Stories

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

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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

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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.  ●

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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.  ●

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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

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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.  ●