Summary:
There are two better than good stories in this issue by Thoraiya Dyer and P. H. Lee and they are the complete antithesis of each other. The Dyer is a colourful tale of a spaceship on its way to Mercury, and its breezy style and inventiveness reminded me of John Varley (it would also fit easily into an issue of Analog); the Lee, on the other hand, starts with the Prince of Jupiter falling in love with the Princess of the Sun, but quickly becomes something more quirky and metafictional (in the second chapter Ursula the Witch tells the Prince’s sidekick that things seldom end well for minor characters, and in the third chapter Stanislaw wheels out his Demetaphoricator. . . .)
The Rich Larson story is another tightly plotted future gangster story, this time with a homunculus hit-man (if you liked his How Quini the Squid Misplaced His Klobučar, you’ll like this).
The remaining three—a horror/fantasy by Suyi Davies Okungbowa, a portal love story from Seanan McGuire, and a multiple worlds love story by Indrapramit Das—aren’t bad, just average.
A stronger issue of this newsletter than normal.
[ISFDB] [Magazine link, individual stories are available at Tor.com and Amazon]

Other reviews:
Greg Hullender and Eric Wong, Rocket Stack Rank Sep/Oct
Victoria Silverwolf and Kevin P. Hallett, Tangent Online Sep/Oct

_____________________

Editors, Jonathan Strahan x2, Ellen Datlow, Ann VanderMeer, Jonathan Strahan, Lee Harris

Fiction:
Victory Citrus is Sweet • short story by Thoraiya Dyer ∗∗∗+
Choke • short story by Suyi Davies Okungbowa ∗∗
Quandry Aminu vs The Butterfly Man • novelette by Rich Larson ∗∗∗
Of All the New Yorks in All the Worlds • short story by Indrapramit Das ∗∗
How the Crown Prince of Jupiter Undid the Universe, or, The Full Fruit of Love’s Full Folly • short story by P. H. Lee ∗∗∗+
Skeleton Song • short story by Seanan McGuire ∗∗

Non-fiction:
Interior artwork • by Gregory Manchess, Xia Gordon, Sara Wong, Bill Mayer, Ashley Mackenzie, Rovina Cai
About the Author

_____________________

Victory Citrus is Sweet by Thoraiya Dyer (Tor.com, 7^th September 2022) has an intriguing opening where the narrator of the piece, Victory Citrus, details one of the hazards of space travel:

Cosmic rays buggered up my right arm just after we took the mission.
That is, some stupid high-energy proton started up an osteosarc in my ulna, which is a new one for me. Last cancer I got was lympho, in my lung. Which was annoying, because you can’t isolate and freeze a lung and keep working.
Lung isolation means a stupid induced coma while the new cells grow and Printer Two compiles a clean, connective tissue scaffold. It means sitting still for six weeks after the graft, somewhere with one-third G or more, waiting for it to take.
It means someone else gets the good jobs. Steals your promotion. I’m not bitter. Who can blame protons? They do what they do. Planet-bounds call us bobble-heads, because of the thick shielding on our helmets. One thing we can’t replace are our brains. But high-mass, high-density helmets don’t weigh anything up here. We take them off when we land, and the smart suits hold our spongy skeletons upright until the dirt jobs are done.

That’s a data-dump beginning, but it works, and we soon find out that Citrus has had to freeze her arm in nitrogen (which is in short supply) to stop the cancer growth so she can do a job on Mercury (her ship Whaleshark is headed to Gog’s Gorge to investigate a mass driver that is slinging refined uranium to the wrong hemisphere on Mars). Further information follows about (a) the nitrogen availability problem; (b) her childhood upbringing in a crèche run by bots; and (c) her apprentice Naamla (who at the end of the story we learn is the daughter of the spacer that Citrus was apprenticed to and who she now views as a rival). This is all reminiscent of the level of novel detail that you get in the early short work of John Varley, as is the chirpy conversational style of the piece:

