A Jungle of Tales

I am really enjoying doing these free Tor short stories in thematic pairs! These tales from two of my favorite newly-discovered authors both deal with revenge against those who have exploited the protagonists, using their bodies to uphold their comfortable lifestyles.   In Lullaby for a Lost World , the narrator is dead, having been painfully sacrificed to ensure the survival of a house that is a last bastion of peace and comfort in a polluted and dying world: The river, dark and oily, licks at the ruin of your flesh—at your broken bones—and sings you to sleep in a soft, gentle language like a mother’s lullabies, whispering of rest and forgiveness, of a place where it is forever light, forever safe. You do not rest. You cannot forgive. You are not safe—you never were. What will she do when she sees another victim being prepared to uphold the order of things?   Blood is Another Word for Hunger starts with revenge, of a slave girl against her mistresses. She finds t...

              This collection is more diverse in tone than ‘Smoke and Mirrors’ , still leaning toward the creepy but with more humorous tales and poems included.             My favorite story in this collection is ‘A Study in Emerald’, which seamlessly blends the Sherlock Holmes and Lovecraft universes. In this version, the Great Old Ones have made themselves the rulers of humanity: She was called Victoria because she had beaten us in battle, several hundred year before, and she was called Gloriana, because she was glorious, and she was called Queen, because the human mouth was not shaped to say her true name.”   But one of them was just mysteriously killed, his emerald ichor splashed across an abandoned room. The detective and his chronicler meet much in the same way as ‘A Study in Scarlet’: “You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive,” that wa...

  Both these stories (available on the Tor website) are essentially tales about revenge for cruelty toward animals (and one human, in the latter case). You might at first think Red as Blood and White as Bone is set in some once-upon-a-time fairytale place, given that the protagonist is an orphan girl working as a kitchen maid who thinks she’s found a lost princess on the manor’s doorstep. But, in fact, she simply lives in some rural Germanic village in the 1920s. When the prince comes, he comes by car, and Klara grows up to be a different kind of hero – even if tricksiness proves as important then as is does in any fairytale. But that doesn’t mean there is no magic in this story!             Between the title of the story and the fact that the “princess” never claimed that title for herself but only went along with Klara, I immediately suspected that Klara was in a different story than s...

  These short stories, again available on the Tor website, feature children with supernatural “pets” that either they or their families fail to value.   In Brimstone and Marmalade , a little girl is being a bit of a brat about wanting a pony. Her family say that they will get her a demon instead – a much more practical pet, as it can live in a small cage and only needs grub souls to eat. Mathilde’s new demon is called Ix’thor. He’s a “miniature dark lord”, and he grows on you very quickly: Mathilde slammed the door behind her and ran up the stairs to her room. She threw her soggy book bag on the floor and flopped facedown on the bed… WHAT TROUBLES YOU, MY MINION?... “We had to make a collage,” Mathilde mumbled. “About animals. And Billy Haggerty . . . he said mine was ugly . . . and he took it . . . and he threw it in the mud! It’s ruined!”   YOUR PLAN . . . WAS NEARLY COMPLETE? “Yes!” Mathilde squeezed her eyes shut. “Now I have to start all over!...

  I quite enjoyed this book the first time I read it. It is structured as a mystery, and that along with the intriguing alien solar system and society the author creates helped pull me along. On the second read, however, since I already knew where the story was going, I found myself getting bogged down by the weaker aspects of the writing, particularly the extremely wooden characterization. Cool ideas and a poetically melancholy tone combined with  unrelatable characters spouting dialog that makes them sound like androids may be a feature of Liu’s writing, as I noted the same points in the short story collection ‘To Hold Up the Sky’ . The story starts with some quite brutal scenes from the Cultural Revolution, which introduce us to a woman named Ye Wenjie, a second-generation physicist. Her father was beaten to death in a denunciation session where her mother had been forced to speak against him, and then she was sent to a lumberjack camp where she go...

