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

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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

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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.  ●

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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.  ●

Summary: This issue has one standout piece by Ian R. MacLeod, The Chronologist, and a good contest prize winner, The Last Truth by AnaMarie Curtis. The two stories by Yefim Zozulya and Lavie Tidhar almost make the grade, and the Fong is okay (but probably in the wrong market).
Overall, though, a mixed bag (and a lacklustre one for a publication that pays a market-leading 25c a word).
[ISFDB] [Magazine link]

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

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Editors, Jennifer Gunnels, Anne VanderMeer, Jonathan Strahan (x2), Diana M. Pho & L.D. Lewis (x3)

Fiction:
Fruiting Bodies • short story by Kemi Ashing-Giwa ∗
The Tale of Ak and Humanity • short story by Yefim Zozulya (trans. Alex Shvartsman) ∗∗+
The Chronologist • novelette by Ian R. MacLeod ∗∗∗∗  
Seven Vampires: A Judge Dee Mystery • novelette by Lavie Tidhar ∗∗+

January/February stories not included in the collection:
Girl Oil • short story by Grace P. Fong ∗∗
Synthetic Perennial • short story by Vivanni Glass ∗
The Last Truth • short story by AnaMaria Curtis ∗∗∗

Non-fiction:
Interior artwork • by Reiko Murakami, Juan Bernabeu (x2), Red Nose Studio (x2), Sara Wong, Dani Pendergast,
About the Author

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This appears to be the first of Tor’s short fiction “newsletters” since March-April 2021 (I’m not sure what the reason for the non-appearance of these is, but I vaguely remember an associated production position being advertised around the same time). As per usual the newsletter misses out some of the stories that appeared on the site during the time period covered so, if you want to keep up with Tor’s original fiction, you’ll need to visit their website (again, I’m not sure why there is this repeated problem).¹

The fiction leads off with Fruiting Bodies by Kemi Ashing-Giwa, which, in an inchoate start, has the narrator, who is from a generation ship whose crew appears to have settled an inhospitable volcanic planet, looking for a woman called Morayo. There is also mention of the arinki, (indigenous?) creatures who come out at night.
As the narrator searches for Morayo, she comes upon one of the other ship members who has been infected with a planetary fungus and is dying:

“How long?” Eranko asks after a moment.
“Turn around.”
He does as I ask, and I carefully pull aside the few lank bits of reddish-blond hair he has left. I run my fingers over his skull—there.
A round, almost imperceptible bump. The pileus of a fruiting body preparing to pop his head open.
I was a mycologist, Before. The transmission and development of the contagion are quite similar to those of the entomopathogenic Earth fungus Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, only differing in minor ways. The zombie ant fungus, it was called. The colonists had hoped I would be able to save them, given my expertise.
“A fortnight, at most,” I tell him.
Eranko gives a shallow, croaking sigh. The infiltrating mycelium has begun to decompose his lungs. Less than a week, then.

The narrator (spoiler) eventually arrives at the settlement and rescues Morayo. During this episode she kills four men and we learn that she has been given a serum developed by Morayo, which has adapted her to the planet (although the narrator is accused by the men of being one of “them” before the killing starts).
Then the story abruptly stops.
This piece could definitely do with another draft, especially sentences like this one:

But the greatest of our reproductive technology died with the Before, so I suppose it would be more accurate to say that only a piece of me is their future to them.

What? I also note that the “Great Filter” idea is clumsily introduced at the start of the piece, in the first paragraph and then the third. It would have been be clearer to link these: “Ancient Scientists called this the Great Filter. Our Great Filter was the arinkiri—the night walkers.” But what we get is the first sentence in the first paragraph and then the Great Filter idea appearing again after a wodge of terrain description in the third:

“But now, those of us still living call our species’ Great Filter the arinkiri—the night walkers.”

This story is unpolished, unclear (probably because there is too much going on in its short length), and it ends abruptly. There are a couple of reasonable body horror scenes (see above) but this is one that should have probably been left in the slush pile.
∗ (Mediocre). 2,700 words. Story link.

The Tale of Ak and Humanity by Yefim Zozulya (1918),¹ translated by Alex Shvartsman, begins with an announcement of the formation of the Board of Supreme Determination, an organisation that will decide who has the right to live. Those deemed to be unnecessary will be required to leave life within twenty-four hours:

For those unnecessary people who cannot leave life, because of their love thereof or due to their weak character, the judgment of the Board of Supreme Determination is to be carried out by their friends, neighbors, or special armed squadrons.

This announcement causes panic amongst the populace until they learn that the highly respected Ak is one of the Board’s members.
The next part of the story sees a family interviewed: the son gets a five year deferment; the mother and father do not. The supervisor mentions to the guard that the couple will probably be unable to leave life themselves. We subsequently see records of other assessments—then Ak starts to have doubts about the process, and stops it before he disappears.
When Ak later returns at the end of the story he appears to have changed his mind (or has gone mad), but the officials ignore him and continue with their new task describing their joyous observations of the populace. The latter continue living their lives as if Ak had never existed.
I thought this might be an allegory about Stalin’s purges, but it is actually, according to the introduction²—and I would have guessed from the date had I known—about the Bolsheviks shortly after the Russian Revolution. It’s not a bad piece given its age, but the back and forth ending is weaker than the rest.
∗∗+ (Average to Good). 3,800 words. Story link.  

The Chronologist by Ian R. MacLeod opens with the narrator of the story revealing how, when he was an eleven-year-old, the Chronologist came out of the time haze to service the town clock:

After the last hedge and scrap of farmland lay a boundary of unkempt wasteland that we had all been warned never to approach, let alone cross. But from up here, peering on through the time-haze, I believed I could make out a little of what lay beyond, and for one moment I was sure there were fields as prim and regular as our own, and the next I saw hills and sunlit meadows, and deep woodlands, and places of ravaged gloom. And beyond even this lay a staggering sense of ever-greater distance, where lights twinkled, and towers and spires far higher and more fabulous than our own gave off signal glints. I was sure that snowy mountains lay out there, too, and the fabled salty lakes known as oceans, and other places and realms beyond anything we in our town were ever permitted to know.

The narrator has this wanderlust reverie as he watches the Chronologist service the town clock in the tower (he manages to sneak up with his father the mayor), and later steals a book from the man’s bag. The narrator later follows the Chronologist out of town, but loses his nerve when the latter disappears in the time haze.
After the Chronologist’s visit the temporal irregularities that had been plaguing the town end, their long summer gives way to autumn, and we learn more about the strictures of this community and the world in which it exists:

I also I found myself irritated by many other things, not least my father’s bumbling inability to manage his own buttons, let alone our town, and the pointless and repetitive tasks we children were expected to perform at school. After all, I had already seen much farther than here, and believed I would see farther still. Why should I have to endlessly draw and redraw the same street maps of our town, or memorise the weights of every recent harvest, or count the number of seconds in each hour, or copy out calendars from years long erased?

Sometimes, though, although I wished she wouldn’t, [my mother would] begin to speak in a crackling, quavering voice that came and went like dry leaves. Gabbling nonsense, or so it then seemed, of the times when the arrow of time flew straight and true.
Marvels and miracles. Machines bigger than houses or smaller than ants. Some that could peer so far into the sky that the past itself was glimpsed. Others that looked so deep into the fabric of everything that the quivering threads of reality could be examined, then prised apart, to see what lay beyond. And it was through one of these rents, or so her whispers told me, that a hole of sheer nothingness widened, and the fabric of everything warped and twisted, and the time-winds blew through.

Eventually, the narrator finds the courage to walk into the time-haze—but exits it walking back into his town. He then decides to sabotage the town clock to force the Chronologist to return (he practises first on the clock in his house, which causes some odd temporal effects).
The final part of the story (spoiler) sees the Chronologist arrive to repair the damage that the narrator has done (the time-storm created has disrupted time and causality in the town). The Chronologist instructs the narrator to follow him up the tower and, when the latter does so, he falls off the ladder and through a time storm. When the narrator comes out of the disturbance he finds himself walking into a strange village where he later, of course, fixes their clock.
Although this time-loop revelation is perhaps an obvious development (the narrator is obviously the younger Chronologist), the story more than maintains reader interest by providing an account of the narrator/Chronologist’s subsequent life and strange travels:

I have visited towns where the clocks are lumbering and primitive, and the people are frankly primitive as well. There have been others where their devices are little more than light and energy, and time somehow pours down from the skies. I have spoken with machines in the shape of people, and people in the shape of machines. I have been to places where the clock tower is worshipped through human sacrifice, and others where the inhabitants have razed it to the ground. It is in one of these ruins, or so I imagine, that I found my metal staff, which appears to be the minute hand from the face of a town clock, although I can’t be sure. I have yet, however, to come across a volume on the repair and maintenance of the commoner types of timepiece. Unless, that is, I’ve already lost it, or it’s been stolen by some ill-meaning lad, or I’ve forgotten that I have it with me right now. My memory’s not what it once will be. Or was. Or is.

The story then fittingly closes another sort of loop with the Chronologist’s elegiac reflections on an eleven-year-old boy’s wanderlust:

There will, I suppose, come a day when I will force some foolish child nurturing dreams of reaching other times and lands to follow me up the ladders of the clock tower in a particular town. Or perhaps it has already happened, and the event lies so far behind me that the memory has dissolved. Either way, I know I can never tell him that there is nothing more precious than waking each morning and knowing that today will probably be much the same as yesterday, tomorrow as well, although I wish I could.

A feeling that is hugely underrated.
This a very good story in a number of ways: it is well written, creates a self-contained and intriguing world which also manages to hint at an off-stage vastness, and, finally, it has the thread of a human life running through it.³
One for the Best of the Year volumes.
∗∗∗∗ (Very Good). 7,300 words. Story link.  

Seven Vampires: A Judge Dee Mystery⁴ by Lavie Tidhar is the fourth story in the writer’s ‘Judge Dee’ series, and opens with the vampire judge and his familiar Jonathan (the perpetually hungry narrator of the story) walking away from a Paris that is not only on fire but also experiencing a vampire pogrom. Further down the road they meet six other vampires and, after some tense introductions and exchanges (Judge Dee has to forbid the others from feeding on Jonathan), they later discover the body of a seventh member nearby, sans head.
As the group journey to Calais to get a boat to England we learn more about the various members (including the fact that Dee appears to be an enforcer of the Unalienable Obligations of Vampires) while, one by one, three of them are murdered.
By the time they get to Calais there are only four vampires left, and Dee eventually calls them together to solve the mystery of who the killer is (we then find out (spoiler) that Dee has previously tasked Jonathan to search the vampires during daytime for the evidence he requires to confirm his theories). Dee explains to the group (“You might be wondering why I have assembled you all here”) that there are two killers: Jack killed Nils and Gregor with a silver knife (discovered by Jonathan) for a treasure map of a Western continent called Vinland (ditto), and Melissandra killed Lady Aisha, who she disliked, in an unrelated act. Dee throws the two miscreants overboard.
When the three remaining travellers arrive at Calais the (still religiously pious) Brother Borja steals the map and disappears. Judge Dee tells Jonathan that Borja will regret this due to the treatment of vampires on that continent.
This is pleasant enough fluff but it is one of those stories where only the author can solve the mystery as there are insufficient clues provided to the reader—who are little more than passive passengers for the duration of the tale (probably not a good thing in a murder mystery story, even a semi-humorous one).
∗∗+ (Average to Good). 9,550 words. Story link.

The next three stories aren’t in the newsletter, and are all winners of the “LeVar Burton Reads writing contest, as co-presented by FIYAH Literary Magazine and Tor.com!”
The second place winner is Girl Oil by Grace P. Fong, which opens with the Asian narrator, Chelle, at the beach with her college student friend Preston and another woman called Wenquian. Chelle is romantically interested in Preston but he is interested in Wenqian.
Chelle later goes to an advertisement casting in the Valley and gets some uncomplimentary feedback from the Mandarin speaking (there is a cultural identity subtext to the story) producer (“let’s face it, you are a little fat”). On her way out one of his assistants gives her an experimental body oil from that may help with her problem.
When Chelle gets back to her room she finds that Preston is, much to her displeasure, with Wenqian. After the two of them leave to have dinner Chelle has a shower:

I dab beads of oil on my face and pat them with the balls of my fingers like I’ve seen Wenqian do. It goes on light and colorless but smells like sulfur and charcoal. It burns and turns my nerves to steam. The tingling continues long after I’ve dressed.
I check the mirror again and I’m shocked. My face is my face, but firmer, brighter, thinner. This might actually work. I massage more into my soft arms, jutting stomach, and radish calves. Sparks dance under my skin until I double over on the bathroom floor. I stumble through the ache and pull myself up to the mirror. The me that rises is brighter, lighter, slimmer. Maybe she can finally fit in.

