I was going to give it three stars only because the other Torchwood book I read was so terrible that anything would look good next to it, but it really only warrants two. Harmless and not actively annoying, as "Pack Animals" was.

Also the little Victorian-era adventure was kind of neat. ( )

Some good stories, some quite sad to read and others fun. Recommended to Torchwood fans. ( )

Torchwood short story collection. I liked the ones set outside the timeframe of the TV series best. I like to see a collection that focused primarily on the earlier teams. Some of the stories are related to and tie together the novels. ( )

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2007827.html

This was the first, and I think only, book of short stories about Torchwood, and a fine collection it is too. We start with "The Baby Farmers" by David Llewellyn, set in the Victorian Torchwood era which generated so much fanfic from just a few mentions on screen, a lovely canonification of this setting; and then there's what will presumably be the last ever Tosh/Owen story, "Kaleidoscope" by Sarah Pinborough, set in the Jack-less interval between Seasons 1 and 2, where I can partly interpret the alien tech of the title as fannish gaze on the characters.

There are then two linked stories set after Season 2, "The Wrong Hands" by none other than long-ago Who script editor Andrew Cartmel, an excellent creepy tale about an evil alien baby, and "Virus" by James Moran, where the baby's father turns up and which I'm afraid I found by some way the weakest in the book.

And we finish with the title story, "Consequences" by Joe Lidster, which brings up front the experiences of a woman who has been a briefly glimpsed background character in several of the previous Torchwood novels, and how her life has been turned into a story written by someone else. I thought it was rather clever. ( )

Virgin's final book of Doctor Who short stories, Decalog 3, was a sequence of stories in whiceach story was a consequence of the last. (and circular, in that the last story fed back into the first) It was imaginatively titled 'Consequences'. Thirteen and a half years later BBC Books have repeated the concept for the first book of Torchwood short stories, right down to the title.

It's surprisingly successfully executed. Torchwood seems well suited to these shorter episodes; indeed several of the more successful novels have essentially been a framing story around a series of episodic events. One of the better decisions is varying the iterationsof the Torchwood team for stories - the opening story is a tale of early Torchwood, the second the team seen in the first two seasons and the more closely interlinked last three are the survivors of the second season finale. If I had one minor niggle, it'd be that a pre-Gwen story with Suzie Costello would've been more interesting to me than a straightforward first season team story. That's a minor concern though, the stories are all strong, from David Llewellyn's take on Torchwood as a Victorian X Files to Joe Lidster's typically, beautifully oblique finale. In between, Sarah Pinborough's Kaleidoscope is bittersweet and heartwrenching, Cartmel's The Wrong Hands straightforward but smart and James Moran's Virus probably the best Ianto story in any medium, a perfect balancing of comedy and thrills. A fine conclusion to the strongest set of Torchwood novels so far. ( )