Rating and review only for "When We Were Starless" by Simone Heller.Interesting and surprising twist from horror fantasy to straight up SF. It caught me off guard.

Simone Heller is a German translator who is also working on scifi books. She lives near Munich and I had no idea she existed. *lol* Thanks to this year's HUGO nominations, I heard of this story and thus of this woman.We are on a devastated and poisonous world. Catastrophe has struck and leaves the survivors struggling. There are tribes and spiderlike robots and "ghosts" and "herds" consisting of "weavers" that apparently are some kind of other robot. The sky is black, courtesy of whatever poison...

(When We Were Starless)I agree that it does sacrifice substance to be so concise. There's so much going on that it's a challenge to figure out the world-building at the same time as figuring out the story and the characters. So, I read it twice, once through to get the gist, and again to see more details and get to know Mink and the others better. And I'm glad I did; I did enjoy it that way.I still don't understand what happened to the stars though. Do any of you?(Free online; cover image is for...

This was a beautiful story. Heller paints a picture of survival, hope, and wonder. While a bit slow in starting and somewhat confusing in who/what we are following as a reader, this all peels away the deeper and deeper you go. We are pushed into knowing more about this bleak world Heller has created and the hope that is waiting to be found and fostered therein. Her prose is a pleasure to read, poetic even, in places that rend the heart."Just remember, beyond the darkness, worlds are waiting.”

Review: When We Were StarlessA sacrifice was made here - one of depth for consiseness. Whilst there is a lot to like here, none of it is explored in depth, instead everything is skimmed over and you have to fill in the missing pieces yourself. I can't help bit feel that this would have been much better if it had been unpacked more. Far more detail could have been given on what happened to the planet, why the lizard race are the nomadic survivors amongst other world building aspects. Characters c...

***When We Were Starless by Simone Heller*** A beautiful and challenging story.It took me a couple of tries to get into it. Because not much gets explained in the beginning. The reader has to slowly piece things together.We’re thrown into an alien world that a long time ago was rendered hostile by some kind of disaster, which also blackened the sky and makes it impossible for the survivors to see the stars.Our narrator, Mink, is a member of a tribe of lizard-like people. She’s a scout who’s task...

[Review solely for two stories]● "The Miracle Lambs of Minane" by Finbarr O’Reilly. http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/oreil...Set in the same universe as his award-winning "The Last Boat-Builder in Ballyvoloon". Ireland is slowly recovering from famine. The Church is (at the start) in heavy-handed control, less so at the end. Clearly part of a WIP, it still works as a story, and I liked it. Weak 4 stars.● "Thirty-Three Percent Joe" by Suzanne Palmer. Cybernetic replacement parts of a soldier inter...

I'm reviewing this issue solely on the story "When We Were Starless" by Simone Heller. I so much enjoy her writing and her ideas.Mink lives in what remains of a fallen world, no real knowledge of the past civilization or that they are using technology of the lost world. Mink is a scout who hunts "ghosts" which really are more than she thinks and I very much loved the way how Mink and one of the "Clusterhaunts" establish kind of a forbidden friendship. This story is a beautiful woven tale of a yo...

"Thirty-Three Percent Joe" by Suzanne Palmer, was the story which caught my attention the most in this issue and the only one which made me laugh.

Contender for 2019 Hugo:Not the easiest story to understand; it's about nomadic beings wandering a destroyed land. One member of the group banishes ghosts, or probably the holograms of some previous civilization from some distant past on this planet. I like how the nomads use weavers (robots). And I loved how the relationship between main character Mink and Orion evolved, which was pretty touching. 3.5 stars.

Read for the 2019 Best Novelette nominees for the Hugos. A futuristic, post-apocalyptic tale where a lizard-like people seem to be the only survivors on Earth, and our main character roams the wasteland with her tribe, her appointed task being to lay 'ghosts' to rest (but which turn out to be electricity, and computers, and technology, which was so cute and clever).I liked the eventual feelings about space and exploration, and shaking a society out of staid convention, and an AI trying its best

Review for When We Were Starless by SIMONE HELLER, 13204 words, ~29 p., ★★★★☆“When we set out to weave a new world from the old, broken one, we knew we pledged the lives of our clutches and our clutches’ clutches to wandering the wastes.“Bipedal lizards living in a post-apocalyptic, lost world. A possibly human race has left behind remnants of their technology. Nomadic tribes just barely manage to survive in a bleak, dangerous and hopeless world. A meeting and forbidden aquaintance changes the w...

Edit after a weird merge... I am referring to When We Were Starless, by Simone HellerI tend to like a lot of short stories and are overly critical of more, but fortunately, this one falls into neither category. This '19 Hugo nom just plain ROCKS.I'm a sucker for subtle and deeply-imagined worldbuilding, alien species as PoV, lost histories, dreaming about the future, taking a risk, and suffering for your task.This one has all of it. And great writing. :) That labor and toil will pay off. It must...

What short story is this a review for? WHO KNOWS?!? Why?!? Cuz either evil or neuro-divergent (not a bad thing, but could be why many don’t understand why they are doing this) GRL who has taken it on themselves to rid GoodReads OF ALL THE EVIL SHORT STORY LISTINGS and INISISTS on smooshing them into anthology listings instead!Seriously, why? If the GRL in question are not neuro-typical, I get it. I was assuming malice in the action, but it may not be there. It may be that the GRL in question hon...

Summer 2019 (Hugo Award Nominee 2019 - Novelette); I have a lot of amazing, moved feelings about the way this ended, and that almost convinced me to mark this as a 3.5 stars, which is coincidentally it's median rating right now, but the longer I sit it with, the more I can't give this novelette an extra half-star for picking itself up and dusting itself off from its many problems along the way with a moving closure. This Novelette did have many things in its favor. I did like the incredibly slow...

Read only for Hugo 2019 Nom "When We Were Starless"Really a solid sci-fi, about a desert people eking out survival post-apocalypse. I think it would have been my lead choice. Story: http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/helle...Review: https://clsiewert.wordpress.com/2020/...

33% Joe by Suzanne PalmerWow, a whole new way to experience a military story. This would have made for a great addition to the Love, Death and Robots TV show.Available free: http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/palme...

"Thirty-Three Percent Joe" by Suzanne PalmerSo enjoyable. Where I (very mildly) criticized Palmer's Secret Life of Bots for cuteness and anthropomorphism...this isn't really much different...but somehow it comes across better? That the consciousness of a bio-computer part longs for its hosts survival seems a natural concept. That this vital goal would overshadow other programming is interesting. You root for Joe and his unknown longing to be a cook rather than a soldier and you cheer for his bio...

Thirty-Three Percent Joe by Suzanne Palmer ★★★★★ Ms. Palmer, I don’t know how you wrote a cute and meaningful war story, but you did. This was fantastic!The smart biomechanical replacements on a soldier conspire to keep him alive and happy.When We Were Starless by Simone Heller ★★★★★ “None of us had ever seen the stars, but our hearts recognized them.” Beautiful feel good story about finding a blaze of hope in the darkness. An alien reptilian tribe in a fallen world struggle for survival. Thei...

“We didn’t change a thing, and all our sacrifices were just to survive another day. It was enough, mostly, as long as we pretended it didn’t tear our hearts out.”Excellent. Packs a bunch of storytelling into just a few pages. Bright and tight.“If the winds are willing and you’re keeping us safe, I’ll eat the stuff that’s trying to eat me.”Heller builds her world through the eyes of her protagonist. The reader learns Mink’s troubles and hopes--and those of her adopted tribe--as she experiences th...