Vanessa Fogg’s short story collection is an assortment of endings. Every story has one, obviously, but many of Fogg’s tales—which have appeared steadily for the past decade in publications like Lightspeed, Podcastle, and GigaNotoSaurus and are collected here for the first time—revel in the heartbreaking splendor of a slow, tragic end, whether that’s inscrutable angels ushering in the apocalypse or the fall of an imperial capital to barbarian hordes. Fogg excels at capturing the feeling of things breaking.

This is on display in the eponymous “House of Illusionists,” which provides an extreme example of Fogg’s love for tragic endings. In it, a pair of aged instructors in a fantasy version of imperial China work with their young students to bend their craft of casting illusions toward a transcendent escape from their civilization’s collapse. Outside the walls, an invading army forces their city toward an inexorable surrender. The details of an agonizing siege, and the imagined pillage that will follow, contrast with the beauty of the illusions which are wrought in the shelter of the school. All this builds toward a gut-wrenching climax.

Fogg also excels at sketching out the contours of a fantasy setting without getting bogged down in its details. This is a skill that gives her stories, most of which are fairly minimalist when it comes to the narrative, a weight which is derived from everything that is not on the page. There’s a feeling that the stories are built on a richly imagined world in the background. I was reading the collection on a trip, and the thick atmosphere and gorgeous details of Fogg’s stories made it a great collection to disappear into in an airport.

This is a characteristic that often gives her stories a dreamlike quality. For example, “An Address to the Newest Disciples of the Lost Words” highlights the tension Fogg successfully maintains between sharp foreground detail and background fantasy outlines, using epic fantasy settings to highlight the richness of the former. In this story, a magic practitioner in a desert academy reflects on their life, their training, and their decision to train in magic. An entire world and magical system are sketched out, but the story remains impressionistic, like a Japanese print. In this case, the minimalism of the narrative, with no climax or resolution, makes the detail that much more striking.

I was a boy of twelve when I first saw/heard/felt this Word. There was a woman at the night market of my hometown, performing Words by the river for free.

The anchor for this Word is wind.

This Word is restlessness coiled deep in the heart. It is a longing with a voice. (p. 173)

Longing is also woven through these stories. In “Wild Ones,” the urban fantasy piece that starts the collection, a mother worries about her daughter as she reaches the age when children—in what appears to be an otherwise normal world—participate in the “wild hunt” each evening, accompanying a goddess figure on flights through the clouds. The mother fears her daughter will not outgrow the longing for the open sky as most children do and that she will eventually choose not to return home. Playing on resonances with Peter Pan (1904) and the anxieties of parenthood, the piece explores the mother’s fear as she recalls her own time as an adolescent flying with the hunt and slowly realizes that it’s her, not her daughter, who is being lured back into the sky: “Why do we forget so much of our wild days? How do we lose the language of the wind?” (p. 7).

Another kind of longing is apparent in “Traces of Us,” which appeared in Neil Clarke’s Best Science Fiction of the Year anthology for 2019, and in which brain scan technology allows two lovers to overcome death through their longing for each other. It’s a poignant and subtle piece that comes to life with medical details highlighting Fogg’s career as a translator and editor of scientific articles. That background comes through not only in her crisp language and detail but in the sharp focus she can bring to scientific sensibilities, as in “The Wave” and “The Message”—two near-future science fiction pieces, the first of which deals with social media and sports in the age of climate change and the second the aftermath of an ambiguous SETI success.

Fogg’s stories deserve to be read more widely, then, and Interstellar Flight Press is to be applauded for bringing this collection to print. (My only complaint about the volume is its lack of a table of contents.) So much new fiction is published each month that it is almost impossible to keep up with all the worthy writers appearing, and small presses like Interstellar Flight do an important job offering volumes collecting excellent pieces that otherwise would be ephemeral. Even for someone who has run across Fogg before, this collection makes it possible to read work that may no longer be available online or anywhere else.

Shelter in gardens, academies, and family; solace through beauty, memory, and at times illusion: Fogg’s focus on endings and societies declining or being destroyed may hit harder today than when these stories were originally written, which is why her consistent emphasis on the power of beauty—if not to save then at least to somehow redeem such endings—is important. I sincerely hope there will be many more such lovely endings to come.