“My lover first tells me that he is turning into a chart on a Tuesday.” So begins “Thematic Cartography,” one of the most curious and compelling entries in Collective Gravities , the debut collection of short stories by Chloe N. Clark. In it, one lover cares for another who is succumbing to the eeriest disease: the gradual appearance of line graphs and snatches of text across his skin. As the disease progresses, so does the mystery of its incomplete information. It’s an exquisite study of how humans continually evolve in an attempt to complete each other, and the way our bodies and identities, in today’s digital reality, can feel like aggregations of data. Love isn’t the main subject that Collective Gravities dwells on, but it’s a major one. “Between the Axis and the Stars” is a science fiction story that traces a love triangle between “Jumpers” and their “Voices,” two types of workers in outer space whose intimate, life-or-death reliance on each other becomes far more than
The Y'allywood Reporter
Your Next Scene