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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.  ●