I have no idea how this collection of short stories by Sara Pinsker ended up on my list, but it is easily some of the best sci-fi I've read and the best short fiction since discovering Ted Chiang a while back. In my experience female authors seem to more frequently escape the boys-with-toys trap implicit in the genre and instead manage to write genuinely speculative fiction. In this sense, Pinsker follows in the footsteps of Le Guin and Jeminsin in creating possible universes that address genuine human problems to characters we care about. Of course, this is not meant to typecast her, and in other respects her writing is completely different from these other women. In this collection at least, most of the stories eschew any of the world-building I associate with the other two, and instead just drop you without explanation into a twisted future that insightfully illuminates some emotional situation.
So, for example, we find a woman who has lost her dream-child discovering a whole community of folks suffering from the same problem. Or a soldier and mother whose memory of a horrific war has been neurologically blocked except during the annual "Remembery Day" parade. And when we get to the inevitable dystopian stories about societal breakdown driving the wealthy to take a neverending cruise, or the utter hollowing out of rural America and the death of live music, the focus isn't on what happened or how it will all end, but on how people are coping, and what regular folks are like after the apocalypse. Even in the brilliant finale And Then There Were (N-One) the focus is not on the dizzying metaphysics of the multiverse but on the clever crime story plot the setting generates, and the deep questions it asks about all the counterfactual divergence points that create our identity.
A highly recommended collection.
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