Reactor, March 2026

“Tatterdemalion” by Michael Cisco

“Cutting Corners” by Yoon Ha Lee

“Blade Through the Heart” by Carrie Vaughn

Reviewed by Axylus

Many (but certainly not all) fantasy genre stories begin with a protagonist who is relatively passive—things happen to that character. Then the protag makes a fateful decision, and begins taking actions that impact others, for good (Stephen R. Donaldson’s Mordant’s Need duology) or for ill (Stephen King’s Carrie). In “Tatterdemalion” by Michael Cisco, the protagonist is initially a “dreamy good-for-nothing” young woman named Temedy. Wandering off from her place of work one day, she encounters a strange old man in the abandoned camp of a divinatory sect. The man asks her to search for a small box containing a document. Temedy finds what he requests, but lies to him, telling him she didn’t. She opens the box. The document is a deed to a magical city, and this eventually brings about her dire fate.

“Tatterdemalion” has a clearly-delineated exposition section that introduces the milieu. The rising action before the climax is relatively engaging, featuring decisions that express Temedy’s “weak and foolish” nature. After the story’s climax, however, she transforms (no spoilers!) into the exemplar of a cautionary tale. The story leans heavily on being amply equipped with interesting details that cover over shortcomings in the plot itself, which is a bare-bones thing at best. Despite its plot deficiencies, the reading experience is bolstered by descriptions that are elaborate without being excessive. Unsurprisingly, “Tatterdemalion” will appeal to readers who enjoy wandering through interesting milieus. [By the way, what’s with the “soul burner” that’s flouting the Chekhov’s Gun principle? Just random coolness, I guess.]

In the past I have moaned about fiction in which every line, every detail, every passage, and every description is extremely well written, but the tale as a whole is deficient in some key aspect of storytelling. Well, here we go again. Setting aside unorthodox avant-garde or stream-of-consciousness offerings, stories have both a plot structure and an emotional structure. Genre fiction (such as SF/F/H) in particular tends to adhere faithfully to this principle. A fundamental similarity of both structures is that they incorporate rising action/tension, a climax, and then some sort of falloff to a new equilibrium. And although I hesitate to state axiomatically that the climaxes of both structures always and everywhere occur at precisely the same moment, I find it difficult to imagine how it could be other than thus. “Cutting Corners” by Yoon Ha Lee is a story that opts for the strategy of completely omitting the natural climax of its emotional structure. In my view, that means it also omits the climax of its plot.

The story follows a crew of expendable human pilots who are tapped to replace expensive drones as a cost-efficient tactic in a space war. It goes into believable detail about their lives and the (engaging, if somewhat bleak) milieu. Much of the emotional progression of the story focuses on characters who are competent and relatable as they wend their way through the fabric of pretending-to-hope in a situation that is objectively hopeless. Pilots worry, pilots die, and in the end the survivors find a critical way to break away from their allotted fate. The denouement is extremely brief, but it is there. In this context, “worrying” is the rising tension, “dying” is (allegedly) the dark night of the soul, and the pilots enacting their ultimate decision is the aftermath. The ending is somewhat unobtrusively signposted, but the signposting is also there. But what is the emotional climax? That happens when the pilots actually make the decision to follow their unorthodox course. How do I know that moment was the climax? Easy: everything that happened prior to that decision was its cause, and everything that happened after that decision was its effect. The entire emotional momentum of the story was building up to the moment that the pilots decide to make their escape, but readers never saw the moment that decision was made. That moment does not appear in the text.

I earlier referred to the dark night of the soul as “alleged” because that too was given only the barest of mentions, in a largely emotionless tone. Yoon Ha Lee even had an opening for a genuine dark night of the soul, but explicitly did not take advantage of it, in the death of a pilot named Candace (nicknamed “Wei Chi”), who was lovers with Latkiewicz (“Scalpel”): “…Candace… abandoned her habitual stealth and sacrificed herself to hold the front. I couldn’t keep James Latkiewicz from going after her. Worse, I didn’t need to, because he didn’t, no matter how much it hurt him to let the night take her.” Back in the dim, distant past of somewhere around 1979 or so I read USMC Major (later Colonel) Gregory “Pappy” Boyington’s autobiography, Baa Baa Black Sheep. An aviator named Cokey Hoffman was shot down at one point, and in a later dogfight someone in the squadron attacked the enemy while shouting, “That’s for Cokey, you bastards!” That scene was memorable enough to stick in my mind for nearly half a century. Ahem… No, Lee didn’t necessarily have to go quite as big as that emotionally (even though that was a real event), but anything would have been better than zero.

What results when the climax does not appear on the page? Regrettably, the emotional structure is decapitated. As a result, “Cutting Corners” is seamless, flawless, admirably well-written, and emotionally nil. By “nil” I don’t mean “bleak”; bleakness is an observable emotional state. Instead, whatever emotions the characters had were largely inaccessible, so the story did not evoke any response in me. I didn’t sit on the edge of my seat, pump my fist in the air, or even lean forward in anticipation. My eyes never widened. My breath never quickened. I did not feel sad or bleak. Nothing. I was relentlessly unmoved.

Many readers will look at the words on the page of “Cutting Corners” and say “Excellent!” And they are absolutely right. Everything on the page is excellent. But I look at what is not there and say, the emotional journey was hollowed out, reduced to a pale shell, decimated. And eliding the climax means erasing the tale’s bid to becoming memorable. This story is recommended, based on the quality of the text on the page, but it coulda been much better.

Poking around the Reactor website, I discovered that “Blade Through the Heart” is the sixth they’ve published in a series of stories by Carrie Vaughn about the protagonist, a soldier named Graff whose artificial augmentations make him nearly indestructible. If you like this one, you’re getting Christmas early this year, since the others are still available on their site as well. The events in this one occur about one month in-universe time after a story published in 2020, “Sinew and Steel and What They Told,” so reading that one before this is an option. I didn’t check for how the others fall on the timeline.

In this tale, Graff and the crew of the space ship Visigoth are tasked by the powerful Trade Guild to rescue a medical outreach mission that has been taken hostage. None of the rest of the crew are augmented like Graff, and they are suspicious of him. The twist is that the planet’s society is pre-industrial, living in castles and fighting with swords, bows and arrows, and primitive gunpowder-launched projectiles. This is a solid tale that Reactor describes as “space opera.” If that style is to your taste, then you’ll find this satisfactory, though it lacks any “wow” factor. Recommended.