The next day Chelle buys a new dress—she fits into a medium size for the first time—and then texts Preston while she is at the beach, asking for an audition with his movie-maker father. That night she applies more oil, even though the instructions say to stop if there is a burning sensation (which she has been experiencing).
The rest of the story (spoiler) sees more three-way romantic complications and Chelle’s overuse of the oil to the point that she almost drowns at the beach (for some reason the oil now makes her unable to swim). Then matters deteriorate even further when creates a hole in her body (“the flesh thins and parts, turning into yellow smoke”). When Chelle finally goes to a call back audition with Preston’s father, she discovers that no-one can see her: she has become invisible.
Finally, Chelle returns to the beach and dissolves in the sea, becoming part of the ocean. The last line has her reconcile with her body/size, “I am so big, and it is so wonderful.”
The slimming oil metaphor/arc of this story may work for young women readers who have body image and boyfriend hook-up issues, but I’m not sure how much of the rest of the short SF reading field (whatever that is nowadays) will be interested.⁵ That said, even if the content is niche, it is well enough written.
∗∗ (Average). 5,000 words. Story link.

The third place winner is Synthetic Perennial by Vivianni Glass (Tor.com, 22^nd February 2022), which opens with K’Mori, the narrator, restrained in a hospital after undergoing surgery. We soon learn that:

I am the first person in modern history to have ever been scientifically resurrected. Excuse me: revitalized. “Resurrection” is a religious and political minefield. I don’t understand the specifics of the procedures; I just know that I have four different people’s organs in me, and my new pancreas allows me to proudly say that I am a cyborg.

A kind nurse, Lillian, arrives later on and, the next day, she puts K’Mori in a wheelchair and they roam about the hospital. During this excursion Lillian asks K’mori if she is going to reply to a boy who has contacted her; we also get a dribble of backstory. At the end of their walk, they see K’Mori’s “followers” on the streets outside the hospital.
The rest of the story (spoiler) sees K’Mori dream about her cousin Kenny, who brings her something in a box and tells her that they won’t let her go. K’Mori awakes from this to discover (I think) that she is having a medical emergency during an attack on the hospital.
This is a fragmentary piece that is little more than a set-up and climax. There is no real plot, or development or examination of the story’s gimmick.
∗ (Mediocre). 4,750 words. Story link.

The winner of the contest is The Last Truth by AnaMaria Curtis (Tor.com, 22^nd February 2022), which begins with Eri, a lockbreaker, opening a chest on a ship so it can be plundered later on:

The lock on the next chest glows red when she approaches it. It’s a standard truth-lock, spelled by Mr. Gilsen’s lockmaster to recognize its true owner. He’s a wealthy passenger unlucky enough to have hired Mareck’s whole ship for his travel, and he’ll be the last person Eri has to steal from.
“Open,” she says.
“I require a truth.”
“I am your rightful owner.” It never works on the locks she deals with, since it’s a lie, but she’s supposed to try, to test for weaknesses. This lock remains a stubborn red.
“I require a truth,” it repeats.
Eri reaches for her tiered truths and plucks out the one that seems least painful to lose. “The ship that brought me from Ekitri to Sild was overcrowded, and my bunkmate elbowed me in her sleep and bruised my jaw one night. It hurt to speak for weeks. I learned to make myself understood without speaking; this is why Mareck picked me to be a lockbreaker.”
The lock glows a soft, welcoming yellow. The ache in Eri’s chest deepens a bit. She wonders what she just gave up. It’s a tricky business, opening truth-locks. Only truths a lockbreaker has told nobody else can open a lock. As soon as a truth is spoken aloud to the lock, it disappears, unusable—and the memory that sparked it goes too.²

After the story’s gimmick has been laid out (Eri can burgle these locked chests at the cost of her memories) she realises that there is someone watching her. That person is a musician called Aena who, after they talk, convinces Eri to open a chest that contains sheet music that she wants to see before a forthcoming test of her musical skills. Eri, who is cautious of the musician (music is a potent and semi-magical force in this world), agrees, and a relationship is formed when Eri recovers a lost memory when later listening to Aena sing.
When Aena then asks Eri to get her violin the two become even more deeply entwined, and they then agree to run away together when they get onshore (Eri hopes that, with Aena’s music, she may be able to eventually recover all her lost memories).
Complications develop in the last part of the story (spoiler) when Eri encounters a particularly strong lock that the captain of the ship insists she open to gain her freedom. However, doing this will require the remainder of Eri’s memories, so she leaves herself a note saying to steal the violin and then contact Aena—and wonders if she will be able to understand her own instructions . . . .
Eri succeeds in an engrossing last section, and the last paragraph is suitably uplifting:

The woman bends down to take the violin from Eri’s hands and presses a soft kiss to Eri’s temple as she straightens up.
“We don’t have much time,” she says, opening the case, making sure the soundproofed door is sealed, “but what we have, I will give you.”
She puts the violin to her chin and begins to play.

The story’s gimmick of telling truths (sacrificing memories) to open locks is, to be honest, not the most convincing, but it is the only major credulity-stretcher in the story, and the rest of it is well told and plotted. If you like the sort of fiction that appears in Beneath Ceaseless Skies magazine, you’ll like this.
∗∗∗ (Good). 5,350 words. Story link. 

•••

The Interior artwork is the usual modern/abstract stuff, and none of it is really my cup of tea, but the best is probably the Bernabeu for the Zozulya, followed by Red Nose Studio’s one for the Tidhar story. (I’m not sure the Red Nose style suits their other work for the MacLeod, which would probably have been better served by a more serious illustration). The other illustrations are by Reiko Murakami, Sara Wong, and Dani Pendergast. 
While I’m talking about the art I suppose that I should mention that the PDF version of the newsletter (it is also available in mobi and epub) has hideous square pages and a sans serif font. It looks as if it has been designed by someone who doesn’t read.⁷
There is a single About the Author note after the Tidhar story (I think the others were probably missed out by mistake).

•••

A mixed bag of stories with only the MacLeod and Curtis stories really worth your time.  For a publication/venue that pays as much as this one, I’d expect better.  ●

_____________________

1. There is also a 1919 publication date for The Tale of Ak and Humanity, and a 1922 one too (this may be for the story’s subsequent book publication).

2. The introduction to The Tale of Ak and Humanity states that the story “helped establish the anti-utopia genre, and directly inspired and influenced Zamyatin’s We, which was finished a year later.”

3. The Chronologist’s self-contained world, and the single human life it spans, reminds me somewhat of David I. Masson’s Traveller’s Rest (New Worlds #154, September 1965).

4. I’m not sure why Tor didn’t keep the “Judge Dee and . . . ” format of the previous three stories for Tidhar’s tale, i.e. Judge Dee and the Seven Vampires.

5. The SF short fiction field has been metamorphosing into a literary small press for decades now; we have probably arrived at the end of that cul-de-sac.

6. This quoted passage is where the The Last Truth should start—there are a couple of unnecessary and/or confusing paragraphs before this (the first should be further into the story and the second deleted).

7. The PDF cover and one of the pages:

Stories

Other reviews:
Greg Hullender and Eric Wong, Rocket Stack Rank

_____________________

Editors, Patrick Nielsen Hayden (Swanwick x2), George R. R. Martin (Vaughn & Walker, Simons), Lee Harris (McGuire), Ellen Datlow (Johnstone, Moore, Carroll), Jonathan Strahan (Solomon & Park), Jennifer Gunnels (MacGriogair)

Fiction:
Murder in the Spook House • short story by Michael Swanwick ∗
Any Way the Wind Blows • short story by Seanan McGuire ∗∗∗
Skinner Box • novelette by Carole Johnstone ∗∗
The New Prometheus • short story by Michael Swanwick ∗∗∗+
A Forest, or A Tree • novelette by Tegan Moore ∗∗
For He Can Creep • novelette by Siobhan Carroll ∗∗∗+
Blood Is Another Word for Hunger • short story by Rivers Solomon ∗
More Real Than Him • short story by Silvia Park ∗∗
Seonag and the Seawolves • novelette by M. Evan MacGriogair ∗∗

Tor.com May—August stories not included in this collection:
Long is the Way • by Carrie Vaughn and Sage Walker ∗∗
The City That Never Sleeps • novelette by Walton Simons ∗∗

Non-fiction:
Interior artwork • by John Picacio (x2), Gregory Manchess (x3), Adam Baines, Samuel Araya, Red Nose Studio, Xia Gordon, Dion MBD, Rovina Cai

_____________________

The third issue of the Tor.com Short Fiction Newsletter recently appeared (titled “Summer 2019” after missing its May/June number due to staff changes), and it includes nine of the eleven stories which appeared on the site from May to August 2019. Once again it omits the ‘Wild Card’ stories.
As I’ve already reviewed the May and June stories in another post, I’ll start with the July and August material. For easy reference I’ve cut and pasted in my previous review at the end of the new material below, and indicated when this begins (so as to avoid the twin dreads of boredom and déjà vu).

For He Can Creep by Siobhan Carroll is an entertaining light fantasy involving an asylum tomcat called Joffrey, an insane poet, and the devil. You can get a good idea of the general tone from the opening:

Flash and fire! Bristle and spit! The great Jeoffry ascends the madhouse stairs, his orange fur on end, his yellow eyes narrowed!
On the third floor the imps cease their gamboling. Is this the time they stay and fight? One imp, bolder than the others, flattens himself against the flagstones. He swells himself with nightmares, growing huge. His teeth shine like the sword of an executioner, and his eyes are the colors of spilled whale oil before a match is struck. In their cells, the filthy inmates shrink away from his immensity, wailing.
But Jeoffry does not shrink. He rushes up the last few stairs like the Deluge of God, and his claws are sharp! The imps run screaming, flitting into folds of space only angels and devils can penetrate.
[. . .]
The whole asylum is his, and let no demon forget it! For he is the Cat Jeoffry, and no demon can stand against him.

Jeoffrey then visits the poet, who is trying to write a poem for God (when he is not being pestered by his publishers to write something else).
That evening the devil comes to the asylum to speak to the cat—he wants Joffrey to stand aside so he can visit the poet and force him to write a particular poem. If the devil is successful in this it will change the future of the universe and put it under his control. The cat accepts a bribe of various treats.
The next day Jeoffrey is in a dreadful state—the treats were just dead leaves which he has been vomiting up—and the tomcat is in no state to protect the poet when the devil arrives. On a subsequent visit by the devil to check the poet’s progress, Jeoffrey fights him but is unsuccessful, and only survives due to the poet’s intercession.
The final part of the story has Jeoffrey visit three of the asylum’s other cats to help him deal with the devil on his next visit. One of these is an air-headed kitten called Nighthunter Moppet, whose personality changes markedly when they start discussing how the defeat the devil:

<This is the wrong strategy,> says the Nighthunter Moppet, and her voice has the ring of a blade unsheathed.
All kittenness has fallen away from Moppet. What sits before the milk bowl is the ruthless killer of the courtyard, the assassin whose title nighthunter is whispered in terror among the mice and birds of Bethnal Green. It is rumored that the Moppet’s great-grandmother was a demon of the lower realms, which might perhaps explain the peculiar keenness of her green-glass eyes, and her talent for death-dealing. Indeed, as Jeoffry watches, the Moppet’s tiny shadow seems to grow and split into seven pieces, each of which is shaped like a monstrous cat with seven tails. The shadow cats’ tails lash and lash as the Nighthunter Moppet broods on Satan.
<It is true that as cats we are descended from the Angel Tiger, who killed the Ichneumon-rat of Egypt,> says the Moppet. Her shadows twist into the shapes of rats and angels as she speaks. <We are warriors of God, and as such, we can blood Satan. But we cannot kill him, for he has another fate decreed.>

The story concludes when the devil visits the next night to pick up the finished poem.
This is an enjoyable tale but the plotting at the end is a little on the weak side (spoiler: while the three cats attack the devil, Jeoffrey sneaks past and eats the poem). One more minor criticism: what is with the < > symbols to delineate the cats’ speech? It is disconcerting, and doesn’t suit the style of the tale.

Blood Is Another Word for Hunger by Rivers Solomon starts with a slave girl called Sully who massacres her mistress and all her family. This action has supernatural consequences:

It was Sully’s unsoftened anger in the face of what she’d done that cut a path between dominions. The etherworld spat out a teenage girl, full grown, called Ziza into Sully’s womb. Ziza had spent the last two hundred years skulking in the land of the dead, but she rode the fury of Sully’s murders like a river current back to the world of flesh. Ziza felt it all, wind and sky and the breath of wolves against her skin. She spun through the ages looking for the present, time now foreign to her after being in a world where everything was both eternal and nonexistent.
“Yes, yes, yes!” Ziza called as she descended from the spirit realm down a tunnel made of life. Breathing things, screaming things, hot, sweaty, pulsing, moving, scampering, wild, toothy, bloody, slimy, rich, salty things. Tree branches brushed her skin. Sensation overwhelmed her as she landed with a soft, plump thud into the belly of her new god. Ziza took in the darkness, swum in it. It was nothing like the violent nothingness of her home for the past two centuries. For here she could smell, taste, feel. She could hear the cries of the girl carrying her, loud and unrelenting.
Sully had never been with child before, and she didn’t understand the pain that overtook her so sudden as she shoveled the last gallon of dirt over the graves of her masters. Spasms in her abdomen convinced her she was dying.

