reviewed by Leila May
Fiction | Story Collection. 320 pages. Small Beer Press: Easthampton, Massachusetts, 2019. Paperback $17.00. Available Here
One morning, you might find an envelope nestled between stacks of bills: an ordinary trifold invitation to a convention. You almost toss it aside, fearing it to be another “free” cruise, but there’s something odd about the sender: they have your name, down to the middle initial. Slicing the paper open, you realize this is no ordinary invitation. A version of yourself from a parallel world cracked the secret to interdimensional travel and is hosting a convention just for you. Sarah Pinsker explores fantastical scenarios like these in Sooner or Later Everything Falls into the Sea, a delightful inclusion into the world of speculative short stories. As with typical science fiction, Pinsker reshapes present-day issues into futuristic landscapes to question our reality and topics that we might find too personal. For instance, the titular story “Sooner or Later Everything Falls into the Sea,” chronicles a world where the rich and famous have left on ark-style cruise ships that sail around the world while the rest of humanity decays in a scavenging society. We follow a literal “washed-up” pop star from one of these ships and her relationship with the woman who saves her life. Pinsker deftly tackles climate change and stark economic inequality at a distance, warning of a future engulfed by our current refusal to mitigate these issues.
While climate change and economic inequality are massive topics marked by global systems like capitalism, Pinsker also stabs at individualistic topics of sexual identity, motherhood, and familial trauma. Take for example “In Joy Knowing the Abyss Behind,” where a dying architect is haunted by a prison he built for a crashed group of aliens: “‘Defenseless, harmless things. Their ship was destroyed. They’ve been in there four years, and the army wants me to design a newer, better place… ‘For the security of the country’ the lieutenant said.’” Though we follow this broken man, haunted by both what lies beyond and behind, the story is told through his wife’s perspective, giving us the lens of love to her husband, but also a stark hatred towards the country that manipulated a man into tortuous nationalism. Pinsker sketches the boundaries of morality in tenuous, shaky lines, leaving a blanket of tonal unease in the aftermath.
As the collection progresses, the stories grow in scale and scope. We start with the idea of a robot arm regaining sentience and remembering driving the open road in “A Stretch of Highway Two Lanes Wide,” but end with “And Then There Were (N-One),” where a quantologist draws in alternate reality versions of Sarah Pinsker to a Sarah Pinsker convention, only for a murder mystery to disrupt the activities. The blurring of walls between the author Pinsker, and the characters of Pinsker, are delightfully fresh. By inserting her own name and supposed life details into the story, the characters feel intimate and real, packed with dense motivations about love, loss, and identity. While the scale is large, the pacing takes place in a few days, allowing for introspection on how the smallest details can change a life and what is worth living (or killing) for in our lives.
Other stories draw from folklore and fantasy, like in “No Lonely Seafarer,” where a town plagued by Sirens forces an intersex child to face the mythical creatures alone. Themes of unbounding freedom after oppression and experiences of unique gender expression highlight the heart of these tales. Though they incorporate the fantastic, Pinsker harmonizes with themes of human experience. One of my favorite things about this collection is its representation. Sooner or Later Everything Falls into the Sea is packed with queer representation of all kinds and features people of color as complex, storied protagonists. In a genre classically defined by white male writers and characters accompanied by flat, over-sexualized love interests, Pinsker drafts real humans who are exploring these worlds with a distinct tie to their culture or identity.
My most beloved story in the collection is “Talking with Dead People” about two college roommates, Gwen and Eliza. The opening lines reveal the end of their friendship, “If I hadn’t called it quits on working with her, I would be a millionaire right now,” leading us on our own mystery as we try and reverse-engineer their relationship. Eliza and Gwen created the House of Whacks, an artificial intelligence museum complete with robot caricatures of famous cold case victims and suspects. Eliza is the one interested in the murders, dragging Gwen to crime scenes across the country, while Gwen is responsible for the intricate models and robotics. Through tight dialogue and strained communication, we learn this story is more than a comment on technology and a societal obsession with true crime, but also one about friendship and respect. Two college girls investigating unsolved mysteries is a familiar story in our world of podcasts and YouTube channels. But Pinsker takes this one step forward—what if they could actually solve these cases? Gwen and Eliza’s artificial intelligence soon begins to solve the crimes on their own, picking up clues investigators and countless people have missed.
Morbid curiosity is one thing, but Eliza soon blurs the boundaries between profit and respect for those who lost their lives, real people who now speak from beyond the grave in metal caricatures. We often forget that these true crime stories involve real people, real death, and real grief, something that gets swirled around in the background every time a murder case goes viral. In Gwen’s last line she seems to recognize this as well, though it takes a falling-out with Eliza to realize how invasive and morally dubious their machines turned out to be: “We were all just mysteries waiting for her to solve us.” To Eliza, and those in the real world who let the mystery go too far, people are dehumanized in the name of a great story, or a great profit.
Sarah Pinsker crafts a beautifully provocative collection of short stories that question how we maneuver within systemic issues and personal battles of morality and identity. Her worlds place us directly into the human experience, whether it be one we recognize or one in the distant future. You can find Sooner or Later Everything Falls into the Sea at Small Beer Press.
Leila May is an English and creative writing major at Lebanon Valley College. She enjoys knitting and baking in her free time, as well as exploring questions of queer identity and the boundaries between the real and unreal. Their work has been published in Equinox Literary Magazine and she is currently poetry co-editor of Green Blotter.