Sarah Pinsker

Overall, a great collection of SF short stories. I didn’t care much for the first three or four, which tended toward very short koan-like weird little stories of the sort I dislike that present little vignettes without resolution. Just, “here’s this weird situation. Isn’t it sad/ironic/outrageous?” But then we get to the longer stories with more meat on their bones, and they tended to be terrific, stories with plot and character development and the sorts of narrative things I like. show more These were some of my favorites:

"The Low Hum of Her" - A more contemporary golem story. Touching. ****

"In Joy, Knowing the Abyss Behind" - A heart-rending story of a marriage and a burden of guilt and a missed chance but ultimately about love. *****

"Wind Will Rove" - The travelers on a generational ship are torn between preserving and forgetting the past, and a history teacher considers what’s worth saving and why. ****

"Our Lady of the Open Road" - In the near, not necessarily dystopic but certainly bleak future, a band perpetually on the road, going from one dive or make-shift live-music venue to the next in their barely legal cooking grease–powered van, stay true to their punk values in the face of the rise of holographic performances. ****1/2

"The Narwhal" - A gig worker takes a job driving what turns out to be a rather extraordinary whale of a car. It won me over with this: “Scenic routes would take too long, even the kind you drove through on your way to your destination. Ditto state parks and national monuments and reptile museums. She added them to her collection, for another trip she’d take someday. She’d spend two months, she told herself. She’d stop at every historic house, every kitschy roadside attraction. Every single one.” I really felt that. ****

"And Then There Were (N-One)" - Last but not least, a murder mystery. The protagonist gets an invitation to SarahCon, traveling through a multiverse portal to a hotel on a remote island where hundreds of Sarah Pinskers from alternate realities congregate. When one of the Sarahs turns up dead, hundreds of other Sarahs are suspects. Cleverly plotted, but best for its philosophical look at the roads not taken.
Some wry easter eggs from this alternate-reality story:
“Two of the awards looked like they had the shape to be the murder weapon, and one of them looked like it had the weight as well: the Nebula, a three-dimensional rectangular block of Lucite, shot through with stars and planets.”
“The rest of the bag was filled with the usual odds and ends I carried: pens, gum, emergency flashlight, loose change. A dog-eared paperback novel called Parable of the Trickster.”
***** show less

Sarah Pinsker is my favorite contemporary writer of short sf&f, so I was excited to pick up Lost Places, her new collection. It contains twelve stories, a couple of which I've read before, but most of which were new to me. Eleven were published in various venues, including some obscure (to me, anyway) anthologies, plus there's "Science Facts!", which is original to this collection.

One can sense Pinsker pushing herself here: in her first collection, Sooner or Later Everything Falls into the show more Sea, there were a number of long-form, character-focused pieces, with strong prose but otherwise told in what you might call a conventional style, like "In Joy, Knowing the Abyss Behind," "The Narwhal," "Wind Will Rove," "And Then There Were (N-One)," "Our Lady of the Open Road," and "Sooner or Later Everything Falls into the Sea." Sure, there were a number of pieces that were more experimental in tone and format, but they were sprinkled throughout the collection. Lost Places has more of those experimental pieces, fewer of those conventional narratives. Most notable is "I Frequently Hear Music in the Very Heart of the Noise," a sort of free-association jazz-induced fever dream about a fictional musician peppered with appearances by all sort of real residents of Jazz-Age New York City. I'm not sure I quite got this one, but I enjoyed the experience of reading it regardless and am certain I will come back to it someday.

But there's also "Left the Century to Sit Unmoved," about a weird swimming hole that occasionally swallows people up and "Remember This for Me," about an amnesiac artist trying to prepare a retrospective exhibition of her life. I can't say that they all worked for me, but I appreciated that Pinsker is clearly pushing herself. I did really like "A Better Way of Saying," which was my favorite piece in the collection, about a young Jewish boy who discovers a magic power than he can only use in very specific circumstances. Like much of Pinsker's work, it engages with the power of art and storytelling itself: in this case, cinema and journalism and their power to remake the world.

Two stories are low-key horror transmitted via media itself. The first is "Two Truths and a Lie," about a woman who discovers she was once a child participant on a weird local television program she had totally forgotten about; the second is "Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather," about an English folk ballad about a man whose heart is literally stolen by his lover, only the story is in the form of commenters on  a lyrics website trying to analyze the story. They sort of engage with what you might call the "creepypasta" genre, but are both more interesting and clever than that.

Four stories are structured somewhat similarly in a way that I found frustrating. "Our Flag Was Still There," "Everything Is Closed Today," "Escape from Caring Seasons," and "The Mountains His Crown" all begin very promisingly. "Our Flag Was Still There" is about people who act as human flags in a future America. "Everything Is Closed" is a prescient vision of the COVID lockdowns; published in 2019, it posits a world where a series of terrorist attacks have closed most places, so everyone has nowhere to go—and many people are therefore unemployed and at loose ends. (Many communications networks are down, so people can't take solace in the Internet as we did in the real world.) The main character, a part-time librarian, teaches a group of local girls to skate and so inadvertently begins to create a network of resistance. "Escape from Caring Seasons" is a strong piece of "if this goes on—" storytelling, about algorithms that have more say in medical care for the elderly than human beings; it follows a woman making a desperate escape from the residential community she designed as all its features are weaponized against her. "The Mountains His Crown" is set in some kind of future world or on a space colony, where an emperor is imposing his top-down will on what crops local farmers must grow. All four are well-told and engaging... and come to a stop at the moment the main characters decide on an act of resistance.