Sully wakes after the birth to find that Ziza put her in bed and has cleaned the house. Ziza tells Sully that, as she committed a multiple murder, she will give birth to others from the etherworld and, in due course, a boy of ten named Miles joins them. Two months later a forty-one-year-old woman named Liza Jane is “born” and, a few days later, a twin sister Bethie. Finally, an old man called Nathaniel arrives.
The group later ambush wagon trains and, for every traveller they kill, Sully births another of their kind. Eventually, they are enough of them to take on the town, which they do successfully.
The final scene (spoiler) has Sully cutting out her own uterus, burying it, killing herself, and being reborn from the soil.
This didn’t work for me, partly because Sully is not a particularly engaging central character (aside from the fact that she is a mass murderer, she spends quite a lot of time bickering with Ziza), and partly because the story is just about a lot of people getting murdered.

More Real Than Him by Silvia Park is set in the near future and its central character is a young female coder called Morgan. Near the beginning of the story (there are a couple of pages of scene setting first) she steals a partially assembled robot from her workplace and, when she is later summoned to her boss’s office, a co-worker called Di covers for her. The story then charts the developing friendship between the pair, something that is initially engrossing as the future world they live in is convincingly and densely described:

The house isn’t what lodges a lump in Morgan’s throat; it’s the menagerie of zoobots. Billowy stingrays and angelfish weave around a chandelier. A jaguar, black as shoe-polish, languishes on a silverware cabinet. “Grandpa,” Di shouts toward upstairs. “Your aquarium’s on the loose! He’s a zoobot designer,” she adds, an offhand summation of her gilded family tree where she is but a branch, budding with potential.
“Is your father here?” Morgan says, because Di’s father is the Zhou Bing and not that Morgan would call herself starry-eyed, but she’s curious. Anyone would be.
“This is my grandpa’s house. From my mom’s side.”
Morgan, also a divorce victim, can sympathize. Di chatters about the rest of her family; her NEET brother has finally enrolled in the police academy, her mother works for a robot rights nonprofit in NY, and as she leads Morgan upstairs, Di nudges the subject back to Stephen.

Stephen is the robot that Morgan stole (and has substantially modified), but the story becomes less about him and more about the relationship problems of both of the women: Morgan is estranged from her mother, and Di has problems with her father. This eventually becomes a little dull, and if the story comes to any kind of conclusion I missed what it was. A pity: this has a pretty good beginning but it goes on too long and feels like it loses focus (or perhaps does not focus on what I am interested in—those attracted to stories where young protagonists wrangle with their personal and/or relationship problems may feel differently).

Seonag and the Seawolves by M. Evan MacGriogair¹ is about a woman called Seonag, who is born into a West of Scotland family; when she grows up and her family emigrate to Canada, she stays behind. She drifts for a couple of days before going to see the narrator’s father, who tells her about the sea wolves and how she can find them. Seonag later goes out into the Atlantic and, after a day or so of apparently supernatural swimming, comes to an island covered with trees.
After this Callum (the narrator) decides to follow her and also swims out to sea, but soon gets into difficulties: he is saved from drowning by three men in their boat. They decide to sail to the island to find Seonag and the wolves.
The climax of the story (spoiler) plays out violently on the island in a fight between the wolves and the men. During this Seonag becomes a magical creature.
There are a couple of things that make this feel like a debut story: the first is that much of the story is descriptive scene setting involving overmuch Gaelic language (which is then explained):

“Ach chan eil mic-thire ann an-seo, Athair!” I fall into Gaelic and hurriedly say in English, “But there aren’t wolves here!”
My father smiles in the way of parents who know more than a child who assumes, in childish folly, that they know more than their parents. That smile turns back in on itself much like that sentence.
He holds up his hand, watching Seonag. “Ah, but there are madaidhean-allaidh.”
Madadh-allaidh, faol, sitheach, faol-chu—they are all words for wolf. This is why I need my Gaelic.
My father has used these words as though he means there is a difference and in English there would be none. What is it that he means?

The writer also seems unable (or unwilling) to write in paragraphs, which frequently makes it feel as if you are reading a long telegram:

Seonag drags herself farther onto the beach, close enough to look at one of the paw prints.
It is the size of her hand, almost. If she curls her fingers in—which she does—she can lay her hand in the depression made by the paw pads and see the indentation of a wet tuft of fur, the pricks of claws.
She has never seen such a track.
The set of prints leads away from the water.
There is more than one set of prints.
If she expects to hear more howling, she is disappointed. There is only the sound of the wind and the waves and her own labored breathing. Seonag knows she will need to find shelter soon. She will likely need to build it.
She has swum through the short summer night, and already to the east, the sky lightens.
She is covered in sand, only on her right side. There are no clouds. She is alone.
Seonag is used to being alone, even when she is surrounded by people.
She pushes herself to her feet.

It also takes a while to get going, and the plot is fairly straightforward, but it’s okay overall, I guess.

The City That Never Sleeps by Walton Simons is a ‘Wild Cards’ story, and the character at the centre of this one is Demise Spector, an ace who can kill people by looking into their eyes. The story is about his adventures in Jokertown, which involve his recruitment as a hitman by a bar owner contact.
His first target is a mafia family and, when he goes to their apartment, things initially go well (i.e. people die quietly and without any fuss). Unfortunately matters spiral out of control when the grandmother hears him killing one of the men in another room; she comes through and throws a pan of boiling pasta in his face before pushing him out of a window. Luckily for Spector he is caught by a Joker (in this instance a newt-like creature) who was climbing up the side of the building at the time. The Joker takes Spector back to his flat, and leaves him to regenerate:

Spector heard a door close and continued knocking back enough vodka to take the edge off the pain.
He’d been badly burned once before and had figured out that dead skin can’t heal, it just sits there.
He’d had to peel it off to jump-start the regeneration process.
There were bits of pasta stuck to his face. Pulling them free was uncomfortable, but not excruciating.
Then he put his hands to his eyelids. They were rippled, bloated, and stuck to his eyeballs. “Fuck me,” he said, draining as much of the bottle as he could. Spector pulled off his coat and put it over his head. That, at least, would cut down on the light. He worked a fingernail into the corner of one of his eyelids and began pulling it away from his eye. At first it came off in little bits, then the entire piece of ruined flesh peeled away. He screamed and forced the bottle back between his lips. It was empty by the time he finished the job.

When the regeneration process is almost complete, Spector leaves the apartment but later returns with money for the Joker as a token of his thanks. The rest of the story tells of their budding friendship, which includes their involvement in two fights; the first is a huge brawl at a baseball game—which has them ultimately escaping out over the roof of the stadium, and then there is an ambush on the Joker by a woman called Sue—a Joker who has eyes which fly around independently—and her gang of thugs. Spector (spoiler) saves the Newt-Joker’s life, and the story ends.
This is a readable and entertaining story told in economic prose (worth comparing to the flabbier entries in this issue) but it is, however, as fragmentary as the last ‘Wild Cards’ piece I read.

The best of the Interior artwork for the July and August stories is probably the Red Nose Studio one for the Carroll, although I also like the Rovina Cai (for the MacGriogair).

Another mixed bag of stories. Together with the May-June entries, this summer issue feels like, at best, an average issue of F&SF or Asimov’s SF.  ●

_____________________

1. “M. Evan MacGriogair” would appear to be a pseudonym for M. Evan Matyas (there is a copyright notice in this name). I hope this non-Scottish sounding author doesn’t get run out of town for cultural appropriation.  ●

_____________________

Here is the already posted review for the May-June stories:

Stories

Other reviews:
Greg Hullender and Eric Wong, Rocket Stack Rank
Jason McGregor, Featured Futures

_____________________

Editors, Patrick Nielsen Hayden (x2), George R. R. Martin, Lee Harris, Ellen Datlow (x2)

Fiction:
Murder in the Spook House • by Michael Swanwick ∗
Long is the Way • by Carrie Vaughn and Sage Walker ∗∗
Any Way the Wind Blows • by Seanan McGuire ∗∗∗
Skinner Box • by Carole Johnstone ∗∗
The New Prometheus • by Michael Swanwick ∗∗∗+
A Forest, or A Tree • by Tegan Moore ∗∗

Non-fiction:
Interior artwork • by John Picacio, Gregory Manchess (x3), Adam Baines, Samuel Araya

_____________________

The first thing to mention is that the cover above is a placeholder made by me¹: I needed an image as the third issue of Tor’s new bimonthly magazine/anthology has not yet appeared (they still seem to be in the process of filling a staff vacancy²). What follows are reviews of the stories that appeared on the Tor.com website³ during May and June. I’ve already commented on the two Swanwick stories in my last post, so I’ve cut and pasted them at the end of this one for the convenience of anyone who hasn’t seen them.

Long is the Way by Carrie Vaughn and Sage Walker is a story from the ‘Wild Cards’ franchise, and starts with an ‘Ace’ (superhero for anyone not up on the ‘Wild Card’ terminology) called Jonathan Hive driving to an interview with another Ace called Zoe Harris. Harris may have been involved in a terrorist attack on Jerusalem twenty years ago but now, apparently, runs a perfume factory.
Hive is so-called as he has the ability to transform himself into a swarm of wasps, and he reconnoiters the facility where Harris works by sending a couple of individual insects ahead:

One bug caught a glimpse: a woman approaching . . . and she saw him. Them. She was a joker, with a face that looked melted on one side, average white middle-aged matron on the other, with brown hair tied in a ponytail. She held a tightly coiled newspaper in one hand. The pair of bugs crawled along the ceiling—well out of reach of the universal weapon of “death to insects.”
And then her arm stretched. She whipped it back and flung it out, once, twice, and both wasps smashed into spots of goo. Well, then. Jonathan felt the buggy deaths as an itch. He decided not to send out any more bugs, at least not right now.

When Harris meets Hive she dismisses his cover story about interviewing her about perfume, and tells him she knows who he is. Harris then proceeds to tell him what she has been doing over the last two decades. This story involves an old lover called Croyd (an Ace fugitive who is also known as “The Sleeper”) springing her from an asylum and taking her to deliver his pregnant lover’s baby.
The childbirth is described graphically, and at length, and (spoiler) it does not go well (the mother dies of pre-eclampsia). When they take the child to a village to get help, Croyd disappears overboard from their boat, and Harris and another Ace called Needles are left with the child. They go on to the local village.
As a result of this experience Harris sets up the perfumery (really a refuge), and eventually saves ten people from unfortunate circumstances.
This is an okay read, but it is obviously a fragmentary and interstitial piece of ‘Wild Cards’ backstory and doesn’t stand on its own. If you are not into the ‘Wild Cards’ series it will probably not do much for you.

Any Way the Wind Blows by Seanan McGuire is a short piece written to commemorate the move of Tor Publishing out of the Flatiron building⁴ in Manhattan. It is narrated by an airship captain from one of many parallel worlds, and there is a lot of backstory about the multiverse that they travel. We learn, among other things, that there are Greek Gods, and creatures who eat reality. In among these discursive descriptions there are moments of Crew Banter:

I turn. Our navigator is looking over his shoulder at me. Well. One of his heads is. The other is still watching the curved window that makes up the front of our airship, crystal clear and apparently fragile. Most people who attack us aim for that window first, not asking themselves how many protections we’d put on a sheet of glass that size. The fact that it’s not a solid mass of bugs doesn’t seem to be the clue it should.
“What is it?”
He smiles uncertainly. “I think I see the Flatiron.”
That makes me stand a little straighter. Not every parallel has a Flatiron Building. Oh, every one we’ve discovered where the European colonists constructed a settlement in the area we know as “Manhattan” has had plans for a Flatiron Building, but they don’t always get built, and once they’re built, they don’t always survive. Some of them have burnt. Others were bombed. One of them was infected by an artificial bacterium intended to help destroy landfills by converting them into arable soil, which had converted it into the largest pile of loam I’d ever seen. An intact Flatiron is reason to celebrate.
Maybe. “How secure does the structure look?”
“Seems stable.”
That’s . . . good. “Is there a docking station on the roof?”
“Negative, captain.” Daphne looks up from her instruments. “The mammals below us are pointing and stopping as we pass overhead. I don’t think the airship caught on in this parallel.”
“Oh, lovely. Primitives.”
“There are flying machines,” says one of the other bridge crew. “They seem to operate on an internal combustion basis, but they get where they’re going. Fast, too. If we had one of those, we’d be home within the quarter.”
“With our surveys half-finished,” I snap. “You can’t chart ground properly if you’re moving across it too fast for anything to record. Use your head, or we’ll get you a new one.”
“I’d like a new head,” says the navigator. “The ones I have don’t provide me with a full range of vision. Three heads, now. Three heads is where it’s at.”

After the leisurely setup they arrive at the building and the incursion team is deployed. The locals request a meeting with the captain, and when he descends to the building he meets what I presume are a number of the Tor publishers and editors:

One of the locals, a cadaverous man who looks like he’s already been killed and resurrected three or four times—so maybe these people are more civilized than they seem—is practically vibrating, smiling so broadly that he’s in danger of splitting his lower lip. “This is really happening, this is really, really happening,” he says. He turns to another of the locals, a shorter woman with graying hair and a politely bemused expression. “You owe me ten dollars.”
“I never made that bet,” says the woman. “Excuse me, ah, Captain, but are you saying these people really came from your, ah, airship up there? From another dimension?”
How much has the incursion team told these people? “Yes,” I say stiffly, lowering my hand. “We come in peace. We don’t intend you any harm.”
“Those two sentences mean the same thing, usually,” says the third local, a balding man who seems short next to the living cadaver, but is about the same height as most of the men in my crew. He has an Albian accent. It sounds weird here in a New Amsterdam cognate. He’s as out of place as we are. “Is there a reason you need to say both?”

