Clarkesworld Magazine has delivered its most dream-like issue with its May offering. Its two stories eschew conventional narrative strategies in favor of world-building, setting and poetic experimentation. Neither completely succeeds in my view, but they’re both rewarding and challenging reads, and more memorable than many other stories out there.

The fact that Clarkesworld continues to find comfortable residence in both the worlds of conventional and experimental storytelling is one of the reasons I keep coming back to it month after month. I never know exactly how much it’s going to make my brain itch with its fine dollops of speculative weirdness. And that’s definitely a good thing.

“From the Lost Diary of TreeFrog7” by Nnedi Okorafor is an inventive tale of exploration in which the pregnant TreeFrog7 and her husband Morituri36 compile entries to upload to the Greeny Jungle Field Guide. Their quest is a fabled mature CPU plant, in pursuit of which TreeFrog7’s friend BushBaby42 mysteriously disappeared. The story takes the form of the field guide entries themselves, a neat structure that provides firsthand perspective on the field guide’s scope and the author’s travails in obtaining their knowledge. Also, it allows first-person narration by both main characters, a useful point-of-view flexibility. The hyperlinking to entries on mentioned creatures is a nice added touch.

Okorafor’s displayed strengths are her imaginative detail and the immersive quality of her world. The plot, though, doesn’t generate as much suspense as I might have wished, and leads to an almost foregone conclusion. This isn’t helped by some of the expository repetition, perhaps resulting from the notion of each entry as self-contained. This story isn’t quite at the level of last year’s other guide, “A Buyer’s Guide to Maps of Antartica” by Catherynne M. Valente, but it is more accessible and more immediately rewarding.

The Podcast by Kate Baker is of high quality. The electronic effects used to signal entry starts are effective, and Baker modulates her diction and pace as dictated by the emotions of the narrators to compelling effect. My one gripe is her reading of the word “proboscis,” which appears numerous times in the story; I’ve heard it pronounced it two ways (as the on-line Webster dictionary confirms), neither of which is Baker’s.

“The Devonshire Arms” by Alex Dally MacFarlane is a language-driven fantasy about immortals who gather at the eponymous pub and find solace in each other’s company. When I say language-driven I don’t mean simply that it is literally conveyed through writing, but that language is employed as one of the story’s forefront elements, a kind of character unto itself. One of the images I found most arresting:

“Aus flicked dark fingers, and a marsupial bird made of folded napkins crumpled into sleep.”

There is little plot and much description. The fact that Ambri, the protagonist, has a sword but that it is not put to use by the story is indicative of the piece’s throwaway coolness and refusal to ever warm up to the reader. The descriptive emphasis is on color and on shape, as well as partitions; multiple times, we experience an explicit separation of right from left, as in an eye, a shoulder, an ear, a trouser leg, or where movement is perceived.

The nameless girl that dislikes patterns embodies this fracturing of directionality, and by extension the narrative itself embraces it. I found it a little over-distancing. The characters come to the Devonshire to rest “between the hard steps of their lives,” and it is the intimacy of their recovery from weariness, suspended against eternal lives of possibility, that we are permitted (with constraint) to enter. Sometimes a welcoming door and burning candle hold more significance than the longest journey.

“What if it All Goes Wrong? A Conversation with Robert V. S. Redick” by Jeremy L. C. Jones is an insightful interview with Redick about his fantasy novel The Red Wolf Conspiracy. Jones’ questions direct Redick beyond a retelling of the novel’s plot or a summation of its genesis; we get this, yes, but also broader considerations, such as comments on craft in storytelling and how to create tension in a world of magic. Of added interest to writers.

Brian Dow has clearly gone to significant lengths to produce the best possible cover he could for Tobias Buckell’s first short-story collection. I’m glad he has chronicled these efforts of craft in “Models and Clay and Plaster, Oh My! Creating the Cover Art for Tides From The New Worlds.” I was recently struck by the artwork when I received my copy of the book in the mail, and finding out how it came to be proved informative and entertaining. Dow’s article illustrates how dedicated execution and experimentation can translate an initial artistic conception into a stunning finished piece; it’s like a juicy DVD production extra, allowing us a behind-the-scenes glimpse into the magic.