Some of the Best of Tor.com 2021

by Ruoxi Chen

I was never an actor. I found each movie entrancing in the first few showings, but after a while my mind started looking for new entertainment. If my sister’s challenge was “How can I read this differently?” mine was “How would I improve this?” I started looking for scenes I’d cut, scenes I’d add, different ways of getting the same information across. All of which bled over into my own lines, because once you start looking at that sort of thing, you can’t help but ask which lines you would change.

I do not think I have ever met a truly brave person. If someone seems to be doing something brave it is usually only because they are trying to avoid something else of which they are more frightened—being left alone or thought a coward. The only person I ever met who this did not seem true of was Hercules, but still I would not go so far as to call him brave; it was more an insensibility of some kind, a sort of useful deafness.