A pleasant if minor piece.

Skinner Box by Carole Johnstone has a content warning for “sexual content, including abuse and assault” (are today’s readers really so fragile?), and good hook line:

I didn’t always fantasise about killing him. I used to fantasise about fucking him, and when that lived up to expectations, I fantasised about marrying him. Which didn’t.

The narrator is Evie, who is on a spaceship that is heading out to beyond Jupiter, and which has two other crew members: Mas, the Zimbabwean ship engineer and her lover, and Don, a scientist and her abusive husband. Evie’s job is to conduct behavioural conditioning experiments on nanites in a Skinner box.⁵ Although there is some material related to this—the control of AI and neural networks—the story largely focuses on Evie’s relationship with Mas, and her plan to get him to kill her husband Don. As the story progresses we also learn about Boris, a previous lover of Evie’s on an earlier trip.
Eventually (and it is “eventually,” as the story is quite a long haul) we learn that (spoiler) Boris and Mas may be the ones who were/are the subjects of a conditioning experiment—we also learn that Boris is an android who is deactivated, and lying in a locked cabin. Then Evie locks Mas (who we later find out isn’t an android) in his cabin to prevent him following through with their plan/his conditioning. There are even more reveals, and we find out that almost no one is who or what we (or they) think they are.
The last section of the story has Evie coming to terms with the fact that she is the subject of the experiment, and a transhuman to boot. She is later reunited with Mas.
This is reasonably engaging for the most part, but the rug is pulled out from under the reader so many times in the final section that it’s hard to care about anything by the end. As I’ve already noted, it is longer than it needs to be (and it also outstays its welcome—the last part seems somewhat anti-climactic).
It reminded me a little of the movie Moon.

A Forest, or A Tree by Tegan Moore concerns four young women on a hike. Although it is a little difficult to work out who is who to start with, it soon becomes clear that: Elizabeth is a foul-mouth who thinks everything is “dicks”; May is the solitary black character; Piper has digestive problems; and Ailey is an experienced woodsman/leader.
There is some sparky dialog, such as this spooky story-telling scene at an evening campfire:

[Elizabeth said,] “Have you heard of Stick Indians?”
“That sounds racist,” Ailey said.
“Stick Native Americans,” Piper said. A trace of sunlight flickered over her closed eyes.
“They call it Stick Indians. I didn’t make it up.”
“Repeating things doesn’t make them not racist,” May said. She hadn’t meant to say it so vehemently. She glanced around their circle to see if anyone had flinched, and relaxed her shoulders.
“Okay, so,” Elizabeth said. “Someone posted this story—it was obviously a story, it had characters and a plot and whatever; real stories aren’t that well organized. A bunch of kids were out camping and were hassled by this tree monster. Whatever, it was dumb, but I hadn’t heard about Stick Indians before.”
Now Piper watched Elizabeth, interested. Ailey poked at the fire.
“Anyway. I looked around and there wasn’t much info. A couple old websites with Yakama Indian legends, but all the sites had basically the same story, and you could tell it was copy-pasted. That first site I saw referenced some books I couldn’t find on Amazon, but I later I saw the same titles in a couple different places. Enough to make me think the books might at least be real.”
“You could try a library,” Ailey said. “Like, where actual research is done.”

The women eventually retire for the night but, when they wake the next day, Ailey and May discover that their pile of firewood, and more besides, has been scattered all over the campsite. They also find Piper is sick, and can’t stop going to the toilet. After some discussion, Ailey, Elizabeth, and May go hiking on their own, leaving Piper to rest.
When they return at the end of the day they find Piper’s condition has deteriorated. As they  question her, Elizabeth sees a deer-like shape with antlers like “huge fucking trees”. They decide that, as night is falling, they will go for help in the morning.
The final section (spoiler) has Elizabeth and May go for help. During their trip, Elizabeth is spooked by a deer (apparently a normal one this time) and she runs towards the ridge (the most direct but steepest route to their car). May is left to go on her own by the normal route, and gets to the car before Elizabeth. Rather than waiting she decides to set off and look for help.
After trying at a couple of empty houses/stores, May finds a house with a hostile female occupant. She finally breaks in to use the phone, and the climactic scene takes place inside a house as the Stick Indian crashes through the French doors, and the old woman waves a shotgun around.
This final scene did not work for me for a number of reasons: why had the Stick Indian followed May rather than Elisabeth (there is an inference earlier that it was following the latter of the two)? Why did it not attack May in the forest when she was on her own? Why does the householder act in such an odd way? What actually happens in this scene? Is it actually happening? (“It—the thing, the creature, if it was even truly there—lifted its dreadful, awful crest and looked at May with no eyes.”)
A pity this doesn’t have a better ending, as it is quite good for the most part.

As mentioned above, I’ve already reviewed the two Michael Swanwick stories,⁶ both of which are set in a magical, early 20^th Century version of Europe under threat of invasion from the Mongolian Wizard and his hordes. The story’s main protagonist is a German called Ritter, who works as an investigator for an English wizard and MI5 spy chief called Sir Toby.

Murder in the Spook House starts with Ritter arriving at a tank depot to investigate yet another murder (a repeating plot device in this series), and this time it is (spoiler) Sir Toby who has copped it. As Ritter is taken by the officer in charge to see the body, the pair see a raven appear and disappear—this is another time anomaly event, similar to the one Ritter experienced in the previous story.
After some of the usual sniffing about by Ritter’s wolf Freki, Ritter uncovers the murderer. The ending resurrects Sir Toby—and his dead doppelgänger disappears back to whatever timeline it came from.
This story suffers not only from having yet another murder investigation at its core, but also from the same unconvincing temporal shenanigans as the previous tale: if the writer can magically undo any of the story’s previous events by timeline manipulation, how can they expect to maintain any dramatic tension?

The New Prometheus is this world’s Frankenstein story, and opens with Ritter driving a dog-sled across the Arctic in pursuit of his quarry. When the creature sets up camp, and Ritter establishes it is safe to approach—he sends Freki ahead and watches as the wolf gets its tummy rubbed—he enters his quarry’s tent and listens to its story. We find out that the creature is a homunculus created by the Mongolian Wizard:

“It is a gruesome process. First the skeleton is assembled from the living bones of various animals. Human bones would not do, for it was desired to give me the features and physiognomy of a god. Bones taken from dead creatures would be . . . dead. So animals were required to suffer. It took a phalanx of surgical wizards just to keep the skeleton viable while muscles and cartilage were attached, nerves grown to interlace the flesh, organs coaxed into interaction, skin convinced to cover all . . . More magical talents were employed in my creation than for any other single purpose in human history. It is doubtful that anyone but my father—for so I consider him—could have arranged for such a thing. And even he had to effectively bring the war to a standstill to free up the resources necessary for it.”

Ritter later learns of the homunculus’s education (part of which was done by Ritter’s uncle, a prisoner under compulsion), and that it is capable of all the magical arts—not just single talents like humans. However, its gift for mind-reading means it suffers from constant exposure to human thoughts, hence the flight to the Arctic.
At the end of the story (spoiler) the homunculus paralyses Ritter and leaves the tent to take what seems the only logical course of action. After it disappears over the horizon, Ritter sees a terrific explosion.
I found this an engrossing account of the short life and death of an almost godlike bring, and it’s one of the series’ better stories.

I liked Manchess’s three illustrations the best, and thought the others okay or better. Again, the cover at the top is a fake created by me.¹

Another weak issue: given this venture’s superior word rates, I expected more quality than I’ve seen in the last three volumes. Given Tor.com’s numerous award nominations in the past, I wonder if they are going through a weak patch? Do any regular readers have an opinion on this?  ●

_____________________

1. Designed from scratch.

2. The Tor job advert is here.

3. You can find Tor.com’s stories in web-format here, and the bi-monthly ‘newsletter’ here (if it is still going).

4. There is a Wikipedia page for the Flatiron building.

5. There is a Wikpedia page on Skinner boxes or, as they describe them, “Opearant conditioning chambers”.

6. All of Swanwick’s ‘Mongolian Wizard’ stories are reviewed here.  ●

Stories

Other reviews:
Greg Hullender and Eric Wong, Rocket Stack Rank
Jason McGregor, Featured Futures

_____________________

Editors, Patrick Nielsen Hayden (x2), George R. R. Martin, Lee Harris, Ellen Datlow (x2)

Fiction:
Murder in the Spook House • by Michael Swanwick ∗
Long is the Way • by Carrie Vaughn and Sage Walker ∗∗
Any Way the Wind Blows • by Seanan McGuire ∗∗∗
Skinner Box • by Carole Johnstone ∗∗
The New Prometheus • by Michael Swanwick ∗∗∗+
A Forest, or A Tree • by Tegan Moore ∗∗

Non-fiction:
Interior artwork • by John Picacio, Gregory Manchess (x3), Adam Baines, Samuel Araya

_____________________

The first thing to mention is that the cover above is a placeholder made by me¹: I needed an image as the third issue of Tor’s new bimonthly magazine/anthology has not yet appeared (they still seem to be in the process of filling a staff vacancy²). What follows are reviews of the stories that appeared on the Tor.com website³ during May and June. I’ve already commented on the two Swanwick stories in my last post, so I’ve cut and pasted them at the end of this one for the convenience of anyone who hasn’t seen them.

Long is the Way by Carrie Vaughn and Sage Walker is a story from the ‘Wild Cards’ franchise, and starts with an ‘Ace’ (superhero for anyone not up on the ‘Wild Card’ terminology) called Jonathan Hive driving to an interview with another Ace called Zoe Harris. Harris may have been involved in a terrorist attack on Jerusalem twenty years ago but now, apparently, runs a perfume factory.
Hive is so-called as he has the ability to transform himself into a swarm of wasps, and he reconnoiters the facility where Harris works by sending a couple of individual insects ahead:

One bug caught a glimpse: a woman approaching . . . and she saw him. Them. She was a joker, with a face that looked melted on one side, average white middle-aged matron on the other, with brown hair tied in a ponytail. She held a tightly coiled newspaper in one hand. The pair of bugs crawled along the ceiling—well out of reach of the universal weapon of “death to insects.”
And then her arm stretched. She whipped it back and flung it out, once, twice, and both wasps smashed into spots of goo. Well, then. Jonathan felt the buggy deaths as an itch. He decided not to send out any more bugs, at least not right now.

When Harris meets Hive she dismisses his cover story about interviewing her about perfume, and tells him she knows who he is. Harris then proceeds to tell him what she has been doing over the last two decades. This story involves an old lover called Croyd (an Ace fugitive who is also known as “The Sleeper”) springing her from an asylum and taking her to deliver his pregnant lover’s baby.
The childbirth is described graphically, and at length, and (spoiler) it does not go well (the mother dies of pre-eclampsia). When they take the child to a village to get help, Croyd disappears overboard from their boat, and Harris and another Ace called Needles are left with the child. They go on to the local village.
As a result of this experience Harris sets up the perfumery (really a refuge), and eventually saves ten people from unfortunate circumstances.
This is an okay read, but it is obviously a fragmentary and interstitial piece of ‘Wild Cards’ backstory and doesn’t stand on its own. If you are not into the ‘Wild Cards’ series it will probably not do much for you.

Any Way the Wind Blows by Seanan McGuire is a short piece written to commemorate the move of Tor Publishing out of the Flatiron building⁴ in Manhattan. It is narrated by an airship captain from one of many parallel worlds, and there is a lot of backstory about the multiverse that they travel. We learn, among other things, that there are Greek Gods, and creatures who eat reality. In among these discursive descriptions there are moments of Crew Banter:

I turn. Our navigator is looking over his shoulder at me. Well. One of his heads is. The other is still watching the curved window that makes up the front of our airship, crystal clear and apparently fragile. Most people who attack us aim for that window first, not asking themselves how many protections we’d put on a sheet of glass that size. The fact that it’s not a solid mass of bugs doesn’t seem to be the clue it should.
“What is it?”
He smiles uncertainly. “I think I see the Flatiron.”
That makes me stand a little straighter. Not every parallel has a Flatiron Building. Oh, every one we’ve discovered where the European colonists constructed a settlement in the area we know as “Manhattan” has had plans for a Flatiron Building, but they don’t always get built, and once they’re built, they don’t always survive. Some of them have burnt. Others were bombed. One of them was infected by an artificial bacterium intended to help destroy landfills by converting them into arable soil, which had converted it into the largest pile of loam I’d ever seen. An intact Flatiron is reason to celebrate.
Maybe. “How secure does the structure look?”
“Seems stable.”
That’s . . . good. “Is there a docking station on the roof?”
“Negative, captain.” Daphne looks up from her instruments. “The mammals below us are pointing and stopping as we pass overhead. I don’t think the airship caught on in this parallel.”
“Oh, lovely. Primitives.”
“There are flying machines,” says one of the other bridge crew. “They seem to operate on an internal combustion basis, but they get where they’re going. Fast, too. If we had one of those, we’d be home within the quarter.”
“With our surveys half-finished,” I snap. “You can’t chart ground properly if you’re moving across it too fast for anything to record. Use your head, or we’ll get you a new one.”
“I’d like a new head,” says the navigator. “The ones I have don’t provide me with a full range of vision. Three heads, now. Three heads is where it’s at.”

