Here are my short story recommendations for May. If you’re a fan of Sarah Pinsker and haven’t read her collection Sooner or Later Everything Falls Into The Sea, I think this month’s lists will be of special interest to you.
The Girl Who Never Was by Harold R. Thompson (Pod Castle, episode 782):
In the The Girl Who Never Was, we follow an illustrator as he takes a commission for a children’s book cover. The MC never had children of his own, his wife having died of cancer fifteen years earlier. He reveals as much when he meets with Kat, the children’s book author. Yet when the MC arrives home that day, it would very much appear that he suddenly has a teenage daughter he had forgotten all about.
The story progresses as the MC tries to figure out what exactly is going on. Is he suffering from some sort of severe memory loss? Is someone trying to con him? Has he quite simply gone mad? On top of all this, he his relationship with Kat develops, and he is forced to consider how much she needs to know about this strange, maybe-real-maybe-not teenage daughter.
Despite being about something as depressing as the loss of a loved one and clinging to the past and what could have been, this was a very cozy read. I love the strangeness of the mystery daughter showing up all of the sudden. And I love how the MC doesn’t just accept this intrusion but reacts like a real human being. And at the same time, his longing for the past means he can’t just ignore the teenage daughter.
Hey, George by Valerie Valdes (Escape Pod, episode 882):
In “Hey, George”, technology allows for a sort neural override and temporary memory and skill transfer, so that a person can have a given set of skills while at work which they otherwise don’t have and the ability to transfer their memories to the person taking over the job. In the story, this technology is used to create the perfect butlers for the ultra rich, generic George characters who will have the same skills and memories as the George performing the same job the day before even though the person beneath the neural overlay is someone else.
The story follows one of the people working as George, serving a rich elderly woman. The plot mostly consists of various scenes showcasing the implications of the speculative technology. It’s only later in the story when the rich woman’s estranged daughter is introduced that the plot really starts. The daughter has made life choices which have resulted in her being cut off by the mother and pitted the two against each other; now, the daughter is in need of money to help her own daughter.
It wasn’t the plot that really hooked me, though. It was the way Valdes uses the speculative George element to highlight inherent inequalities in society, the way not being aware of your privileges can lead you mistreat those without these same privileges, and how erasing/ignoring a person’s individuality and identity is used to keep them down. On top of that, there’s a nice little detail about not trusting too much in the infallibility of technologies.
Sooner or Later Everything Falls Into The Sea by Sarah Pinsker (Lightspeed, Issue 69 & The Sooner or Later Everything Falls Into The Sea anthology):
The story takes place in a future where the super rich have taken permanent refuge on cruise ships and those left on land have to struggle in a wounded world. The plot starts when our protagonist, a once semi-famous musician washes ashore in the broken world. When she comes to, we learn that she has fallen over board. However, we quickly learn that the protagonist isn’t providing all the information she could offer, and maybe she is holding back most of the truth.
As the story progresses, we follow our washed-up and washed-out musician as she is struggling with the truth, with interacting with a person she has learned to look down upon, an with surviving in a world that she no longer knows.
“Sooner or Later Everything Falls Into The Sea” is another great example of what Pinsker does best, creating believable near-future worlds which are simultaneously full of hope and, if not down right post-apocalyptic then at least bleak and bleeding. She does this in “Our Lady of the Open Road”, in her novel We Are Satellites, and she does it so, so well in “Sooner or Later Everything Falls Into The Sea”. On top of that, there’s a well-crafted unreliable narrator and a spot on critique on how the 1% treats the rest of the world and how those in the middle of society in turn treats those on the bottom of society.
Our Lady of the Open Road by Sarah Pinsker (Asimov’s & The Sooner or Later Everything Falls Into The Sea anthology) – I reviewed this way, way back in the September 2020 Story Recommendation post, but re-reading it was such a joy that it got to be on the monthly list twice.
And Then There Were (N-One) by Sarah Pinsker (Uncanny, Issue 15 & The Sooner or Later Everything Falls Into The Sea anthology):
In a world where cross-dimensional travelling and communication has recently been discovered, various iterations of Sarah Pinsker meet at the first PinskerCon. The con takes place in a hotel on an isolated island. And if you have read Agatha Christie’s And Then There None, then you can probably guess that a storm comes in, cutting off the hotel from the mainland and then one of the attendees is found dead.
Normally, I’m not a big fan of authors writing about authors or generally using self-inserts. Here, though, Sarah Pinsker’s role as an author does not really play a part in the story (the version of Pinsker who acts as the protagonist is an insurance agent). Instead, the self-insert and the MC’s constant pondering on the small events which changed her life so drastically in other dimensions lead to the characters being incredibly detailed and feeling very much like real human beings.
Having recently read And Then There None as well, I really appreciate the choices Pinsker made in where to stick with and deviate from Christie’s murder mystery. That, and Pinsker uses the speculative element of the multiple iterations of herself in a clever way to obstruct and affect the murder investigation.
Murder mysteries are difficult to pull off, especially in a short story, but Pinsker more than manages.
That’s it from me. I hope to see you around in June.
This month, I’ve read stories from Pod Castle, Uncanny, Clarkesworld, Escape Pod, Flash Fiction Online, Apex, and Sarah Pinsker’s 2019 short story collection Sooner or Later Everything Falls Into The Sea.
Toby Backman 