Ken Scholes – Grey Patterson

A continuation of my previous post, where I started but didn’t finish reviewing a massive, 5,000-page anthology of short stories collected by the science fiction publisher Tor. There’s a longer explanation in that previous one; here, I’m finishing my list of stories that caught my interest, with links to where you can read them (free!) online.

Fire Above, Fire Below by Garth Nix. Garth Nix’s writing always reminds me of his Seventh Tower series, which I absolutely loved as a kid.¹ Which has nothing to do with this story, but it’s still what came to mind.
Four Horsemen, at Their Leasure by Richard Parks. At this point, I think Terry Pratchett pretty definitively owns the idea of Death as an anthropomorphized entity. And this fits right into that style—theologically very different from the Discworld mythos, and a great deal emptier, but the idea of Death arguing with God? That’s still very Pratchett.
Silver Linings by Tim Pratt. This can’t not be an allegory about nuclear proliferation. Given that nuclear proliferation is one of my biggest worries, how could I not enjoy the story?
Clockwork Fairies by Cat Rambo. Rambo did a great job of writing this, because the protagonist is, very deliberately, the single most unlikeable person I’ve ever had to share a perspective with. He’s got that same “terrible in an entirely believable way” thing going on that made Umbridge such an iconic villain.
The Cairn in Slater Woods by Gina Rosati. I wasn’t actually expecting this story to go the way it did—I was really thinking it was gonna go, like, “the other school in the neighborhood is for the local vampires” or something silly.
Loco by Bruce Sterling and Rudy Rucker. This feels like a weird cross between Girl Genius and Livewires and I’m… kinda here for it?²
Firstborn by Brandon Sanderson. There’s a definite Ender’s Game thing going on here, with the whole “managing a war, lots of training simulations, one sibling is preternaturally good at it” aspect. But the way it’s turned and twisted is quite fun.
After the Coup by John Scalzi. I’m a frequent reader of the “humanity, fuck yeah!” type of story, and this feels like that genre at its absolute best. It isn’t about how great humanity is, unstoppable war machine or whatever; it’s about what people are really like. It’s comical in the best of ways.
The President’s Brain is Missing by John Scalzi. It was at this point that I decided I should probably put Scalzi on my “get some of his full books and read them” list, because this was just as much fun to read as the previous one.
Shadow War of the Night Dragons, Book One: The Dead City: Prologue by John Scalzi. Another entry for the “Terry Pratchett would be proud” category. This feels like a slightly darker take on Guards, Guards!³
A Weeping Czar Beholds the Fallen Moon by Ken Scholes. I’ve just now realized what this makes me think of—the Septimus Heap series. An old-fashioned world, with a bit of real magic… that just so happens to be the things built back when magic was just science.
Do Not Touch by Prudence Shen. I really like the idea that paintings have those “Do Not Touch” signs not because it’ll damage the ink, but because the curators are tired of diving into the paintings after the kids there on field trips.
Overtime by Charles Stross. After the amount of Doctor Who they’ve all seen, nobody should be surprised that the British continue to produce time-travel paradoxes.
Down on the Farm by Charles Stross. That said, I’m actually really enjoying this “Laundry” setting, and may need to go read one of the bigger books. It feels like it’s partially addressing one of my issues with Warehouse 13—namely, that any government organization dealing with Weird Crap like that should have a much bigger bureaucracy.⁴⁵
A Tall Tail by Charles Stross. You could maybe write a story that’s more precisely up my alley, but to do so you’d have to take one of those AI models and train it exclusively on my interests for a few years. This sent me off on multiple searches to find out if historical things mentioned actually existed and I’d just missed them, or they were made up for the story.⁶
The Dala Horse by Michael Swanwick. Very much in the style of a northern European folk tale, but with a setting where the magic is a result of having built and then forgotten how to build a whole lot of very big, very powerful technologies.
The Mongolian Wizard by Michael Swanwick. The starter of a whole series—which, as I found out when grabbing the link, continued on after what’s in the ebook, so I’ve got some further reading for myself—of a very magical take on something of a World War.
What Doctor Gottlieb Saw by Ian Tregillis. Recommended reading prior to this: “Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies”. Because this is, for sure, a story about what happens when you create a superintelligence without thinking in advance about what and how.
The Girl Who Ruled Fairyland—For A Little While by Catherynne M. Valente. A less young-adult version of the Enchanted Forest Chronicles, which I’ve mentioned before as one of my favorite series.
The Last Son of Tomorrow by Greg van Eekhout. A lot of similarity to the ending of Superman: Red Son, what with the examination of “hang on, what does Superman do when he notices that he’s immune to aging?”
A Stroke of Dumb Luck by Shiloh Walker. Another entry in the “vampires and werewolves are just kinda fun” category, with bonus points for a good balance between “actual consequences” and “oh god you’re such a teen about how to deal with this situation.”
Super Bass by Kai Ashante Wilson. The moment in the book (here, thousands of pages in, yes) where I realize how overwhelmingly white/european everything else in the book has been. A reminder that I want to get further out of my comfort zone with what I read, because a lot of the stuff out there, like this, is really good. Very, very different from what I’m used to, and I feel like I’m missing a whole lot of cultural context, but I can muddle my way through and still enjoy it.
The Woman Who Shook the World-Tree by Michael Swanwick. I’m very slowly working my way through Lessons in Chemistry at the moment, and this very much reminded me of that at the beginning, to the point that I spent the whole story bracing myself for the betrayal that never came. Instead, this was a bittersweet, paradoxical work that I found myself really loving.
The Sigma Structure Symphony by Gregory Benford. Between the wonderful description of a Lunar colony developed around archiving SETI transmissions from a busy, busy galaxy and the exploration of music as mathematics (and mathematics as music), there’s no way this wasn’t making it onto my list.