After the leisurely setup they arrive at the building and the incursion team is deployed. The locals request a meeting with the captain, and when he descends to the building he meets what I presume are a number of the Tor publishers and editors:

One of the locals, a cadaverous man who looks like he’s already been killed and resurrected three or four times—so maybe these people are more civilized than they seem—is practically vibrating, smiling so broadly that he’s in danger of splitting his lower lip. “This is really happening, this is really, really happening,” he says. He turns to another of the locals, a shorter woman with graying hair and a politely bemused expression. “You owe me ten dollars.”
“I never made that bet,” says the woman. “Excuse me, ah, Captain, but are you saying these people really came from your, ah, airship up there? From another dimension?”
How much has the incursion team told these people? “Yes,” I say stiffly, lowering my hand. “We come in peace. We don’t intend you any harm.”
“Those two sentences mean the same thing, usually,” says the third local, a balding man who seems short next to the living cadaver, but is about the same height as most of the men in my crew. He has an Albian accent. It sounds weird here in a New Amsterdam cognate. He’s as out of place as we are. “Is there a reason you need to say both?”

A pleasant if minor piece.

Skinner Box by Carole Johnstone has a content warning for “sexual content, including abuse and assault” (are today’s readers really so fragile?), and good hook line:

I didn’t always fantasise about killing him. I used to fantasise about fucking him, and when that lived up to expectations, I fantasised about marrying him. Which didn’t.

The narrator is Evie, who is on a spaceship that is heading out to beyond Jupiter, and which has two other crew members: Mas, the Zimbabwean ship engineer and her lover, and Don, a scientist and her abusive husband. Evie’s job is to conduct behavioural conditioning experiments on nanites in a Skinner box.⁵ Although there is some material related to this—the control of AI and neural networks—the story largely focuses on Evie’s relationship with Mas, and her plan to get him to kill her husband Don. As the story progresses we also learn about Boris, a previous lover of Evie’s on an earlier trip.
Eventually (and it is “eventually,” as the story is quite a long haul) we learn that (spoiler) Boris and Mas may be the ones who were/are the subjects of a conditioning experiment—we also learn that Boris is an android who is deactivated, and lying in a locked cabin. Then Evie locks Mas (who we later find out isn’t an android) in his cabin to prevent him following through with their plan/his conditioning. There are even more reveals, and we find out that almost no one is who or what we (or they) think they are.
The last section of the story has Evie coming to terms with the fact that she is the subject of the experiment, and a transhuman to boot. She is later reunited with Mas.
This is reasonably engaging for the most part, but the rug is pulled out from under the reader so many times in the final section that it’s hard to care about anything by the end. As I’ve already noted, it is longer than it needs to be (and it also outstays its welcome—the last part seems somewhat anti-climactic).
It reminded me a little of the movie Moon.

A Forest, or A Tree by Tegan Moore concerns four young women on a hike. Although it is a little difficult to work out who is who to start with, it soon becomes clear that: Elizabeth is a foul-mouth who thinks everything is “dicks”; May is the solitary black character; Piper has digestive problems; and Ailey is an experienced woodsman/leader.
There is some sparky dialog, such as this spooky story-telling scene at an evening campfire:

[Elizabeth said,] “Have you heard of Stick Indians?”
“That sounds racist,” Ailey said.
“Stick Native Americans,” Piper said. A trace of sunlight flickered over her closed eyes.
“They call it Stick Indians. I didn’t make it up.”
“Repeating things doesn’t make them not racist,” May said. She hadn’t meant to say it so vehemently. She glanced around their circle to see if anyone had flinched, and relaxed her shoulders.
“Okay, so,” Elizabeth said. “Someone posted this story—it was obviously a story, it had characters and a plot and whatever; real stories aren’t that well organized. A bunch of kids were out camping and were hassled by this tree monster. Whatever, it was dumb, but I hadn’t heard about Stick Indians before.”
Now Piper watched Elizabeth, interested. Ailey poked at the fire.
“Anyway. I looked around and there wasn’t much info. A couple old websites with Yakama Indian legends, but all the sites had basically the same story, and you could tell it was copy-pasted. That first site I saw referenced some books I couldn’t find on Amazon, but I later I saw the same titles in a couple different places. Enough to make me think the books might at least be real.”
“You could try a library,” Ailey said. “Like, where actual research is done.”

The women eventually retire for the night but, when they wake the next day, Ailey and May discover that their pile of firewood, and more besides, has been scattered all over the campsite. They also find Piper is sick, and can’t stop going to the toilet. After some discussion, Ailey, Elizabeth, and May go hiking on their own, leaving Piper to rest.
When they return at the end of the day they find Piper’s condition has deteriorated. As they  question her, Elizabeth sees a deer-like shape with antlers like “huge fucking trees”. They decide that, as night is falling, they will go for help in the morning.
The final section (spoiler) has Elizabeth and May go for help. During their trip, Elizabeth is spooked by a deer (apparently a normal one this time) and she runs towards the ridge (the most direct but steepest route to their car). May is left to go on her own by the normal route, and gets to the car before Elizabeth. Rather than waiting she decides to set off and look for help.
After trying at a couple of empty houses/stores, May finds a house with a hostile female occupant. She finally breaks in to use the phone, and the climactic scene takes place inside a house as the Stick Indian crashes through the French doors, and the old woman waves a shotgun around.
This final scene did not work for me for a number of reasons: why had the Stick Indian followed May rather than Elisabeth (there is an inference earlier that it was following the latter of the two)? Why did it not attack May in the forest when she was on her own? Why does the householder act in such an odd way? What actually happens in this scene? Is it actually happening? (“It—the thing, the creature, if it was even truly there—lifted its dreadful, awful crest and looked at May with no eyes.”)
A pity this doesn’t have a better ending, as it is quite good for the most part.
As mentioned above, I’ve already reviewed the two Michael Swanwick stories,⁶ both of which are set in a magical, early 20^th Century version of Europe under threat of invasion from the Mongolian Wizard and his hordes. The story’s main protagonist is a German called Ritter, who works as an investigator for an English wizard and MI5 spy chief called Sir Toby.

Murder in the Spook House starts with Ritter arriving at a tank depot to investigate yet another murder (a repeating plot device in this series), and this time it is (spoiler) Sir Toby who has copped it. As Ritter is taken by the officer in charge to see the body, the pair see a raven appear and disappear—this is another time anomaly event, similar to the one Ritter experienced in the previous story.
After some of the usual sniffing about by Ritter’s wolf Freki, Ritter uncovers the murderer. The ending resurrects Sir Toby—and his dead doppelgänger disappears back to whatever timeline it came from.
This story suffers not only from having yet another murder investigation at its core, but also from the same unconvincing temporal shenanigans as the previous tale: if the writer can magically undo any of the story’s previous events by timeline manipulation, how can they expect to maintain any dramatic tension?

The New Prometheus is this world’s Frankenstein story, and opens with Ritter driving a dog-sled across the Arctic in pursuit of his quarry. When the creature sets up camp, and Ritter establishes it is safe to approach—he sends Freki ahead and watches as the wolf gets its tummy rubbed—he enters his quarry’s tent and listens to its story. We find out that the creature is a homunculus created by the Mongolian Wizard:

“It is a gruesome process. First the skeleton is assembled from the living bones of various animals. Human bones would not do, for it was desired to give me the features and physiognomy of a god. Bones taken from dead creatures would be . . . dead. So animals were required to suffer. It took a phalanx of surgical wizards just to keep the skeleton viable while muscles and cartilage were attached, nerves grown to interlace the flesh, organs coaxed into interaction, skin convinced to cover all . . . More magical talents were employed in my creation than for any other single purpose in human history. It is doubtful that anyone but my father—for so I consider him—could have arranged for such a thing. And even he had to effectively bring the war to a standstill to free up the resources necessary for it.”

Ritter later learns of the homunculus’s education (part of which was done by Ritter’s uncle, a prisoner under compulsion), and that it is capable of all the magical arts—not just single talents like humans. However, its gift for mind-reading means it suffers from constant exposure to human thoughts, hence the flight to the Arctic.
At the end of the story (spoiler) the homunculus paralyses Ritter and leaves the tent to take what seems the only logical course of action. After it disappears over the horizon, Ritter sees a terrific explosion.
I found this an engrossing account of the short life and death of an almost godlike bring, and it’s one of the series’ better stories.

I liked Manchess’s three illustrations the best, and thought the others okay or better. Again, the cover at the top is a fake created by me.¹

Another weak issue: given this venture’s superior word rates, I expected more quality than I’ve seen in the last three volumes. Given Tor.com’s numerous award nominations in the past, I wonder if they are going through a weak patch? Do any regular readers have an opinion on this?  ●

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1. Designed from scratch.

2. The Tor job advert is here.

3. You can find Tor.com’s stories in web-format here, and the bi-monthly ‘newsletter’ here (if it is still going).

4. There is a Wikipedia page for the Flatiron building.

5. There is a Wikpedia page on Skinner boxes or, as they describe them, “Opearant conditioning chambers”.

6. All of Swanwick’s ‘Mongolian Wizard’ stories are reviewed here.  ●

Edited 23:59, cover image replaced.

Magazine link

Other reviews:
Greg Hullender and Eric Wong, Rocket Stack Rank
Jason McGregor, Featured Futures
Various, Tangent Online

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Editors, Ellen Datlow (x4), George R. R. Martin, Cory Skerry.

Fiction:
Knowledgeable Creatures • by Christopher Rowe ∗∗∗+
One/Zero • by Kathleen Ann Goonan ∗∗∗
Blue Morphos in the Garden • by Lis Mitchell ∗
Painless • by Rich Larson ∗∗
Mama Bruise • by Jonathan Carroll ∗∗∗+

March/April stories not included in the collection:
How to Move Spheres and Influence People • by Marko Kloos ∗∗∗∗

Non-fiction:
Interior artwork • by Armando Veve, Keith Negley, Mary Haasdyk, Eli Minaya, John Picacio
About the Authors

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This is the second outing for Tor’s new short fiction magazine,¹ which purports to collect the fiction published on their website for the dates shown. However, the last issue omitted two stories, and this issue misses one. Jason McGregor (from Featured Futures) pointed out to me that there is a vacancy advertised for the person in charge of the magazine’s production; perhaps the situation will improve once it is filled.²

All of the stories in this issue (bar one from Cory Skerry) are edited by Ellen Datlow, and the first of these is one of two animal fantasies. Knowledgeable Creatures by Christopher Rowe begins with a dog detective called Connolly Marsh, who is approached by a woman seeking help with a man she has killed in self-defence. Marsh first of all goes to consult a former colleague in the police (this seems to refer to a previous story) to ask whether they know about the killing (they don’t), and then he does a background check on the woman. Marsh finds out she is Thomasina Swallow, a professor of history at the Rookery, and that her godfather is the influential and powerful Vicar Coleridge, a mouse.
During the course of the story, Marsh reflects on how this world came to be:

It’s hard not be be fascinated with the creatures who made you.
Maybe made is too strong a word. Enabled your making might be a more accurate phrase. What cannot be denied is that it’s the alchemical processes developed by Isaac Newton and his partner Xerxes, the first publicly acknowledged learned mouse, which led to the so-called Flowering, the world-wide, centuries-long explosion of new knowledgeable creatures, from Nox, the first curious cat awoken by Newton and Xerxes, on down to every philosophical pig and argute [shrewd] crow today. On down to every investigative dog—including, of course, me.
Have learned mice been around forever? Did they awaken humans at some time in the distant past? Are they the secret governors of us all, operating independently of the Imperium, probably controlling it?
These really aren’t the kinds of questions you ask if you want to be taken seriously. They certainly aren’t the kinds of questions you ask if you want to stay a police officer.  p. 13-14

These latter speculations come to the fore when Marsh learns that Swallow has been working on a revolutionary theory about the origins of man, and he later finds that the body has vanished . . . .
Readers’ reaction to this story will probably depend on their tolerance for talking animals, and how intrigued they are by the mice uplifting humans gimmick. I rather liked it.