  I read these two short stories back-to-back on the Tor website, and they were an interesting pairing. Both involve humans in love with genuinely monstrous – but not necessarily evil – aquatic beings. Both have a haunting quality that make one ponder what love really is, why we are drawn to certain other people (even if it doesn’t seem wise)…and, of course, as Contrapoints put it, “the inherent eroticism of the sea”.   A Cup of Salt Tears is set in (I think) modern-day Japan. Makino is a middle-aged-going-on-old woman whose husband is dying. She goes down to the onsen (hot springs bath) to try to wash of the smell of hospitals and grief, and a kappa joins her in the pool. As the figure nears, she sees its features through the mist: the green flesh, the webbed hands, the sara—the little bowl that forms the top of its head—filled with water that wobbles as it moves…it smells like a river, wet and earthy. Alive… ‘Good evening,’ the kappa says. The wor...

              This is not the first biography I’ve read of Alexander Von Humboldt, a naturalist who was highly influential at the turn of 19 th century – that was ‘Humboldt’s Cosmos’. As this impressively-ahead-of-his-time fellow has been largely forgotten in the English-speaking world - though still fairly well known in Latin America and Germany – it is good to see more than one book focusing on his contributions. It’s been a while since I read ‘Humboldt’s Cosmos’ but, as I recall, it mainly focused on his voyage to the Americas and his research. This book covers that too, of course, but spends much more time talking about his networks and influences and more socio-political ideas, which are quite fascinating. Long story short: the man knew everyone from (writer/scientist) Goethe to (geologist) Lyell to (revolutionary) Simon Bolivar, and influenced everyone from Darwin to Thoreau! In terms of science, one...

  This is a lovely short story that, being told in second person, puts you in the shoes of Xin, an ansible on an off-world colony. The term “ansible” was first coined by Ursula Le Guin in ‘The Left Hand of Darkness’ to describe a device that allows for instantaneous communication between planets; one radio-like end stays anchored, while the other travels, and they remain mysteriously linked. The word has been adopted by other authors since, but this is the first time I’ve seen ansibles be people …and, naturally, treating people as if they are machines causes problems! Fittingly, given the queerness of the story in which the term originated, these ansibles are women who are in love with one another – though, of course, to do their job they must be separated. However, we learn as the tale goes on that the belief that this is the only type of person who can do this job is false. To me, that means there is likely an element of government control at play; control...

                      This little novella feels like a folktale or a fairytale retelling but is (so far as I know) a totally new creation. As in something like ‘1001 Nights’ we have a frame story and a tale, or rather two versions of a tale. Chih, a nonbinary cleric from the Singing Hills monastery, is traveling north with mammoth-rider Si-yu on a mission to collect stories. But as they approach the way station they have to take shelter in a barn after being threatened by a trio of tigers. Chih is level-headed enough to speak to them respectfully when they realize that the tigers can talk and take on the forms of women: “Why are we talking to tigers?” asked Si-yu. “Because they are talking to us.” Chih said, stifling a somewhat hysterical giggle. “They can talk, and now they’ve seen that we can. That’s – that means that they’ll treat us like people.” “But there’s still a chance that they’re going to ea...

            I picked up this story about a zombie apocalypse seen through the eyes of a sarcastic crow because I needed comfort. My eldest dog, who had been with me for 13 years, had just died, and none of the three books I had already started - an ideas-focused sci-fi ; a biography of Humboldt that that was just getting to the bit where the adventurous, liberal scientist is getting old while the world turns reactionary; and one about how capitalism fuels climate change – seemed likely to provide. But this one, in which a crow named Shit Turd (S.T. for short) figures out something is off when his owner’s eyeball randomly falls out, leading to a quest with his bloodhound buddy to try and save the humans, seemed just the right level of goofy and heartwarming. And it was, even though there are some scenes that are likely to leave dog lovers bawling even if they are otherwise having a good day, and even if (as a biolo...