I won an astronaut’s apprenticeship in a lottery my parents entered me in before I was born.
Don’t really remember them. Bots raised me in a creche. The bots came cheap, secondhand, from an Earth retirement village, and asked questions like, Are your bowel movements within normal parameters? Does the fleeting beauty of the blossoms make you ache with bittersweet memories? Your cortisol levels are high, do you feel you have failed your family members?
One of those was semi-appropriate for toddlers, I guess?
My personal bot had previously cared for someone with very specific music tastes, which is how I got acquainted with Earth sounds of the 1960s.
According to my EleAlloc service record, my worst hangover from being raised by bots is that I get squicked out by the sight of human eyeballs moving in their sockets.
I mean, anyone could get squicked out by that, right?
When I have to do my self-health-checks, and see my own reflected eyeballs moving, it makes me shout, “NO!”
Without fail. Every time. And I’m twenty-three years old, so I shouldn’t be shouting at myself in the mirror. I can’t help it. Eyeballs are so gross.

The main action occurs when the pair arrive on Mars and discover, in short succession, a gas vent near the drilling site, electron bursts that are transmitting the Fibonacci Sequence, and then (spoiler) animal/fish/lobster-like beings exiting crevasses in the ground—to their death—seventy clicks south of the first vent.
The rest of the story sees Citrus and Naamla investigate the body fragments of the dead aliens (they have a sulphur chemistry instead of a carbon one) and then attempt to communicate with them—they succeed, whereupon the Mercurians provide the nitrogen that Citrus needs. Then Citrus and Naamla realise that the mining operation has caused catastrophic damage to the underground Mercurian civilization, so they attempt to convince the Martian authorities to start slinging bismuth back from Mars to fill in the holes (and they enlist Naamla’s father to help them do this). Finally, having been over-exposed to radiation and developed multiple cancers, the pair enter comas to regrow their affected body parts.
The last section sees Naamla’s father wake them up—their limbs have been regrown, the Mercurians have been saved, and we learn Citrus’s apprentice name: Hogwash Perjury.
This is a fast paced, inventive, and colourful First Contact story. That said, the scene where Citrus almost effortlessly communicates with the Mercurians stretches credulity to breaking point.
∗∗∗+ (Good to Very Good). 7,450 words. Story link.

Choke by Suyi Davies Okungbowa (Tor.com, 14^th September 2022) sees the narrator, Kédiké, accompanying Afonso, a fellow academic and friend who “worships free food”, to a family assigned by the International Friends program:

The house, when you arrive, is more conspicuous than you had expected. Apparently, it used to be a church, back when this town was still a part of Mexico. The Spanish architecture and Infant of Prague statues, both of which you recognize from your Catholic upbringing, are huge tells. When you go past the motion-sensored outdoor lights, the statues come to life, casting slant shadows, like sentries over something poached.
The gate swings open into a large compound containing multiple buildings. The door at the top of the steps is open, ushering you in. From inside: the smell of good food, laughter, a cat meowing. Afonso beams. There is joy here.
You have forgotten your ancestors’ whisper that you will choke.

This passage pretty much presages the three narrative threads that are developed in the story. First, there are the whispered warnings and statements (of variable reliability) that Kédiké regularly receives from his dead ancestors in the “Great Across”—and they have already warned him that he will “choke” at this gathering; second, we learn about Kédiké’s abusive religious upbringing in Nigeria; and, third, it becomes obvious that the hosts of the meal, the Paxton family, are proselytizing Christians using the Friendship program to recruit new converts.
During the evening the ancestors continue to give Kédiké nudges and brief visions at the meal, and he also becomes increasingly uncomfortable with the religious observance that occurs (prayers and passages from the bible between courses, etc.). This discomfort increases when (spoiler) a final member of the family arrives, Elijah Paxton, who, after an aggravated assault on a woman with a baseball bat (he called on the “LGBT slut” to repent), was banned from all campuses in a fifty-mile radius.
The story climaxes with Kédiké experiencing an intense vision:

The world flickers, and the last light in the room is snuffed out. Your ancestors, tired of waiting, step forward.
Every guest at the table is a faceless two-dimensional darkness, bodies draped over furniture and cutlery, trapped in the plane of shadows. They speak but are unheard; scream but are stifled by a form too shallow to hold all their selves. The only bodily parts spared are their fingers, fleshy ends clinging to the flattened shadows at the table. With these they call for attention, scratching at the wood, pulling splinters, drawing blood.
But the sound of water drowns them out.
Each Paxton is a white robe wearing a stole, like the men from your exorcisms. Sticky gray tendrils, borne of each utterance, each interaction, connect the whites to every guest, bonding all in a closeknit web. Water so saline you can taste it pours from the depths of each Paxton to the dining room floor, enveloping the slant shadow-selves. Alessia’s ejections happen, like her words, in drips, slipping down the sides of her mouth. Charlotte and Donny, Hollywood smiles still intact, spout huge bucketfuls. But no one gushes into the fast-rising lake like Elijah, from whom water pours out of every orifice: eager, hungry, restless.
Young Joshua is the only Paxton left untouched. He is still stroking the cat. But rather than the vacant expression he has presented all evening, his face is warped by fear as he watches the water rise. His eyes turn, slowly, and find you, realizing you have joined him in this separate reality.
“Help,” he whispers, choking. “Help me.”
The flesh-fingered shadows scratch the table, echoing his words in wood. HELP. HELP ME.

The narrator quickly leaves, and realises that the ancestors were warning him that he might drown (in the host’s religion, presumably).
For the most part this is a readable piece (and economical, too—it does a lot with its four thousand words) that slowly and successfully builds unease in the reader—but it is somewhat anti-climactic (Kédiké runs away), and unsatisfyingly open-ended (what does he subsequently do to help Joshua, who appears to be in a similar situation to the younger Kédiké?) It also feels a bit like an anti-Christian hit job, and an unsubtle one at that.
All in all this reads like the beginning of a longer story, and I wonder if it is a novel in progress.
∗∗ (Average). 3,950 words. Story link.

Quandry Aminu vs The Butterfly Man by Rich Larson (Tor.com, 21^st September 2022) opens with an unnamed woman arriving at a makeshift biolab run by a man called Jow. After some brief conversation she opens a pouch containing something that looks like the cross between a foetus and a homunculus, and they watch it grow in the bathtub of biomass that Jow has prepared:

There’s a rattling gurgle, like rainwater racing through pipes during a storm, and the tub starts to churn. A wet pink fleck strikes Jow’s boot. He steps back, heart humming, knees shaky. The biomass is sluicing away, but not down the drain. The thing from the pouch is greedy, growing, sucking with ravenous pores.
Jow watches the level fall, and fall, and a body emerge. It swells and thrashes. Limbs elongate. A cartilage skeleton stretches, twists. Muscles creep over each other, layer on bubbling layer; rubbery skin splits and reforms to accommodate. Jow can’t take his eyes off it.
When the gurgling noise finally stops, the fully formed butterfly man is lying in a shallow carbon puddle. It’s human-shaped, but strays in the details: joints distended, no finger or toenails, smooth uninterrupted flesh between the legs. Its face is the most perfect part of it, with planar cheekbones and soulful dark eyes.
“Thought it’d be bigger,” Jow says, to mask the crawling in his spine.