One/Zero by Kathleen Ann Goonan has two separate story arcs that intersect towards the end of the story. The first of these concerns a girl called Vida, who we first meet when her family house in Kurdistan is attacked by soldiers:

My brother struggles as I crush him to my side. Aunt Ezo, at the front door, her AK-47 at the ready, yells “Runrunrunrun GO!”
I rush through the back door into air and fall, still holding Azul: The step is gone. Thunderous thuds echo behind me and end with machine gun chatter, which spurs me to my feet. Azul fights like a wild animal. “Let go! My party!”
Drones dart through smoke-filled air. Dodging sparking wires, I gain the pergola and set Azul on his feet. Winter-dry grape leaves ignite. Licked by their flame, twenty helium birthday balloons pop as I drag him behind the stone fireplace.
Two soldiers leap from the back door and sprint toward us. Ezo, silhouetted in the doorway, raises her gun.
The men drop. Then Ezo spins and collapses into the courtyard, clearly dead.
Azul yanks my arm, but I can’t move. In the last five minutes, I was informed that our parents had just died in a souk bombing. At that moment, our house was attacked. Now Ezo, a revolutionary soldier for twenty years, is gone. She came today to plead with my parents to leave. “The battle is coming this way,” she said. But they had heard this before. Their response, as always, was “This is our home,” and it was—the nucleus of our extended family since 1930, nearly a century.
Then they went out for last-minute party supplies.  p. 28

Vida and her brother Azul narrowly manage to escape on an autonomous bus, which takes them four thousand kilometres³ to a refugee camp. When they arrive, Vida is given a slate by one of the workers (this happens amid some SI—superintelligence—and math talk). The slate starts talking to Vida, and asks her to give it a name. She calls the slate Ezo—which we later find out is an extension of a rogue SI—and it starts organising supplies for the camp. Vida slowly takes charge.
The other thread concerns an elderly woman in Washington D. C. called Mai, whose daughter works in the field of tech start-ups (there is SI discussion in this thread too). Mai is suffering from the effects of old age, and her nurse suggests an AI-connected nanotech capsule to improve her health. After some more slice-of-life (a back injury, the institutional routines imposed on her by the nanomedbot, etc.) she eventually gets a unexpected call from Vida’s brother Azul, where he talks about his birthday party. Mai does not know Azul, and cannot phone him back, but she remembers seeing the refugee tents in the background. The two stories dovetail when Mai later tracks the boy down (with the SI’s help) and goes to the children’s refugee camp.
For the most part this is an engrossing read, as both threads give a convincing sense of the near future. However, around the three-quarter mark, it starts becoming rather preachy and slowly turns into a manifesto, e.g., the children in the camp start discussing the UN Declaration of the Rights of the Child, for instance, and there are passages like this:

I wait for my flight in Dulles Airport—one of those futures, an architectural paean to flight and to the exhilaration of the future, built when the United States was strong and had the power to rebuild a ravaged continent wrung dry of hope, and to create new democracies.
It is named after John Foster Dulles, who pioneered NATO as well as our hidden, duplicitous brand of power-wielding around the world. He and his brother Allen, head of the CIA, and their like-minded colleagues, built and toppled governments, sold ever-more-powerful arms, trained and created our future enemies, and sowed life and death as they deemed fit.
The reckoning has come.
The world is no longer theirs, or ours.
It belongs to the children.  p. 56

I found this and similar material rather vacuous, and thought the righteous tone of the ending took the shine off of what was, to that point, a strong piece.

Blue Morphos in the Garden by Lis Mitchell starts with the narrator’s daughter Lily coming into the kitchen to tell her that grandma is turning into butterflies:

The river is a small one, shallow, gentle, hardly deserving of the name—a tributary branch leading to a larger one. A low rocky embankment leads up the slope towards us, and perched on the largest of those rocks is a withered and naked woman … if you can call the husk before us a woman at all.
Faded blue gingham pools around her feet, and her legs rise like scrawny white aspens above the crumpled fabric. Her arms are open wide, as if to embrace the sun, and her white-gray hair unspools into the morning breeze. A cloud of blue butterflies eddies on this same breeze, shifting around her, exposing and then hiding and exposing again her collapsed breasts, her sagging buttocks, her scarred belly. As I watch, I see dark spores blossom on her skin. One here, one there. They swell slowly into gold-green pods—chrysalides, really, which ripen and split. The butterflies crawl backwards into this life, unfurling crumpled, wet wings. The outer edge of the wing resembles split wood with whorled knots, but each butterfly unfolds itself into a slice of fluttering blue sky and dark stormshadow. Open—sky, closed—wood. Each insect delicately buds. Each one just as delicately extends a proboscis to taste the salt on Gray-Granna’s skin, and then casts itself into the butterfly-cloud.  p. 63

After this scene we find out two things: first, that the narrator’s partner Dash (they are unmarried) is from a family that is “enchanted”, the result of which is that his relatives turn into objects when they die; secondly, we find out that the narrator may be suffering from a terminal disease, and that she doesn’t want this to happen to her. To avoid this outcome she won’t marry Dash, as the enchantment would then apply to her. This causes tension between them.
The final scene is at grandma’s funeral, where (spoiler) the narrator completes the arc of the story by confirming her decision.
The first part of this isn’t bad—it is quite inventive—but the rest just feels like the writer doing some gloomy navel-gazing about their own mortality. It’s all a bit depressing.

Painless by Rich Larson is set in a future Africa, and has as its protagonist Mars, a bioengineered soldier who has almost supernatural powers of recovery:

When they go through anti-interrogation, the water filling his lungs is only a tickling ghost. They pull him out of the tank before he drowns, but he is not sure if he can drown anymore. The other members of his unit, sopping wet, breathing ragged, look at him as if he is a god. Then they look at each other.
That night they invite him to drink. He guzzles the ogogoro until he can fool himself into thinking he feels the same crazy happy way they feel. He shows them his own version of their knife game: Instead of stabbing the spaces between his fingers, he drives the point of the blade into each knuckle in turn, moving like a blur, and by the time one circuit is complete he has already healed.  p. 86

The story relates an incident-filled journey to track down his “brother”. Their actual relationship is explained in the final scene.
This is a good read for the most part, but Mars is an emotionally deadened character which gives the story a slightly flat affect. The story is also is somewhat open-ended, and stops with a revelation that begs further development. This should have been the first section of a novella and not, as I suspect, the first in a series.

Mama Bruise by Jonathan Carroll opens with the female narrator being knocked over by her dog: later, we find she has a bruise down one leg in the form of letters that say “Mama Bruise”. The story then goes on to relate another odd incident, when the narrator made her husband cookies for this birthday, which then vanish and are later found in a hat-box (the birthday present Stetson that was originally inside is later found in the bedroom).
The dog turns out to be at the centre of these events and we see, in a later scene, the woman explain to her husband that she thinks (spoiler) the soul of her dead father is reincarnated in the dog. Other information comes to light—payments into the couple’s joint bank account—which suggests that her father is trying to make amends for his previous actions.
The ending of the story takes a darker turn when other animals start reacting violently towards the dog, apparently because it has revealed what it is to the humans. This twist is rather dumped in at the end of the story, which spoils it a little, and it could have been improved by a slightly longer and more organic ending, not to mention a couple of pointers earlier in the story to set up the final scenes (instead of “Mama Bruise” why not something that indicates the dog is at risk?)
Overall this piece contains a neat idea which is intriguingly developed, and is set against some convincingly described marital tension. Possibly one for the best of the year anthologies.

The story missed out of this issue of the magazine is a ‘Wild Cards’ story (maybe the reason why), How to Move Spheres and Influence People by Marko Kloos. This series is set in an alternate world where certain individuals develop superpowers and become “Aces”, and others develop repulsive physical conditions and become “Jokers”.
The story starts with the narrator T. K., “a skinny fifteen-year-old redhead with freckles and left-side hemiparesis” (she only has full use of one arm), being bullied by two of her classmates in a game of dodgeball, where they are taking advantage of her disability by throwing balls at her on the side she can’t block. After a certain amount of this, T. K. becomes increasingly angry, and then another ball is thrown:

That’s when the thing happens.
Later, she’ll puzzle about what triggered it. She’s hot and sweaty, angry at Brooke and Alison, hurting from the shot to the bare skin of her leg, and the muscles on her left side, the one with the paralysis, are taut enough to snap, which is what happens when she overexerts herself. But she knows that she feels a swell of fresh anger, and something goes snap in her brain. There’s a hot, trickling sensation, like someone just opened the top of her skull and poured a cup of coffee directly on the back side of her brain and down her spinal column. T.K. raises her hand to keep the ball from hitting her in the face, even though she knows it’s too late for that. But then the strangest sensation follows the hot trickle. She can feel the ball not three feet in front of her face—its roundness, the way it displaces the air around it—and she gives it a tiny little shunt with her mind, and it’s the best feeling she’s ever had, like finally scratching an itch you couldn’t get to for an hour, only a hundred times better. The ball—the one that was about to give her a nosebleed—hooks ever so slightly to the left and whizzes past her left side, close enough to her ear that she can hear it whistling through the air.

She goes back to the gym and experiments with her new talent later on, and finds that she has the ability to telekinetically move any spherical object. Her next practice takes place at an abandoned factory where, after some small-scale efforts, she converts bb pellets bought from a hardware store into a devastatingly destructive shrapnel grenade.
At the next gym class she gets her own back on the two girls—they both get a good clout with a dodgeball—but T.K. finds this act of petty revenge sobering, and she resolves not to use her power for such trivial matters in future.
The story then takes T. K. and her family to Edinburgh on holiday. Here (spoiler) she sees a terrorist attack by a Joker unfold (similar to recent real world terrorist attacks, he runs amok with a lorry) and she intervenes decisively in a vivid and exciting scene.
The rest of the piece details the fallout that results from the revelation of her superpower to the world: the authorities subsequently question her, both in the UK and on her arrival back in the US, she is expelled from school, and she has to hide out at home to avoid the media, etc.
The final scenes see another Ace called Snowblind approach her on behalf of a UN agency. The meeting is inconclusive, and Snowblind leaves T. K. her card.
The story ends with T. K. telling her friend that she has chosen “Slapshot” as a superhero name.
I found my reaction to this piece very odd: despite the fact that it has a simple storyline (and one that is probably not that original), comes to a climax just after the midpoint of the piece, and has an anticlimactic back third, I really liked it. I also found it, in parts, inexplicably moving. An engrossing read, if not a perfect one, and one I’d definitely use it in a ‘Year’s Best’.

There is no non-fiction in this issue other than an About the Authors page which, as it manages to omit Lis Mitchell, should probably be retitled About Most of the Authors.
The Interior Artwork in this issue is, overall, more to my taste than last time around. My favourite illustrations were by Armando Veve, Mark Smith, and John Picacio (especially the first two). The others are too abstract and/or sketchy for my taste.

This issue’s fiction is of a much better standard than last time around (although not without niggling flaws) and is closer to the quality level I’d expect from such a well-funded operation. That said, four of the acquisitions come from Ellen Datlow, who I suspect is one of the better of the Tor short fiction editors, and one who would probably manage to produce a good magazine regardless of budget.  ●

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1. You can find Tor.com’s stories in web-format here, and the bi-monthly ‘newsletter’ sign-up here. The issue above is here.

2. The Tor job advert is here.

3. Four thousand kilometres seems rather a long way to a refugee camp—that’s about the same distance from the West to East coasts of America.  ●

Other reviews:
Greg Hullender and Eric Wong, Rocket Stack Rank¹
Jason McGregor, Featured Futures (+The Song)

Editors, Ann VanderMeer (x3), Beth Meacham (x2), Marco Palmieri, Lindsey Hall, Ellen Datlow.²

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Fiction:
Beyond the El • short story by John Chu ∗∗∗
Deriving Life • novelette by Elizabeth Bear ∗
His Footsteps, in Darkness and Light • novelette by Mimi Mondal ∗∗∗
Circus Girl, the Hunter, and Mirror Boy • novelette by JY Yang ∗∗
Articulated Restraint • short story by Mary Robinette Kowal ∗∗
Old Media • short story by Annalee Newitz

January/February stories not included in the collection:
The Last Voyage of Skidbladnir • short story by Karin Tidbeck ∗∗∗
The Song • short story Erinn L. Kemper ∗∗∗+

Non-fiction:
Interior artwork • by Dadu Shin, Mary Haasdyk (x2), Kashmira Sarode, Ashley Mackenzie, Jasu Hu, Soufiane Mengad, Victor Mosquera

_____________________

For some years now the publisher Tor has spent a chunk of their marketing budget providing online fiction and non-fiction content.³ The stories (which come from different editors) usually appear every week or two on the company website, and have featured heavily in recent years’ awards ballots and Year’s Bests (unsurprising as the stories are free, and their payment rate is far above Asimov’s, F&SF, and the other magazines.)
Notwithstanding their award success I could never get into the habit of reading the stories as I don’t like fiction that is only available as web pages (I want PDFs),⁴ and am not organised enough to visit the site regularly. Fortunately, some bright spark at Tor thought it would be a good idea to periodically collect the stories and issue them as a free ebook (and also send subscribers a notification email and download link for future issues)—give that person a raise.
The first ‘issue’ covers January and February 2019, or at least that is what it says on the cover. The problem is that there were eight stories published on Tor.Com in the first two months of this year but the collection only has six of them, missing out the Tidbeck and Kemper stories listed above. I don’t know why they did this, and note that the March-April issue is also missing a story. Not a good start.
The ebook contains only the stories and a a single page of artwork for each.

