic life suit slithered towards you, and from what shaft, what crevice, as you struggled with the air. The quiver in your stomach as the shape-shifter engulfed your […]
Directors Werner Herzog and Errol Morris are well known for their renegotiations of what’s called cinéma vérité—the notion that truth can be found through footage in the absence of a blatantly intervening narrator or narrative. When these documentarians sat down in 2008 with Believer Magazine, Herzog observed that Morris’s recently released Standard Operating Procedure had […]
When Host laughed, her esca wriggled, and the gills behind her pectoral fins vented hard enough to stir up the silt. Organ tumbled in the waste-stream’s wake, but kept one tiny black eye fixed on her bobbing, bioluminescent beacon—the first he had seen in six turns of the current along the foreign reef. “I almost […]
