Tuesday, January 19, 2016

The Father, by Kola Heyward-Rotimi

Clarkesworld Magazine, October 2015; 3,094 words
Rating: 2, Not recommended

The church of the Goddess plans to sacrifice the engineers who recreated the "seeds of the goddess" for them, but Madhav plans to escape.

Mini-Review (click to view--possible spoilers)

Pro: We liked the twist that the Goddess turned out to have some reality to her.

Con: There's a lot of substance to the back story that we never figure out, so the whole story is confusing and feels incomplete. Why did the Children of Confucius want the Seeds of the Goddess? Is it an AI? Why did the church execute all the engineers? What's the point of returning to an earlier Earth? What's with the reference to the multiverse?

2 comments (may contain spoilers):

  1. ...why are so many Clarkesworld stories so hard to follow?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Different magazines have different styles, and Clarkesworld's style definitely tends towards the surreal.

      Delete