The first story is Beyond the El by John Chu, which is about Connor, a “food crafter” in, presumably, some futuristic restaurant. One evening a diner (his estranged sister) requests that he prepare the most expensive and complicated dish on the menu:

The Chrysler Building is a deconstructed paella composed of discrete floors that become ever lighter and more delicate as they approach the building’s crystalline spire. Garlic and saffron perfume the air as he prepares all the layers from the grouper at the bottom to the clear tomato distillate at the top at once. Various proteins transform from raw to poached as a deft gesture of his hand lifts them off their plates. At a glance, a pot of water begins to simmer and the water is infused with flavors from fish bones and shrimp shells. Within minutes, the water is transformed into savory stock. Grains of rice swirl about an invisible center. They swell and congeal as they absorb the stock that he makes rain down on them. Meanwhile, with another deft gesture, tomatoes dissolve then evaporate. Their clear condensate drips into a gelatin that Connor has crafted in the meantime.  p. 13

Against the background of Connor’s work and personal lives, a family drama plays out which involves him trying to recreate his dead mother’s dumplings (she didn’t leave the recipe), while dealing with his unpleasant sister and their mother’s estate.
At the end, Connor (whose hopes are temporarily raised when his sister gives him what appears to be his mother’s recipe book) learns to let go.
This is technically well done, generally polished (although “simultaneously prepared” in the passage above would avoid the dangling “at once” at the end of the sentence), and I enjoyed it—but this is essentially a mainstream work dressed up as SF (or fantasy if you like).

Deriving Life by Elizabeth Bear has as its protagonist Marq, whose partner Tamar is dying in hospital. We later find out (spoiler) that Tamar is a “host” for Atticus who is, we find later (there is a lot of back end data dumping in this one) a “Tenant”:

“I have a sense of the Tenants’ history.”
It had been before I was born: The lead paleoanthropologist and two others working on several intact Homo neanderthalensis cadavers that had been discovered in a melting glacier had all developed the same kind of slow-growing cancer. That had been weird enough, though by then we knew about contagious forms of cancer—in humans, in wolves, in Tasmanian devils. It got weirder when the cancers had begun, the researchers said, to talk to them.
Which probably would have been dismissed as crackpottery, except the cancer also cured that one paleobotanist’s diabetes, and suddenly they all seemed to have a lot of really good, coherent ideas about how that particular Neanderthal culture operated.
What a weird, archaic word, glacier.  p. 40

After this discovery humans volunteered to host the Tenants in exchange for having their chronic health problems managed, or life spans extended—which is what Tamar did before he met Marq.
This all, as I’ve said already, comes late on in the story, and up until this point the tale is overwhelmingly about Marq’s struggle to come to terms with his partner’s impending death: there are scenes that flashback to how he and Tamar met (Tamar confesses to being a “zombie, a podling, a puppethead”); a trip they take to an undiscovered waterfall (“There were rainbows, though, shifting when you turned your head”), etc.
The scenes in the present describe (a) Marq’s visits to Tamar in the hospital (who eventually refuses him admission), (b) his conversations with his own “transition specialist” (Marq has also applied to be a host), and (c) his meetings with his other partner Robin.
Most of this, I am afraid to say, is mawkish, self-pitying fare:

“You’re healthy, Marq.” Tamar says.
I know. I know how lucky I am. How few people at my age, in this world we made, are as lucky as I am. How amazing that this gift of health was wasted on somebody as busted as me.
What if Tamar had been healthy? What if Tamar were outliving me?
Tamar deserved to live, and Tamar deserved to be happy.
I was just taking up space somebody lovable could have been using. The air I was breathing, the carbon for my food . . . those could have benefited somebody else.
“You make me worthy of being loved.” I take a breath. “You make me want to make myself worthy of you.”
“You were always lovable, Marq.” Their hand moves softly against mine.
“I don’t know how to be me without you,” I say.
“I can’t handle that for you right now,” Tamar says. “I have to die.”
“I keep thinking I can . . . figure this out. Solve it somehow.”
“You can’t derive people the way you derive functions, Marq.”
I laugh, shakily. I can’t do this. I have to do this.  p. 35

I’m already trying to change myself so somebody will love me better.
So that I will love me better.
Evangeline [the transition specialist] says, “We need what we need. Judging ourselves doesn’t change it. Sometimes a hug and a cookie right now mean more than a grand gesture at some indeterminate point in the future.”
“What if we make an irrevocable decision to get that hug and that cookie?”
Evangeline lifts her shoulders, lets them fall. “My job is to make sure that you’re making an educated decision about the costs and benefits of the cookie. Not to tell you how much you should be willing to pay for it.”  p. 46

Basically, if you are up for twenty-five pages of someone not coping with their partner dying, and generally wandering around with a sucking chest wound, then this will be right up your street. It wasn’t up mine.
I should mention that there are other things I didn’t like, such as the clunky and telegraphic prose at the start of the story:

Tamar avoiding thinking about that is the same as Tamar thinking that I should go away. Stop taking my drugs. Maybe file for divorce. Tamar wants to think there’s a way this could hurt me less. They’re thinking of me, really.  p. 29

There are also four “think” or “thinkings” in that passage, which is about two too many. I could have also done without the foody details: “I start a pot of tea, and though I usually drink it plain, today I put milk and sugar in”, “To a background of white wine and pistachio and chickpea salad”, “Everything about the salad is perfect and perfectly dressed. Robin did the chickpeas themselves”, all of which, along with the endless navel gazing and emotional incontinence, makes this feel even more affected.
Only the weird but interesting concept of a sentient cancer saved this one from null points (Eurovision tonight).⁵

His Footsteps, in Darkness and Light by Mimi Mondal is set in India, and has as its narrator Binu, a trapeze artist who also acts in an Aladdin play at the Majestic Oriental Circus. The play is directed by another character, Shehzad:

[As] Alladin, all I had to do was to put on a pair of satin pants and a skullcap, and parrot a series of memorized lines. I had never met an Arab street urchin, nor had an inkling what all the words meant, but neither had anyone in the audience. I bellowed, “Ya Allah!” and “Shukr hai!” and “Dafa ho ja, shaitaan!” at my cues. The girl who trained the parakeets doubled as the princess in a shiny ghagra and choli, adorned with tawdry sequins. Johuree, our proprietor and ringmaster, completed the cast as the villainous Zafar, dressed in a moth-eaten velvet cloak.
It was an almost ridiculous performance, but it turned into the most renowned act of the Majestic Oriental Circus, all at the touch of Shehzad Marid. As the three of us hemmed and hawed through our scripted gibberish, the jinni would emerge from his lamp in clouds of curling smoke. Illuminated by our cheap stage lights, the clouds would take the shape of a magnificent palace, the gaping maw of a cave, raging armies on horseback that crashed into the audience until our entire circus tent would erupt with gasps, applause, and cries of horror and disbelief. A small child could hold open his palm and receive a dancing houree, crafted immaculately of ice as the clouds condensed. Then they billowed up again—into monsters never heard of; swooping rocs; clerics whose voices soared in prayer across minarets that pierced the sky above a faraway, mythical city; hundreds of jinn, and back to the only one. It was a show unlike anything offered by any rival circus company in our land.  p. 61-62

After the show, the circus continues on its travels to perform at a raja’s daughter’s wedding. Here, the narrator Binu sees the divine dancers, the devadasis, and one of them catches his eye. More or less concurrently, we also find out that (spoiler) Shehzad is really a jinni who lives in the lamp used in the play:

From the stories people tell, even those in our own hack show, the lamp sounds like a prison. The listener imagines himself being suffocated, neck twisted, limbs folded at painful angles, squeezed into a box too small to contain his body and left there to wait for decades. But the listener of the tale is human—imprisoned already in his withering flesh and bone, the measured years that are given to him. The human mind can barely fathom the bond between its own body and soul. What would it grasp of the relationship between a jinni and his lamp? What could I—hardly a philosopher, never having read a book, barely literate enough to scribble my own name—grasp of it?
In our two years of friendship, I had learned every detail of Shehzad Marid’s humanity. There was no man, or woman, that I knew better. I could read each of his smiles, each raised eyebrow, each cryptic comment for exactly what it was. But I had also learned that his humanity was mere performance. He was relieved to shed it, as I was to remove my circus costumes and makeup.  p. 67

The rest of the story (spoiler) revolves around a slight plot where the devadasis who caught Binu’s eye comes to him asking for help to escape. When Shehzad comes out of his lamp and discovers this he is not impressed, stating there are worse things than being a slave—and worse masters. The climax occurs when the caravan leaves the palace and is beset by a terrible dust storm caused by a goddess angry at the theft. She only agrees to spare the caravan if Binu will give her the jinn, and he eventually makes a deal where they will both serve her for half of his remaining lifetime.
This is a pleasant enough tale with good local colour but it is slight, and needs a more substantial plot.

Circus Girl, the Hunter, and Mirror Boy by JY Yang opens with the Lynette in the bathroom where, instead of her reflection in the mirror, she sees a young boy. Later on there is some backstory (is there a prequel?) about how “Mirror Boy” appeared at a critical point in her life but how, after she left her job as an escape artist in a circus and moved on, he disappeared. Now he is back.
When Lynette rejoins her roommate for breakfast there is news:

All was quiet except for the chittering of the newsprinter, spooling its thin scroll onto the dining table. When it stopped, Shane tore off the printout and scanned its fuss-less, tiny text. “Great squid. There’s been another murder.”
“Murder?” I said, not really processing the words.
“Yes. In Darlingfort. Probably that same serial killer that’s been going around.” She turned the chit towards me. “Here, look. Seem like anyone you know?  p. 86

When Mirror Boy next speaks to Lynette he tells her that all the other victims of the killer were, like her, his “refuges”. She is the last one left, and he urges her to run because, if she dies, so does he.
Lynette, in an effort to find out what is going on, takes a trip by gondola to a flooded building (this world is a drowned one) where she meets a witch called Chrissa. She deduces that Lynette is infected with a wraith, and forces it to appear:

I looked at the lines and glyphs spread across the floor. “Is it going to hurt him? I don’t want to hurt him.”
“Oh, honey.” Chrissa shook her head. “It won’t hurt him. It’s for me to see him and talk to him. If he wants to talk.”
I gingerly tiptoed into the circle, careful not to disturb the still-wet lines.
Mirror Boy stood in front of me, fully clad in a shabby red t-shirt and jeans.
I’d never seen him like this, and it sent a trill of sadness and betrayal through me.
“I’m sorry,” he said. He was just a child, scuffing the toe of one beat-up shoe against the heel of the other.
“Why didn’t you tell me any of this?”
“I’m sorry,” he repeated.
Chrissa knelt and chanted softly over the charm circle, invoking Kraken, invoking Leviathan. “Neither spine nor ribcage, neither collarbones nor hips, the eyes that see in the watery dark, the mouths that open in the deep.” Her handiwork slid from glistening black to iridescent silver, and the lines sang as they came to life, each circular glyph ringing a different note. The chorus of bell tones raised my flesh in tingling waves.
“Alright,” Chrissa said, matter-of-factly. She stood and struck gray dust from her hands as the charm circle hummed. “Let’s see what we got.”
She stepped in, looked into the mirror, and melted. “Oh, honey. Look at him. He’s just a baby.”
“Yeah,” I said, mouth dry. He was a baby. I’d been a baby back then, too.
Neither of us knew what we were doing, flailing through this world.
Chrissa and her marshmallow heart were already gone. I should have known this would happen. Her voice was bright and airy like she was talking to a small, soft animal. “Hello. What’s your name?”
“I don’t have one.” He looked to me for reassurance. “She calls me Mirror Boy.”  p. 97-98

After Chrissa questions Mirror Boy (spoiler), she identifies the killer as Mirror Boy’s twin brother, and that Mirror Boy was someone who died by drowning, the point of near similarity he has with all his refuges.
At this point the story switches to the killer’s point of view and we find out why he is hunting his brother, before it changes back to Lynette for the climactic chase scene.
There are some nice touches in this fantasy (the drowned world setting, the mentions of Kraken and Leviathan, etc.) but the background is a little weak (this isn’t helped by the odd newsprinter at breakfast, one of the few obvious differences in this world). More importantly, the story’s structure is a mess, with far too much of the story’s plot coming at the back end of the story, not to mention the very late introduction of other points of view. Perhaps the twin brother should have made an earlier appearance, which would also have improved the low energy start (the first eight pages are ploddingly mundane). Nevertheless, I’d be interested to see further stories in this world.

Articulated Restraint by Mary Robinette Kowal has astronaut doctor Ruby Donaldson turn up at a lunar neutral buoyancy lab (a big water tank on the Moon where astronauts practice EVA procedures) to find out that there has been an accident involving an orbiting platform and a docking rocket which misfired. The team now have sixteen hours to work out how to get the crew off, and are about to test a procedure in the tank. There are two complicating factors: (a) Ruby has a badly twisted ankle from last night’s dancing, and (b) the EVA suits take hours to reconfigure for other crew members. Because of the latter factor Ruby decides to continue with the planned EVA rehearsal, but as she suits up she realises her leg is in worse shape than she thought. She doesn’t tell anyone, and then one of the other four astronauts can’t get a seal.
The rest of the story (not much of a spoiler) is an absorbing enough account of the tricky procedure and the difficulties the team have to overcome. Ruby successfully completes the dummy run, but when she comes out of the pool the rest of the team discover she is badly injured and they have to cut off part of her suit. Ruby resolves to do better in the future.
This is, I guess, an okay story, but why would anyone want to read about rehearsal of a rescue mission rather than the real thing? And the fact that she injured herself dancing and then concealed her injury is, by turns, banal and unforgiveable (who wants to work with an injured and deceitful crewmember in space?)
I suspect this isn’t a standalone story but an extract from a longer work.¹ (Oh, and it is set in an alternate timeline where Earth has been hit by a meteor.)