The woman compares it to a tupilak, something made out of animal carcass that you send after a person who has wronged you but, before she can expand on her comment, Jow gets a text saying, “For diagnostic purposes, run or hide.” The butterfly man then leaps out of the bathtub and stabs the woman to death with a plastic probe before pursuing Jow, who flees.
The next section switches to a bar where Timo finds a woman called Quandry and tells her that a gangster called Jokić is unhappy about “the harbour job going belly up,” and that he has sent a butterfly man after her. The story subsequently turns into a Terminator-style narrative (the butterfly man has extraordinary powers of regrowth) where Quandry is relentlessly pursued and has several close shaves. During this she learns about butterfly men from her father (Quandry keeps his oxygenated head in a case while she is acquiring funds to buy him a new body), and he tells her that they only survive for 24 hours, but no-one who is pursued lasts that long.
The pivotal part of the story comes when Quandry goes to a drug dealer’s house and discovers (spoiler), when the butterfly man arrives, that she is in its temporary lair. Quandry then fights with the butterfly man, manages to inject a cocktail of drugs into its jugular, and restrains it. She subsequently manages to convince the creature that, if it kills Jokić before her, it can get control of the rest of the shipment of butterfly men that is due to arrive and, because they have linked memories, gain control of its own destiny and do what it wants rather than being endlessly compelled to be a bioware assassin (we have learned along the way that it likes noodles and painting). The butterfly man agrees to kill Jokić first, then her.
The climax of the piece comes when Quandry and the butterfly man go to the top floor of Jokic’s building, where they kill his guards and then fight with him and his barber robot. During this Quandry watches a second butterfly man push the original off the roof (this second butterfly man has the same memories and essentially the same consciousness as the first but likes pushing things off of buildings). This latter act is fortuitous because the second butterfly man, unlike the first, has not been programmed to assassinate Quandry.
If you don’t think too much about what is going on here (the part where Quandry ends up in the butterfly man’s lair and manages to convince it to go along with her plan hugely stretches credulity) then this is an entertaining enough gangland assassination story with lots of grisly wetware action and a twisty plot. If you enjoyed Larson’s recent How Quini the Squid Misplaced His Klobučar (also on Tor.com) you will probably like this.¹
∗∗∗ (Good). 14,750 words. Story link.

Of All the New Yorks in All the Worlds by Indrapramit Das (Tor.com, 19^th October 2022) opens with the narrator, a multiple worlds traveller, meeting Aditi-0, the original iteration of his ex-girlfriend Aditi-1, who he met in New York City-5 while travelling across the timelines (NYCs 2-4 didn’t have an Aditi in them). We subsequently learn that he met Aditi-1 after he was tasked to take a message from Aditi-0 to the versions of herself on other Earths (her “altselves”).
The rest of the story is mostly an account of the time he spends with Aditi-0, during which they talk about his failed affair with Aditi-1 (which he is still moping about). The story ultimately (spoiler) subverts reader expectation by having the narrator and Aditi-1 become friends instead of lovers at the end of the story (or perhaps it just describes what happens when people break up but remain in touch). I am not sure what the point of this is.
The story essentially appears to be a piece about failed relationships even though it is decorated with SFnal furniture, e.g. the physical effects of timeline travel (nausea, etc.), futuristic jargon (“altselves,” “sticers”), and one scene that describes a trans-timeline node in operation:

Time appears to slow, and sound with it, flooding my ears with a low hum.
Everything. The people, the stars in the sky, the ruddy smear of sunlight still burning in the clouds behind Manhattan, the lights of New York City, the glowsticks now arcing through the air above us. Everything grows persistent trails that crawl across the dark blue evening air in shimmering banners and strings. Aditi0 is replicated a hundred times until she is surrounded in a glimmering tracery of herself. The entire world etches the expanding mark of its passage on to the surface of reality. We see the potentialities of past and present grow around us for what seems like infinity but is actually just a few moments. As this multi-hued, crystalline geometry of our movement and Earth’s movement through spacetime grows more and more complex it begins to ripple and fade like a wake, so the tearing meteoric lines of the city’s lights fracture into what looks like a thousand overlapping New Yorks and a thousand starscapes splayed out across the horizon, before vanishing into the singular skyline we know.
The dancing replications decorating reality stream away to nothing and time hits its normal pace again, letting sound rush in like an explosion. I stagger back at this effect, gasping as I take in the world, which now seems to be moving too fast. It takes a few seconds of staying still to keep from throwing up at the contrast. Aditi0 lets her shoulder sag against mine.