I found this acceptable once, but once it became a pattern, I became frustrated. How did these acts of resistance play out? The decision having been made, what were the consequences? What came of the flag who chose to speak up? How did the skater girls organize? Did the algorithms get revised? Did the farmers face repercussions from the emperor? It felt like kind of a cop out: resistance to the large structures that govern our lives can often feel hard to imagine. It's easy to write sf that just gives a moment of hope, but I think it can do more, it can show us how that hope might play out in practice. It's easy to say "oh a better world is possible" but what sf can do is demonstrate how through hard work that better world can come into being. Somewhat amusingly, a character in the collection's final story, "Science Facts!", summed up my discontent: "That isn't an ending. [...] That's where the story begins. A good story would go on from there to tell us what they all did next." That isn't to say these aren't good stories. But I did feel like Pinsker was holding herself back somewhat when there was another story to be told. (I guess I'm saying I want the skater girls novels? I am given to understand, though, that "Everything Is Closed" takes place in the world of her first novel, A Song for a New Day, which I haven't yet read.).

I didn't mean to touch on every story, but find that I almost have, so I'll discuss the last two to complete the set. "The Court Magician" is a dark, well-told fantasy story; like many of Pinsker's fantasies, it's about power and its dangers. Other than "Better of Way of Saying," though my favorite story in the collection was the final one, "Science Facts!" It's told in the collective first person by a group of preteen girl scouts (though not, seemingly, Girl Scouts) on a backpacking trip. Like some of Pinsker's work, the sfnal element is slight and comes into the story late, but effective in the way it sews up the themes of the story and connects everything together. A great evocation of the power of camping, the dangers of wilderness, the social dynamics of preteens, and the strangeness of the plant world.

Pinsker has written, according to ISFDB, over fifty works of short fiction. Between this volume and her first collection, I don't think even half of it has been collected yet. I look forward to more collections of it... and some day a magisterial set of The Complete Short Fiction of Sarah Pinsker hardcovers, surely? show less

“She hadn’t realized music could reach inside you.”

What an unputdownable book! It wasn’t because of the plot – it was because of the characters’ feelings, experiences, choices, growth. There was music everywhere, too, even when no one was playing.

I liked how Sarah Pinsker created her near future world. It does not feel dystopian, since we are looking at it from the inside. It does feel prescient, though. For so many of the characters, this is the status quo, this is how things show more are (evil monopolizing tech corporations included) – until they accept it no longer.

Both Luce and Rosemary are fascinating POV characters to follow – somehow, the mundane stuff becomes as exciting as when they experience something awesome for the first time. I loved both their journeys. When the POV’s finally converged, my heart melted, it felt so right. Isn’t it wonderful when such book moments happen to you?

I am trying to remember when I last read a book that described playing music, listening to music, having music inside you in such a fitting, true way… and I cannot remember. I wanted a playlist for this book so badly! Guess what, I found one :) Or rather: of course there was a playlist. It’s on Spotify, made by the author. Apparently, the chapter titles are song titles. This is so cool :))), even though it’s not quite the same thing as listening to Luce’s music. But I will listen for sure…

“Playing music was the fire that kept the monsters at bay. Nothing could touch me in the middle of a song.”

People made powerful by creating relationships and connections, being stubborn and finding a way, and the power of music – all this brought me joy. show less

Sarah Pinsker is one of my favorite writers of short sf&f, but this is the first of her novels (she has written two now) that I have picked up. It's set in the near future, and weaves in perspectives from four different family members on the Pilot, a brain implant that allows people to multitask. Of the two parents, one wants it for work and the other wants no part of it; of the two children, one gets it but it never works quite right, and the other can't have it because she is show more seizure-prone.

Pinsker does a great a job inhabiting the third-person limited perspective of all four characters, and her skill as a short-story writer really comes through here in the way that the very short chapters always end at just the right moment, a sharp line of emotional observation that recasts what has gone before in the scene. Since I have become a parent, books about parents have struck me differently; it's not so much reading about kids in danger (as I know some people say, such as my wife), but parents trying to figure out what is right for their kids. I got very anxious reading the scenes of Val and Julie trying to make these decisions. Pinsker is quite skilled at depicting people making bad choices for bad reasons while making it totally understandable, something she has in common with one of my favorite writers, George Eliot. Val and Julie want to be good parents and good spouses, but just like all of us, they do not always succeed.

I do have some quibbles. I would have liked to have seen more of the wider social impacts of the Pilot technology; specifically, it bothered me that there were only Pilots. I felt certain that such a technology would inspire a raft of imitators, which would bring its own problems that would fit well into Pinsker's story. Second, why does each chapter have the name of the viewpoint character up top? I can tell who it is by reading!

But overall, this is great. I was liking it all along, but I knew it had won me over when the end of one chapter made me cry, not just little tears, but being on the verge of sobbing! Maybe I am a soft touch, but hey, touching us is what fiction is supposed to do. show less