Old Media by Annalee Newitz is a story about John, an ex-slave in 2145, which begins with him making out with another man in the employees only area of his work while a female co-worker makes sarcastic comments. After this there is a scene in John’s home, which he shares with Med, a robot, and then one where John goes to the library. The story concludes with John and Med together again in their apartment. John wants to have sex with Med: she declines, but agrees to sleep with him. This involves an unusual powering down of her systems.
This supposedly futuristic slice-of-life is not remotely convincing because all the characters sound and behave like they would today:

“How’s [the?] job going?” Med divided her attention between John and whatever she was previewing.
“Pretty good. I keep hooking up with Michael, but he’s starting to annoy me.”
“I can’t even keep track of your hookups. Which one is Michael, again?”
“Dinosaur hair guy.”
“Oh yeah!” Med stopped streaming and took her hand off the charging pad. “He sounded nice?”
“He’s nice but he’s just . . . I dunno. He asks too many boring questions.”
“Like what?”
John tried to come up with a good way to explain it. “He asked about my [slave] brand. Which—why would you ask somebody about that after fucking them? So rude.”
Med didn’t pick up on his sarcasm, or she chose to ignore it. “I can see why he might be curious. Why do you keep it if you don’t want to talk about it?”
“Why do you tell people that you’re a bot if you don’t want them to make snotty comments about it?” His voice rose in anger he hadn’t intended to express.
“You know why. Because fuck those fuckers.” Delivered utterly without sarcasm. John had to laugh.  p. 144

This is supposed to be a conversation between a human and a robot a hundred and twenty odd years in the future (there is also a reference to a “super good friend” later on). I know that most contemporary SF is really about the present, but give me a break.¹

As I mentioned above, there are two stories published on Tor.com during the period covered by the collection which are not included in it. The first of these is The Last Voyage of Skidbladnir by Karin Tidbeck, which features a strange part-organic spaceship—essentially an alien space crab which has for its shell a huge building that houses the human crew and passengers:

Saga had seen Skidbladnir arrive, once, when she had first gone into service. First it wasn’t there, and then it was, heavy and solid, as if it had always been. From the outside, the ship looked like a tall and slender office building. The concrete was pitted and streaked, and all of the windows were covered with steel plates. Through the roof, Skidbladnir’s claws and legs protruded like a plant, swaying gently in some unseen breeze. The building had no openings save the front gates, through which everyone passed. From the airlock in the lobby, one climbed a series of stairs to get to the passenger deck. Or, if you were Saga, climbed the spiral staircase that led up to the engine room and custodial services.
Novik took a few steps back and scanned the hull. A tall, bearded man in rumpled blue overalls, he looked only slightly less imposing outside than he did in the bowels of the ship. He turned to Saga. In daylight, his gray eyes were almost translucent.
“There,” he said, and pointed to a spot two stories up the side. “We need to make a quick patch.”
Saga helped Novik set up the lift that was attached to the side of the building, and turned the winch until they reached the point of damage. It was just a small crack, but deep enough that Saga could see something underneath—something that looked like skin. Novik took a look inside, grunted and had Saga hold the pail while he slathered putty over the crack.
“What was that inside?” Saga asked.
Novik patted the concrete. “There,” he said. “You’re safe again, my dear.”
He turned to Saga. “She’s always growing. It’s going to be a problem soon.”

Saga is one of the maintenance crew, and later discovers that the problem is worse than Novik realises when she discovers the ship is growing into sections of the building where it shouldn’t. When there is a subsequent discussion with the captain about this, he states he will sell the ship for meat rather than have to bear the cost and disruption of a new and bigger building. Saga and Novik (spoiler) are not happy about this and steal the ship the next time they make planetfall.
The rest of the story tells of their subsequent journey through space, and eventual arrival at a deserted city:

At dusk, Skidbladnir’s walls cracked open. Saga understood why Novik had positioned them so far away from the building; great lumps of concrete and steel fell down and shook the ground as the building shrugged and shuddered. The tendrils that waved from the building’s cracked roof stiffened and trembled. They seemed to lengthen. Walls fell down, steel windows sloughed off, as Skidbladnir slowly extricated herself from her shell. She crawled out from the top, taking great lumps of concrete with her. Saga had expected her to land on the ground with an almighty thud. But she made no noise at all.
Free of her house, Skidbladnir was a terror and wonder to behold. Her body was long and curled; her multitude of eyes gleamed in the starlight. Her tendrils waved in the warm air as if testing it. Some of the tendrils looked shrunken and unusable. Saga also saw that patches of Skidbladnir’s body weren’t as smooth as the rest of her; they were dried and crusted. Here and there, fluid oozed from long scratches in her skin.
Next to Saga, Novik made a muted noise. He was crying.
“Go, my love,” he whispered. “Find yourself a new home.”
Skidbladnir’s tendrils felt the buildings around the plaza. Finally, they wrapped themselves around the tallest building, a gleaming thing with a spiraled roof, and Skidbladnir pulled herself up the wall.
Glass tumbled to the ground as Skidbladnir’s tendrils shot through windows to pull herself up. She tore through the roof with a thunderous noise. There was a moment when she supported her whole body on her tendrils, suspended in the air; she almost toppled over the side. Then, with what sounded like a sigh, she lowered herself into the building. Saga heard the noise of collapsing concrete as Skidbladnir’s body worked to make room for itself. Eventually, the noise subsided.
Skidbladnir’s arms hung down the building’s side like a crawling plant.

This is a quirky piece with some nice scenes, but it has a slight plot.

Last, and most definitely not least, is The Song by Erinn L. Kemper, which has as its central character Dan, a widowed deep sea diver who works on a future oil rig converted to become a whale meat production facility. After some establishing narrative—vaguely melancholy stuff about his personal life, and mentions of save-the-whale extremists/bombers—he meets a biologist called Suzanne who has just arrived on the rig. She is investigating the changes in the whales’ songs, and their increasingly abnormal behaviour.
As the story develops, we learn more about these two, and the rig they work on:

On the deck below, a door squealed open and two women in lurched out onto the walkway. They wore carver-staff coveralls—purple to camouflage blood-splatter without being morbid. Arm in arm they staggered along, singing a slurred version of an old song, repeating only the words they knew, over and over, to the familiar melody.
“Oh Danny Boy, oh Danny Boy, oh Da-ah-ny…”
Suzanne waved down at them, but the women didn’t notice.
She gazed back over the sea, her smile touched by sadness. “We were seeing some of that at the research station I came over from, too. People feeling the stress. Drinking to blow off steam. That and people taking permanent leave, you know. Must be worse here.”
“I guess. Can’t fire those two, even though they’re ignoring the rules. Eventually they’ll run out of booze, and then we’ll have a worse problem.” Statistically, carvers were most likely to take a header over the rail or hang themselves from the pipes, according to the shrinks.
Suzanne nodded. “Seen that, too.”

The struts that supported the hydraulic lift on the kill floor showed some minor cracking in the welds. Dan did a full inspection and made the call. Shut it down. Give the butchers a break. Everyone was supposed to call them carvers, but Dan didn’t think of them that way.
[. . .]
Maintenance was supposed to back him up, but everyone avoided working the kill floor if they could, with its massive adjustable saws and their diamond-honed blades, the long-handled traditional knives clipped to the wall, gleaming, ready for custom orders.
Marge sniffed the air and wrinkled her nose. “Man, I wish tech would come up with some kind of cleaning product that gets rid of the stink, you know? Forget about new butchering techniques. Who cares about cost-effective ways to debone a whale? Those people have a shit-ton of money to spare.”
Rumor was one of those TV chefs had designed an enormous fryer. He would cook a narwhal inside an orca inside a minke. Tables were priced at something like a hundred thousand a head. Proceeds were supposedly going to the plastic filtration project. A worthy cause. Dan pictured a crystal-chandeliered dining stadium. Massive steaks delivered to the linen-draped tables by forklift. CEOs, celebrities, and socialites carving delicate mouthfuls from dripping chunks of perfectly seasoned meat. His stomach lurched.

Dan spends more and more time with Suzanne, who plays him whale songs, and shows him optical representations of their changing brain activity. She also explains what she thinks the animals are saying to each other.
Time passes, and a week later he sees her again on deck:

Suzanne stepped out onto the deck near the kill floor loading bay. Dan joined her. She didn’t notice him at first, as she leaned over the railing to look at the sea under the rig. Below them, a small pod of bowhead whales schooled around the rig legs. Suzanne put her hand over her mouth and shook her head, then looked up at Dan, her eyes wide and empty.
“What’s going on?” Dan had never seen whales behave this way.
“A special rush order came in. For meat prepared the traditional Inuit way. The pod followed the harvesters here. Attacked the boat and tried to capsize them, from what I heard.” She stalked down the hall to the kill floor.
“Hey, c’mon. Let’s go to the cafeteria—or to your lab to see what the song’s doing. If there’s any new chatter.”
“I know what the song is doing, with this pod anyway.” She tapped the headphones. “They’ve stopped singing. One or two of them had taken it up, but then the cowboys rode in and ’pooned a female. That’s why I came to check it out. No chatter at all. But their brains are flaring like a fireworks show.”
She shoved open the double doors and stepped onto the kill floor.
The flensing had already begun. Four carvers stood atop the whale, with long knives like curved hockey sticks, slicing deep into the whale’s side, the blades sliding through in long lines a few inches apart.
“She’s dead. But look at them.” Suzanne pointed down.
Through the metal grate he could see the pod that had followed the harvesting boat surge and strain for the kill floor, mouths open, before they slipped back under. Their bodies collided, stirring great spumes gone pink with blood.
As the carvers pried long slabs free and wrestled them into the shed-sized cooler containers, the whales below calmed, then dove from sight.

This is not only a chilling story but a sad, elegiac one too—even more mournful than the whale song it describes in the story—and it culminates with an ending that is particularly bleak, in more ways than one. I found it rather good, and wouldn’t be surprised if it ends up in one or more of the ‘Year’s Bests’.
That said, there are a couple of things that aren’t entirely convincing. First, the psychological problems caused to the crew: were that the case, most abattoirs, etc., would have closed by now. Second, the idea of a future whale meat industry isn’t particularly convincing given we are on the verge of more cheaply producing meat and meat substitutes by artificial means—but the story probably isn’t about the future but about today, and Japan’s recent decision to commence commercial whale hunting in July 2019.⁶

The interior artwork is more typical of modern web design than traditional SF illustration: Dadu Shin’s illustration for the Chu story is fine but doesn’t have any connection with it; Mary Haasdyk’s two illustrations for the Bear and Kemper are weird abstract stuff I didn’t particularly care for and, in the case of the Kemper, is not a good match, whereas Sarode’s Indian-themed picture suits the Mondal; Mackenzie and Hu’s artwork for the Yang and Kowal look like Japanese animation—again, not a particularly good match for either story, particularly the Kowal, although I rather liked both pieces; I didn’t care for the Mengad (the central figure looks at best odd, and at worst poorly executed, although I realise this latter is probably an ‘art’ thing). My favourite is the Mosquera, a SFnal illustration for Tidbeck’s SFnal story, even if it does look more suited to War of the Worlds.

Noted in passing: there are three reversed double apostrophes/speech quotes on p. 96-97.

In conclusion, a rather disappointing issue for such a well-funded operation: I expected something better than the equivalent of an average issue of Asimov’s SF.  ●

_____________________

1. Rocket Stack Rank states that Kowal’s Articulated Restraint “can serve as an introduction to the author’s “Lady Astronaut” series”, and that Newitz’s Old Media “isn’t a story so much as a “taster” to introduce you to the world of the author’s Autonomous series”.

2. There are a number of editors responsible for the January to February content: how did they do?
Top of the pile this time around is Ellen Datlow (who provides the Kemper, the best of the lot). Next comes Marco Palmieri (again only one story, the good but minor Mondal), followed by Ann VanderMeer, (the Chu, Yang, and Tidbek stories, two good but minor, and one average), and then Beth Meacham (one average and one borderline poor). Last is Lindsey Hall with the Newitz story. This doesn’t really provide any useful statistical information, but I note that there isn’t a bad story among VanderMeer’s three choices.

3. You can find Tor.com’s stories in web-format here, and the bi-monthly ‘newsletter’ here.

4. Yes, I know you can save web pages as PDFs, but Apple’s Safari bowser truncates them at a certain length (at least on my iPad), and the page layout can sometimes be a little odd. As I had to get hold of the two missing stories, I ended up getting iBooks to make the PDF and then transferred it to Goodreader. This is a two-stage process though, and a bit of a faff. And a random privacy notice appeared and blocked a line or two of the introductions.

5. I was surprised to find out that Bear is a double Hugo winner (I should get out more).

6. There is a short news article about the Japanese decision to resume whaling here.  ●