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A review by kayeofswords
Clarkesworld Magazine, Issue 131 by Neil Clarke
5.0
I really liked this issue. Chen Qiufan's "A Man out of Fashion" was the strongest piece in the collection, followed by Octavia Kade's "The Stone Weta" and Nin Harris' "Reversion." Kade's was also a bit personal for me because I was an organizer for one of the (climate) data rescue events in my city.
I found Kim Stanley Robinson's "Venice Drowned" really interesting. I wasn't certain that I liked the story at first. While reading it, I spent a lot of time separating my feelings about the anti-pagan iconoclasm of the Church in antiquity after it made polytheism illegal from the work's actual content — a Catholic Christian disturbed by the repurposing of his sacred iconography for secular show. It's similar to my feelings as a Hellenic polytheist who has to visit museums to see religious agalmata of deities I worship. After unpacking my reaction by talking to a friend, I discovered that I actually liked the story. The descriptive language was good, too.
As a conlanger, I also appreciated the "How to Invent an Alien Language? A Linguistic Perspective" essay by Olga Kuno. The advice is solid, especially where Kuno talks about using conlang words in a work using the example of why a character wouldn't suddenly use a conlang version of "table." As a writer-conlanger, I typically stick to concepts that are either not translatable or not succinctly translatable into English — such as pronoun systems, foods, genders, some less translatable profanity, and proper names. I also use it to highlight multilingualism, such as when characters' at-home language is not the same as the privilege language in a story. Kuno's use of Klingon in examples would be very familiar to many. If anyone's looking for stuff beyond this, there are a few primers on writing constructed languages from members of the conlang community, and the Language Creation Society also has a job board where writers can request language sketches at various price points.
I found Kim Stanley Robinson's "Venice Drowned" really interesting. I wasn't certain that I liked the story at first. While reading it, I spent a lot of time separating my feelings about the anti-pagan iconoclasm of the Church in antiquity after it made polytheism illegal from the work's actual content — a Catholic Christian disturbed by the repurposing of his sacred iconography for secular show. It's similar to my feelings as a Hellenic polytheist who has to visit museums to see religious agalmata of deities I worship. After unpacking my reaction by talking to a friend, I discovered that I actually liked the story. The descriptive language was good, too.
As a conlanger, I also appreciated the "How to Invent an Alien Language? A Linguistic Perspective" essay by Olga Kuno. The advice is solid, especially where Kuno talks about using conlang words in a work using the example of why a character wouldn't suddenly use a conlang version of "table." As a writer-conlanger, I typically stick to concepts that are either not translatable or not succinctly translatable into English — such as pronoun systems, foods, genders, some less translatable profanity, and proper names. I also use it to highlight multilingualism, such as when characters' at-home language is not the same as the privilege language in a story. Kuno's use of Klingon in examples would be very familiar to many. If anyone's looking for stuff beyond this, there are a few primers on writing constructed languages from members of the conlang community, and the Language Creation Society also has a job board where writers can request language sketches at various price points.