And, honestly, still enjoyed rereading a couple years ago—it’s great fodder for a “this is a work of fantasy, but how can I turn it into far-future science fiction?” thought experiment. Hint: it involves a globe-spanning swarm of nanobots running a virtual world. ↩
> “Not much like Patel,” mused Becka. > “I can’t say,” replied Gordo. “Remember, I only joined your team after the Patel incident.”
> “I wish you’d stop bitching about ‘the Patel incident.’”

> “Look,” said Gordo, “you can’t just morph a federal scientist into a giant invertebrate that catches fire. That’s not an acceptable protocol.” ↩
> It is said that earthquakes are what happens when two night dragons love each other very much. ↩
> Call me impetuous (not to mention a little bored) but I’m not stupid. And while I’m far enough down the management ladder that I have to squint to see daylight, I’m an SSO 3, which means I can sign off on petty cash authorizations up to the price of a pencil and get to sit in on interminable meetings, when I’m not tackling supernatural incursions or grappling with the eerie, eldritch horrors in Human Resources. ↩
Although, that said, Warehouse 13 did feature an org chart that consisted of a handful of agents, a manager, the CEO, her personal driver, a contractor of a doctor, and then a board of directors that outnumbered the entire rest of the organization, so maybe they do have a healthy amount of bureaucracy… ↩
I shouldn’t have doubted myself; all the things that I went “wait, is that real? How have I never heard of that?” were, in fact, fictional. Or, I guess, are still classified. ↩

This is a massive read. My e-reader, which paginates things fairly well, counted it out to precisely 5,000 pages—I actually spent some time wondering if it was so perfectly 5,000, or if that’s just a hard-coded limit at which it throws its hands up in the air and says “I dunno, man, it’s a long document.” As it turns out, it’s just a perfectly even 5,000 pages! I’ll have to try harder if I want to stump the pagination algorithm.

As to what the actual content is, Tor (the publisher, not the service you use if you want to avoid government censorship and/or commit some kind of crime) frequently hires writers to write short stories, which they publish on their website. And, at some point, they bundled up five years’ worth of those stories into this gargantuan ebook. It’ll make for an interesting review, because everything contained in the book is also online, so I can link directly to individual stories. (Which is for the best, because I now can’t figure out where I got this ebook or if it’s still for sale.)

So, here goes: the stories that I bookmarked, and some thoughts about each of them.

