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.  ●

Edited 23:59, cover image replaced.