Tor.com March 2022
“Hush” by Mary Anne Mohanraj
“The Loneliness of the Long Distance Reporter” by Daniela Tomova
Reviewed by Geoff Houghton
The first original story published in the March edition of Tor was “Hush” by Mary Anne Mohanraj. It is set on an Earth-like planet in a galaxy that has been jointly colonised by humans and many technologically equivalent alien species. The humans of the planet Antira are far away from Earth in both space and time, but the author does not accept the hopeful premise that humanity will eventually learn to make the future better than our past history. She believes that the worst faults and foibles of humanity will travel with us to the stars.
The protagonist is a middle-aged interstellar flight attendant who has returned to her home world at the end of her routine scheduled tour of duty to find that her planet is in turmoil and under curfew. An unpleasant populist party has whipped up anti-alien feelings in scenes only too reminiscent of Oswald Moseley in pre-war England or the Nazis in 1930s Germany. Our very ordinary heroine takes upon herself the thankless task of escorting a young alien girl away from racist border control officers at the spaceport and through the baying crowds.
This tale is deliberately set in a futuristic SF environment but the story that it tells was already old when writing was first invented. Even seemingly normal, apparently civilised people can only too easily be led to hate and fear those who differ and when they do run amok it can only be hoped that the few who do not succumb can still display the best of humanity and win out over the mindless mob mentality.
The second story in March is “The Loneliness of the Long Distance Reporter” by Daniela Tomova. It is set in the present day Norwegian Arctic with one deviation from our baseline reality that converts it to both fantasy and horror. In this alternative world it is an accepted norm that buried corpses that are unearthed for any reason will reanimate as zombies. The female narrator is a journalist who has made a speciality of extreme sport reporting. She has travelled to Northern Norway to cover a race that certainly qualifies as extreme; a long distance ice-sled race between the living and the undead. This is a novelette rather than a short story (11,000 plus words) and, although it is light on blood and gore, it most certainly falls firmly in the hard core horror category.
The narrative begins in conventional prose but rapidly segues into a dream-like surrealism, except that this is the sort of dream from which you really, desperately want to wake up. Whether the narrator survives, succumbs or possibly even wakes up to find that some of the more obscure events were not real is deliberately left unexplained.
Geoff Houghton lives in a leafy village in rural England. He is a retired Healthcare Professional with a love of SF and a jackdaw-like appetite for gibbets of medical, scientific and historical knowledge.