The Witch of Duva by Leigh Bardugo. So perfectly creepy, and not at all in the way you’d expect it to be—an inverted folk tale. The first story in the book where I went “aw, crap” because I was reading before bed and it was about to ruin my ability to sleep. Also the first one that I went and found online to send to someone to read.
The Water That Falls On You From Nowhere by John Chu. Heartbreaking and heartfelt, and all the complexity of family and expectations. I absolutely adore the use of a science fiction concept as perfectly normal—it reminds me of a(n apparently misremembered) Steven King quote. “Science fiction is about ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances; literature is about extraordinary people in ordinary circumstances.”¹
The Commonplace Book by Jacob Clifton. I liked the familiar-but-not-quite feel of Ada Lovelace and her dealing with the complete nonsense that is societal expectations.²
The Strange Case of Mr. Salad Monday by G.D. Falksen. Wonderfully irreverent, with some of that Sherlock Holmes styling that I enjoy, though wrapped up as an actual police officer instead of entirely an outsider to the system. The setting feels very big though, like, there’s a whole lot of steampunk world to explore… but we’re here, in the big city, safe from all the things that go bump in the night. Well, mostly.
A Clean Sweep With All the Trimmings by James Alan Gardner. The writing style took a little bit to get used to, but by the end I was a little bit in love with it.³
Shade by Steven Gould. I had to look up the author afterwards, and realized that while I hadn’t read any of his other works, some of what’s going on here feels familiar because it’s set in the same universe as one of those other works… that was adapted into a movie that I’ve seen. And I like things like this, seeing people use their extraordinary circumstances to help ordinary people.
Ghost Hedgehog by Nina Kiriki Hoffman. Once again, this feels like a connection to an existing work, although I don’t think Hoffman wrote The Sixth Sense.
The Cat Who Walked A Thousand Miles by Kij Johnson. What can I say? I’m a cat person. And this story has that nice “old legend” feel to it—it isn’t polished to within an inch of its life, it has little side journeys along the way.
First Flight by Mary Robinette Kowal. Doing a bit of rereading for this review, and I don’t know that I’d realized quite how good a mic drop “he understood the historical context” is at the end.
The Speed of Time by Jay Lake. It’s a little disjointed, but I think that actually worked quite well. It reminds me of Fine Structure—something huge and not nearly so complex as it seems, expressed in many different ways.
The Starship Mechanic by Jay Lake and Ken Scholes. Something about Penauch stuck with me. An infinite multi-tool of a creature, wanting nothing more than a little vacation, and only able to get it by some fairly ridiculous means.
Earth Hour by Ken Macleod. Every other future in the book feels a little bit dated—that general feeling of old science fiction where they assumed we’d be running around on Mars but had no idea that cell phones would exist, though not to nearly that degree—except this one. It still feels very modern in how it imagines the future. I still can’t decide if it’s an optimistic take on the future or not, but I enjoyed it either way.
Though Smoke Shall Hide the Sun by Brit Mandelo. Here’s a piece of fiction that feels particularly of a time—vampires and werewolves, oh my! But, hey, that was a big trend for a while for a reason. It’s fun!
Heads Will Roll by Lish McBride. This feels like the concept for a YA TV series. I’d watch the heck out of it, honestly. Percy Jackson vibes, too.

And here, I’m splitting the post, because a 5,000-page book deserves more than one post worth of review. (And, frankly, I feel like I should get more than one week’s worth of blog post out of that much reading!)

After a great deal of googling, I managed to find the actual quote, which is similar but not quite what I was thinking:> Pop culture writing is about ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. Literature is about extraordinary people in ordinary circumstances. ↩
I also pulled out a great quote:> “At the end of things, which comes closer every minute, you will look back and you will see the path of your life. Do you want that girl to be a cringing swot, a spinster who loved and lost; or do you want to be strong enough to design your life to your own specifications? I assure you, I shall hate you either way. But you shouldn’t hate yourself. ↩
> Carl says a delivery came for me and it is waiting behind the candy counter. When I look, I see two wooden crates. One is stuffed with feather pillows and one is not. The one without pillows holds twenty sticks of dynamite. The other holds four bottles of nitro, which are put to bed on nice soft pillows because nitro gets sore if someone wakes it accidentally. ↩