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

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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.  ●

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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.  ●