Sarah Pinsker

This book was the perfect autumn vacation read. Set against the backdrop of an old apple orchard, rife with rumored ghosts, it is a beautiful reflection of how personality and woodcarving go hand-in-hand. If you are looking for a spooky novella, look no further for your new ghost story read.

Pinsker drops us into a vivid little pocket of the ghosthunting world, and draws us out the other end by reminding us that we all come from somewhere/someone. Remembering is painful but important, and it show more is vital to be honest with yourself. Ow.

A very tantalizing read for anyone obsessed with haunt attractions, too. show less

In A Song for a New Day, there is the Before, that is, before the virus hit, and before the terror attacks on large public gatherings. And then there is the After, when large gatherings like concerts and performances are banned.

Tied in with both Before and After is Luce Cannon, who had been on her way to stardom with her hit song Blood and Diamonds. And despite the ban on concerts, she’s persisting in playing live, via a series of illegal performances. Then there’s Rosemary Laws, who show more doesn’t quite know of life in the Before. She lives in a virtual world, in what is known as the Hoodspace, where she works her online job, helping customers with their drone deliveries. She isn’t good with crowds – or real live people in general – as she works in isolation on her parents’ farm. But a job opportunity comes up with a company called StageHoloLive or SHL to discover new musicians for their virtual reality performances. That means going out into the real world and finding them.

Reading this book in today’s COVID-19 panicked world, I can so easily see this happening, and in a sense, it has, in parts of the world. Cities in Hubei province in China have been locked down. A live fashion show in Italy was altered in that models walked the runway to an empty theatre and the show was live-streamed. Travelers in a hotel in Tenerife have been quarantined.

And I wonder, how far will this go?

Could life end up like in A Song for A New Day?

I really enjoyed the music aspect of the book and wish there could have been a soundtrack to go along with it! Pinsker effortlessly captures that magic of being in a concert, amidst a sea of fans all singing the lines together. She’s a musician herself and her love for music is evident throughout.

Rosemary is a fascinating character, having lived all her life on the farm, she’s not used to, well, people. And when she begins her new job, she has to attend concerts, be among a crowd, take public transport. Life in the After means isolation booths in restaurants, and interstate buses. It means drones delivering you everything you need. Imagine growing up in that and never being out and among other people besides your family. This new job requires such growth from her and Pinsker gradually coaxes it out, nothing too shocking or dramatic, and in the end, satisfying.

A Song for a New Day is an entertaining and immersive read that will stay with me for a long time. show less

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