Clarkesworld issue 96

September 2 2014

JY Yang

Its not every day one has a story up at Clarkesworld so I thought Id commemorate the publication of my story Patterns Of A Murmuration In A Billion Data Points with an actual blogpost I wrote this story as part of a flash fiction challenge with added prompts from my lovely Clarion West classmate Kelly and folded in a Tuckerisation request from my friend Wayne Ree who incidentally has out a book of short stories Its about mothers and death and revenge Also Big Data Possibly Definitely

Im also really thrilled and really looking forward to Clarkesworlds new project to publish a translation of a Chinese SFF story with every issue Yesssss One of my greatest self regrets is that Im not proficient enough with my mother tongue to be able to read literature in the language I want to read more Chinese SFF but I know my Mandarin CMI I have very poor character recognition I can understand a great deal of the spoken language but I can barely read it beyond an elementary level I am deeply ashamed that I have to wait for English translations the older generation will mock you 华人不会读华语 but at the same time Im just really happy that theyre available

The first of the series is a brilliant magical CNY story by Xia Jia Spring Festival Happiness Anger Love Sorrow Joy translated by Ken Liu All the little touches the superstitions the precarious family ties just made me really really happy to read Im sorry I keep saying Im really happy I should probably stop that