This is probably the only truly SFnal part of what is essentially a slow-moving mainstream story about relationships.²
∗∗ (Average). 6,350 words. Story link.

How the Crown Prince of Jupiter Undid the Universe, or, The Full Fruit of Love’s Full Folly by P. H. Lee (Tor.com, 12^th October 2022) opens with the Crown Prince of Jupiter becoming infatuated with the Princess of the Sun:

He was in love, and his heart knew no persuasion. “Oh look at her,” he would say, admiring the tiny portrait, “what radiant beauty!”
“Her radiance,” commented his advisors, “is due entirely to her nuclear fusion. If your royal highness was in her presence, even a moment, then by those self-same processes you would find yourself instantly annihilated.”
“Are we not all slain by the self-same arrows of true love?” answered the Prince. Which, of course, was not any sort of answer, except to a young man in love.

The Prince subsequently stops eating and drinking, so his advisors implore his Aunt to intervene. She initially reiterates what he has already been told but, when she sees he is smitten, tells him that his only hope lies with Ursula, a witch who lives on Earth.³
In the second part of the story we see the Prince and Alisterisk (an advisor) journey to Earth suitably attired in pressure armour. There they meet Ursula and the story takes a meta-fictional turn:

Ursula’s eyes came at last on the Crown Prince and on Alisterisk beside him. In their pressurized armor, they looked to her as bluewhite gleams in a beam of sunlight. “Ah,” she said, relaxing. “I see now that this is a science fiction story. And I suppose you want me to write the end of it. All right then. What’s the matter?”

There is more of this kind of thing when (after the Prince tells his story and Ursula tells him that he should seek out the wizard Stanislaw) Alisterisk momentarily stays behind to thank her:

“Do not thank me yet,” said the Earth Witch. “For the matter is not done. I am afraid, Alisterisk, that you shall come to no good end in this affair. The side characters seldom do.”

The final section sees the Prince and Alisterisk meet Stanislaw³ who, after hearing their story (spoiler), tells them he can help, but that there may be consequences:

“I have in my possession,” said the wizard Stanislaw, “a Metaphoricator, left for me by the Constructor Trurl when he sojourned in my company these many years ago. A Metaphoricator is a most particular device. Operated properly, it can transform any real thing into a metaphor, merely a story meant to illustrate its point.”
“So you mean to transform us into metaphors?” asked Alisterisk hesitantly.
“Oh no!” said the wizard Stanislaw, “You are quite clearly metaphors already. Just think of it! How could there be such a thing as a real Crown Prince of Jupiter, a real Princess of the Sun? Your entire narrative is quite clearly a farce.”
“But then what do you intend to do?” asked Alisterisk
“By means of a few simple re-arrangements and jerry-rigs,” said the wizard Stanislaw, “my Metaphoricator can be transformed into a Demetaphoricator. And that is the machine I intend to operate.”
“What good is a Demetaphoricator to our present difficulties?” asked Alisterisk.
The wizard snapped his fingers. “With a single application of a Demetaphoricator, I can transform all of your story—the Crown Prince, Esmerelda, the Coreward Palace, Ursula the Earth Witch, even myself the wizard Stanislaw, into real people and real events, actually existing in the world beyond this story. At such time, both your Crown Prince and his beloved Esmerelda shall be rendered as real people, with no physical impediments to their romance. Of course, they may still encounter other difficulties, but that is simply the course of being human.”

The story ends with the characters having escaped the story and the writer quizzing the reader as to whether or not they have ever known archetypes like the Prince or Princess (the boy who became infatuated with a girl who could do nothing but destroy him), whether they helped, and what their role was, if any (were they like Alisterisk the advisor?)
This story probably sounds like an unlikely and unsuccessful combination of elements, but the quirky beginning, the meta-fictional development, and the story-transcending ending makes for an original, entertaining, and accomplished piece.
∗∗∗+ (Good to Very Good). 3,650 words. Story link.

