Sarah Pinsker's first novel, A Song For A New Day, won the Nebula Award, and her first short fiction collection, Sooner or Later Everything Falls Into the Sea won the Philip K Dick Award. Her latest book is Lost Places: Stories which was selected as a Best Book of the Year by Slate and Book Riot. She is also a singer/songwriter who toured nationally behind four albums on various independent labels. She has wrangled horses, managed grants, taught writing to college students, and tended bar badly. She lives with her wife and two rescued terriers in Baltimore, Maryland. Find her online at sarahpinsker.com.

Sooner or Later Everything Falls into the Sea by Sarah Pinsker

Sooner or Later Everything Falls Into the Sea is one of the most anticipated sf&f collections of recent years. Pinsker has shot like a star across the firmament with stories multiply nominated for awards as well as Sturgeon and Nebula award wins.

The baker's dozen stories gathered here (including a new, previously unpublished story) turn readers into travelers to the past, the future, and explorers of the weirder points of the present. The journey is the thing as Pinsker weaves music, memory, technology, history, mystery, love, loss, and even multiple selves on generation ships and cruise ships, on highways and high seas, in murder houses and treehouses. They feature runaways, fiddle-playing astronauts, and retired time travelers; they are weird, wired, hopeful, haunting, and deeply human. They are often described as beautiful but Pinsker also knows that the heart wants what the heart wants and that is not always right, or easy.

CURATOR'S NOTE

This debut collection from acclaimed author Sarah Pinsker brings together some of her best short fiction in a collection that takes readers on a breathtaking journey into Pinsker's many fascinating worlds. – Melissa Scott and Catherine Lundoff

 

REVIEWS

  • "One of the year's most anticipated collections is even better than advertised."

    – Joe Sherrry, Nerds of a Feather

  • "Sarah Pinsker's debut short story collection is speculative and strange, exploring such wide-ranging scenarios as a young man receiving a prosthetic arm with its own sense of identity, a family welcoming an AI replicate of their late Bubbe into their home, or an 18th century seaport town trying to survive a visit by a pair of sirens — all while connecting them in a book that feels cohesive. The stories are insightful, funny, and imaginative, diving into the ways humans might invite technology into their relationships."

    – Arianna Rebolini, Buzzfeed

  • "This was my first time reading Pinsker, and she BLEW MY MIND. . . . These 13 stories are wildly original and, frankly, jaw-dropping."

    – Liberty Hardy, Bookriot
 

BOOK PREVIEW

Excerpt

I considered declining the invitation. It was too weird, too expensive, too far, too dangerous, too weird. Way too weird. An invitation like that would never come again. I'd regret it if I didn't go. It lay on our kitchen table for three weeks while I argued out the pros and cons with Mabel. She listened, made suggestions; I countered her, then argued her part, then made both arguments, then reversed them again.

"How do I know it's not a hoax?" I asked, studying the list of backing organizations for the twentieth time. "The website looks legit, but how could it not be a hoax?"

"Look at it this way," Mabel said. "Either you'll be part of a ground-breaking event in human history, or a groundbreaking psych experiment. Someone benefits either way. And you've never been to eastern Canada, so at least you get to see someplace new even if you just end up standing in a field somewhere looking silly."

She always had a way of making an adventure out of things that would otherwise stress me out. Four months later, I flew to Nova Scotia, took a bus to a seaside town too small for a dot on a map, boarded a ferry to Secord Island, and stepped through the waiting portal into an alternate-reality resort hotel lobby swarming with Sarah Pinskers. At least two hundred of us by my estimation, with more straggling in.

It was easy to tell who had just arrived. We were the ones planted in the lobby, bags in hand, eyes wide and mouth open. My body and face, even my expression, reflected back at me in two hundred funhouse mirrors. Stranger even than that, an energy in the air that I couldn't quite explain, a feeling that every single Sarah had stepped through to the exact same thought, to the same curious-amazement-horror-wonder, to the same rug-yanking confirmation that the invitation had been real and we were no longer alone, or maybe we were more alone than we had ever been.

Large groups gathered around the hotel check-in desk and SarahCon registration, no doubt trying to pick themselves off the long lists of near-identical names. A third faction, which I decided to join, had adjourned to the lobby bar, hoping to use alcohol to blunt the weirdness of coming face to face with our multiverse selves. I found a barstool and shoved my suitcase and backpack under my feet. Space was tight amid the other suitcases and backpacks.

"The stout," I said when I caught the bartender's attention, pointing at the third tap handle.

He grinned and held up a glass. "Seventh one in a row. You all go for the stout or one of the good whiskeys."

I filed that information away. Took a sip. The Sarah next to me did the same. We both put our glasses down at the same time. Both raised eyebrows at each other.

The bartender hovered. "Room number for your tab?"

"I haven't checked in yet. Cash isn't okay? Oh. The cross-world currency thing."

"You can put her drink on my tab," said the me next to me. She wore her hair in a long braid down her back. I'd worn mine that way when I was thirteen.

I lifted my glass and toasted in her direction. "Thanks. Appreciated."

"My pleasure. I've never bought myself a drink before. Well, not like this anyhow. Do you know how many there are altogether? How many of us here, I mean."

I shook my head. "No clue. You could ask someone at registration."

A third Sarah, maybe a decade older than me, joined our conversation. My parents were married years before they had me. I'd always wondered if I'd still be me if they hadn't waited. "I'm sure she'll tell us the numbers in her opening address."

"She?" asked One Braid. "Sorry if it's a stupid question. I checked into my room but I haven't braved convention registration yet. I hate lines."

Older Sarah rummaged in a SarahCon commemorative tote bag and pulled out a program. She turned to a bio page and started reading. "'Sarah Pinsker [R0D0]'—I don't know what 'R-0-D-0' means—'made the discovery creating the multiverse portal. She is a quantologist at Johns Hopkins University.'" She looked up. "I think that's her over there. She's been rushing back and forth as long as I've been sitting here."

We followed her pointing finger to a Sarah bustling through the lobby, walkie-talkie to her lips. Her hair was pixie-short, defeating the frizz that plagued me. She looked harried but better put together than most of us, elegant in a silk blouse and designer jeans that fit and flattered. I had never been anything approaching elegant. Never had the guts to cut my hair that short, either.