Lost Places by Sarah Pinsker
The Court Magician – the story I first heard in the podcast mentioned above tells a tale of ambition that takes a boy too far. He literally ends up losing himself. As a young boy, poor and with the ambition of becoming a great magician, he is noticed and approached by a palace official to be trained to serve the Regent.
While training he is told that his job will be to make the Regent’s problems disappear and is warned this skill would come at a cost. However, determined to become a great magician, whatever it takes, he continues. As he performs magic duties for the Regent, he notices for each magic task he performs, he loses a piece of himself – a fingernail, a toe, an ear, a favorite item. This continues and even though he realizes what he is losing, and the fact that many of the Regent’s enemies have disappeared, he makes excuses, takes pride in serving the Regent and being recognized as a great magician – he doesn’t stop. Many of the author’s stories deal with choices we make, doing what we think is right, saying no if something is wrong, which may be a challenge and contradiction to the power structure and our own self-interests and comfort zone.
That Our Flag Was Still There – a scenario of patriotism. A country with a National Flag Center, where the Center’s personnel infuse a program of chemicals and other engineering controls to turn a human subject into a literal flag, a living flag for all to see on the National Mall and a televised feed. Citizens enter a lottery at age eighteen for a chance to become a flag for a day, although you may not survive the ordeal. This society is also surveillance-heavy where any behavior deemed unpatriotic is punished.
With this in place, the story focuses on two female employees at the Center, one young and optimistic, who believes in the system, and the other is older, has been on the job at the Center for many years, and has doubts. Their dialogue builds until the older employee takes a bold stand.
Escape From Caring Seasons – AI elderly care becomes extremely intrusive and controlling. A couple, one who helped design the facility and her wife, are residents at an elderly community that is integrated with hospital care, so its residents can spend most of their time at home. Problem – with a chip implanted in all residents, your location and medical status are monitored at all times and the AI system makes all decisions whether you should be in the hospital or at home.
Changes are steadily made to the design, with the AI program becoming more intrusive, monitoring the resident’s every move. This story takes us through the protagonist’s realization of the facility’s level of control and her plan to escape.
Sooner Or Later Everything Falls Into The Sea by Sarah Pinsker
Remembery Day – A society where war veterans’ memories are erased to spare them traumatic memories of combat. Once every year on a holiday called Remembery Day, “the veil” of forgetting is removed and veterans are honored as they march in a parade.
The daughter of one veteran knows this is for the best to spare veterans like her mom painful memories of brutal war, but the holiday is the only time she can ask her mother about the past – what she did in the war, how she met her father. But time is so short. This one day is filled with the parade and meeting other veterans, so these questions never get answered. So, sure, her mother is spared painful memories, but her connection to her past is lost, she doesn’t remember why she is scarred, in a wheelchair, and her daughter has lost her family’s history.
In Joy, Knowing The Abyss Behind – An old couple, George and Millicent, married over sixty years, live in their own home. George just had a stroke and is hospitalized. Through this ordeal, the story tells us how they met and how George went through an experience that changed his life.
George was a talented young architect in the military when he first met his wife. He explained to Millie that a lot of design sketches he did for the army were for hypothetical scenarios. He thinks they are made up, futuristic possibilities. Years later, living his happy corporate life as an architect, he would discover that his designs weren’t hypothetical, when the army called him in for a few weeks for project maintenance.
George told his wife what this project was – a prison built for ship-wrecked extra-terrestrial creatures. After returning from this trip, he changed, never trying to excel at work again. The only thing he played special attention to was the building and design of the children’s tree house in their back yard.
In the hospital, George partially paralyzed from his stroke, can still sketch with one hand, and tries to make a sketch of this prison. Millie takes the sketch home and searches for its blueprint. Their son finds it and they see that George did leave a breech within the design for a possible escape. For years this one design, that went against his moral principles, haunted George and changed his life.
And Then There Were (N-One) – the author uses her own name here. Sarah Pinsker, an insurance investigator, receives an invitation to an inter-dimensional convention where she meets hundreds of other Sarah’s that come from alternate timelines. When physicist Sarah is murdered, since the conference is at a secluded location at an alternate-reality-resort-hotel, only investigator Sarah is available with the skill set to solve the case.
Quantologist Sarah discovered how to make a multi universe portal and then uses that portal to invite her alternate selves to a convention. Meeting people that are identical to you in appearance/DNA with different experiences, different professions, figuring out that divergent point that made each of you turn out different, sounds like an interesting, fantastic experience. But why murder? Investigator Sarah would first have to identify the body and find out who would want her dead. Why would one Sarah want to kill another from a different timeline? Sarah goes through the exercise of investigating while experiencing being in a place in the company of hundreds of look-a-likes, other Sarah Pinskers, a very creative interesting reading journey.
These stories intertwine the familiar with the unfamiliar, the past and the present and in many cases, you are on a journey just waiting to see where the author is going, very creative, interesting and thought provoking. I highly recommend these two books of short stories, Lost Places and Sooner Or Later Everything Falls Into The Sea by Sarah Pinsker.