Skeleton Song by Seanan McGuire (Tor.com, 26^th October 2022) is one of her “Wayward Children” series (Every Heart a Doorway, etc.)⁴ and opens with sunset on Mariposa, with the abuelas singing the summoning song that reanimates the dead skeletons of this world:

In the palace, in the curtained bower reserved for the Princess, a scattering of bones dusted with diamond and amber began to stir, tempted into motion by the song rising from below. On the other side of the room, a terrible creature raised its head and watched.
It was strange and fleshy, shaped as a skeleton was shaped, but with a covering of fat and skin stretched across it, concealing it from proper view. It hid most of its body under rags it called “clothing,” which had grown tattered and worn, developing holes where none had been before. Some among the palace staff had hoped, for a time, that the same might happen to the terrible creature’s “skin,” leaving proper, honest bone to shine through. It had not. When the creature broke its skin, as happened from time to time, it bled and wept and hurt, and took to the pile of rags it had claimed as a “bed.”
They would never have allowed it to remain in the palace were it not for one strange truth: hideous as the creature was, impossible as it seemed, the Princess loved it.

We learn that the fleshy creature is Christopher, a human who arrived in this world of living skeletons via a portal. The Princess saw that this new arrival was ill and drew all the sickness into a bone, later extracting it from Christopher’s body. Christopher now uses the bone as a flute.
The rest of the story sees the Princess paint her bones (a skeleton’s equivalent of dressing, I guess) before they go to see her parents in the depths of the catacombs (Christopher loves the Princess and does not want to go back to his world, so she says he must meet her parents). When the pair eventually arrive at the bottom of the catacombs, they learn from the Princess’s father that he also came to Mariposa as a human—but he kept his fleshly memories by having his mother plunge a gilded bone into his heart on their wedding night and then cut away his flesh (this resolves a memory problem mentioned by Christopher during an earlier discussion with the Princess about him becoming a skeleton).
The story concludes with the couple returning to the surface. The Princess wants “to sleep in the flowers” with him one last time (her bones are inanimate during the daytime) and then, when she rises that sunset, they will follow the ritual outlined by her father. When the Princess wakes that evening, however (spoiler), she finds that Christopher has had second thoughts and vanished.
This isn’t badly done (there are some nice touches, e.g. the journey down into the catacombs) but the idea of a man falling in love with a skeleton requires a little too much suspension of disbelief. I suspect this story will appeal more to those already invested in the series and who are interested in interstitial material.
∗∗ (Average). 5,000 words. Story link.

•••

This appears to be the first issue of the Tor.com Short Fiction Newsletter since the March-April one, and I don’t know why that is—but I suspect it is caused by the same half-heartedness that seems to afflict the project (there have been previous missing issues, missing stories in some issues—sometimes Wild Cards stories but sometimes others—and I have mentioned the woeful PDF format design before). I don’t know why, if Tor are going to bother with this newsletter, they can’t address these issues. I also don’t know why, given the wealth of non-fiction essays they have to choose from on their website, they wouldn’t include a few of the better ones and put out a proper magazine to appeal to those who want a pre-packaged non-web product. And they could include full page adverts for their books.
Putting my moans to one side, this issue has a better selection of fiction than normal and, given there are no turkeys, shows a better consistency of quality than usual.  ●

_____________________

1. Both Quandry Aminu vs The Butterfly Man and How Quini the Squid Misplaced His Klobučar show Rich Larson in Hollywood movie mode (albeit movies that have more SFnal invention than most).

2. Contrast and compare Indrapramit Das’s mainstreamish Of All the New Yorks in All the Worlds with his decidedly SFnal Weep for Day (reviewed here).

3. In P. H. Lee’s story, How the Crown Prince of Jupiter etc., Ursula the Earth Witch is obviously Ursula K. LeGuin (the Earthsea series), and Stanislaw is Stanislaw Lem (Trurl is from The Cyberiad).

4. Seanan McGuire’s “The Wayward Children” series at ISFDB.  ●