History
Neil Clarke and Sean Wallace founded Clarkesworld Magazine in July 2006, originally as a companion to Clarkesworld Books, a now defunct online bookstore. The magazine published its first issue three months later.
In February 2007, Clarkesworld announced the first in a series of annual print anthologies starting with Realms: The First Year of Clarkesworld Magazine. It was published in June 2008 by Wyrm Publishing.
In January 2015, Clarkesworld began a relationship with Storycom to regularly translate and publish works of Chinese science fiction in their issues.
In February 2019, editor Neil Clarke announced that the magazine had received a grant from LTI Korea for the purposes of translating and publishing nine Korean science fiction stories in upcoming issues of Clarkesworld.
In January 2020, its editor Neil Clarke withdrew a short story by Isabel Fall at Fall's request, "I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter", after Fall had been harassed by people who suspected the story of trolling or transphobia.
In November 2022, editor Neil Clarke announced that the magazine would be opening a submission period for science fiction written in Spanish.
In December 2022, Amazon declared that they would stop selling magazine subscriptions. Clarke called the announcement "devastating", and noted that they had been offered a chance to continue in Kindle Unlimited for less money.
On 20 February 2023, Clarkesworld temporarily closed submissions due to a sudden increase in AI-generated stories sent to the magazine. During the first weeks of 2023, the magazine received 35 times as many fake spam submissions (the magazine categorizes AI-generated stories as spam) as it did last year during the same time frame.
