Quick Sips - Tor dot com May 2017

Well, Tor dot com continues to put a nice amount of SFF short fiction this June, with two novelettes and three short stories. Mercifully for yours truly, the novelettes actually came out first and not on the last day of the month, so I got to do a reviewer happy-dance. And luckily for yours truly, these are some interesting and at times intensely dark stories that show the ways that the darkness swirls around us and takes shape. The way that it whispers to us. The way that it pulls at us and begs to be let in. These are stories of mutants and aliens, ghosts and shadows, and a buried sense of loss and violence. These are stories about the repressed returning, about alternates and news ways of thinking, and they are both beautiful and terrifying. So yeah, to the reviews!

Art by Robert Hunt

Quick Sips - Tor.com July 2015

Tor.com this month certain tends toward the dark, with pretty much all but of its five stories inky and disturbing. Of course, there's really nothing wrong with that, and the stories do provide a wide range of approaches to darkness, to suffering. And there is a much lighter superhero story thrown in to bring a bit of lightness and fun into the mix. Really these stories seem to be about dealing with the past, with past trauma in most of the stories but the past more generally. A dance unfinished, the looming ghosts of past experiments, the forgotten nightmares of a time before humans, the origin of a superhero steeped in loss, and the tragic childhood of a woman from a very messed up family, the past refuses to stay buried in these stories. So let's get to the reviews!

Art by Jeffrey Alan Love