By Sarah Pinsker
I borrowed this from the town library in April 2024 and read it over a prolonged period. It’s a collected set of short fiction, with not much of a discernible theme except ideas of identity and soft sci-fi. Overall it was a bit underwhelming: the fiction had little in the way of beauty or magnificence, but some individual stories had wonderful conceits, so I’ve included them below.
This story is about a man who is fitted with an electronic prosthetic arm, which dreams and yearns to be with the rest of itself: a stretch of highway two lanes wide, hundreds of miles away. He dreams of it, desperately; whenever he looks down at it, he sees the hot dusty tarmac with trucks and cars thundering over it.
The arm is infected around the chip - when it is removed and replaced, the visions vanish. We’re left pondering about the nature of yearning and consciousness, and whether the chip was truly dreaming, or whether the effects of the infection were interpreted and assimilated by the man himself.
A horror piece about a woman who dreams, regularly, of her child. Not her real children, not her family, but of a different child, watching her in different episodes of her life, as a baby, as a student, as a toddler, with kids of her own. She’s not alone; she finds a community of such women online, all with their own dream children who grow to blot out every other concern, every other dream.
The women all have the same dream, of their children emerging from the sea on one particular beach, and so they congregate there, those who can make it, and wait for days on end. Eventually, they see their children in the waves, swimming towards them like creatures of the ocean, who have always been swimming and will never stop. They draw closer and closer, beautiful, their eyes darkly glittering.
This is a dystopian story about a war in the recent past, whose surviving soldiers have agreed to draw a veil over their memories: they have no recollection of the war, and do not believe they ever participated, for all but one day of the year, where the veil is drawn back and they are allowed to remember the atrocities. An interesting idea about who we are when we lose our memories, and what is valuable to society, but not that well executed.
This eponymous story is another dystopian one about a near-future world where the rich abscond to permanently-sailing cruise ships, entertained by people trapped on board by contracts or money. One of the main characters is a woman making a living on an island near the coast, and the other is a rock star who jumped off the ship to escape. She washes ashore and is found, and, fearing she’ll be turned in, leaves for the mainland. She’s woefully unprepared, but the other woman goes after her, and they decide to continue together, only to find their way blocked by a huge waterway caused by a cataclysm. An interesting idea about what we owe to each other after the world has ended, and our capacity for sudden and unexpected change.
A WWII-era story of a father who constructs a robotic grandmother for his daughter after the real one passes away. A secret cavity in her chest allows them to escape Germany to friendlier countries, and eventually the child, initially reluctant to accept the humming, metallic woman, accepts her, and teaches her the recipes and songs her grandmother taught her. I didn’t quite get the point of this one - I’d say it would have been a nice vignette except the characterisation was a little too neat and 2D.
A story about two girls in college who are fascinated with unsolved murders, and decide to build and sell little models of the houses in which they happened, complete with an AI model containing information about the events and people involved. They sell like wildfire, and even help to solve some outstanding cases, but one of the characters falls out with the other after she creates a model of her childhood home and feeds it all the data she knows about the former.
A shorter one about a home for people who live through different moments in time. Just three pages long, and it barely went anywhere.
A longer one, and one of the better ones. It’s about an architect and his wife, told from the wife’s perspective. Originally bursting with ideas and passion for architecture, the architect is asked to help with a secret government project. On returning, he’s devastated by what he’s done, and loses all energy for his job, retaining it only for his family and the treehouse he builds for them.
This is told through the frame of his last moments: he has a stroke, and it’s told through flashbacks as the wife sits at his bedside. When he becomes coherent again, briefly, he sketches plans and drawings, and the wife recalls that the day he came back, he cried of a prison, of a stranded people trapped by the government, and she slowly realises that the project he was asked to build was a panopticon to keep them under surveillance and unable to leave. She finds in the treehouse the original plans, and realises there’s a blind spot: he left them hope. At the close, the wife and her half-coherent husband sketch out plans for escape, and atonement for what he’s done.
I liked it! The alluded to horror, the mystery of who the people are, and the touches of the cosmic prison are really well executed, and the framing device of their life together in flashbacks is lovely, achieving a rather difficult blend of making me enjoy both parts.
A story of a child in a village who is chosen to help a captain navigate past the sirens who have taken residence in the bay, and are preventing all passage in and out. The child is hermaphroditic, and thus immune to the first-level wiles of the sirens. However, when they approach, recognising one of their own, they take the child, who goes willingly, desiring to become a siren and leave their human life. However, they remember the kindness of the people in the village, and choose to retain their humanity, successfully navigating past them, and coming to new acceptance of who they are.
I thought this was a bildungsroman done slightly poorly - the growth feels a little saccharine and contrived, if not downright woolly.
A harder sci-fi story about a generation ship which, sometime in the recent past, experiences a blackout where an employee purges their databanks, leaving them little knowledge of their cultural heritage. The main character in the present is a history teacher in the school, attempting to convince his charges of the importance of that history.
It investigated the questions of what we owe to our past and our descendants, and whether our history is even worth retaining in such alien circumstances as a generation ship near the start of its voyage. Nicely done, although it could have been a bit more philosophical and thought-out.
About a band in the near future on permanent tour, trying to make enough money to survive in a world where the music and entertainment industry has been ravaged by holo companies offering the entertainment as at-home holograms. An examination of the value of live music and in-person interaction, although, as characteristic of this collection, uncertain about what it is and what it’s trying to achieve.
A story about a woman who is hired to keep an older lady company as she drives her recently-deceased mother’s car across the country to a buyer. The car is a novelty: a giant whale, with tens of mysterious buttons inside doing things a car shouldn’t normally be able to do. When the car breaks down in a small town, the woman uncovers a local mystery about an Event which took place decades ago, to which is dedicated a museum with a diorama showing the car and the lady’s mother there.
It ends on a bit of a cliffhanger, and I liked the cosmic horror touches near the end, but again a bit wishy-washy.
(pronounced n minus one)
This was a good one, about an interdimensional conference of the same woman from parallel universes. On the first day evening, one of them is found dead, and the story becomes a murder mystery. It eventually turns out that the woman who organised the conference (who also discovered the principles of interdimensional travel and made first contact) wanted to escape the fame, and killed the version of herself she thought the least valuable, a druggie DJ who’d lost all contact with her friends and family, and was likely to overdose very soon. The murder mystery was inherently confusing (given that everyone involved, all the suspects, the victim, the assorted others) are the same woman with the same name, but it could have been done better, as could the central conceit, which was a little woolly. I did however like the depiction of some of the weirdnesses of meeting hundreds of copies of yourself, all slightly different.