Short stories are dangerous: tiny sparks of pure narrative fire that burn hotter because they snuff out sooner. Small, self-contained adventures gave me the freedom to fail — to push my limits, to experiment with styles and ideas that I wasn’t sure I could pull off. And fail I did, over and over. I wrote scores of short pieces before I managed to turn out one that fired on all cylinders. The wonderful thing is, if you blow it with something short, you’ve only wasted a week or three of writing time. And if someone reads your story in a magazine and hates it, there’ll be another story, by another author, on the next page.
Even Greater Mistakes is a collection of nineteen short stories by Charlie Jane Anders; mostly sci-fi and fantasy, mostly set in space or a near-future/post-apocalyptic Earth. As the author notes in an intro, this collection spans her entire career, and as she was encouraged to “showcase the full range of (her) writing”, this is a real mixed bag: as a consequence, there were a few misses for me, but many more hits. Anders can swerve from angrily political to gonzo comedy, and consistently, display a lot of heart and relatable human characters (even if those humans are engineered or cat-shaped or zombie vampires). Throughout, people are having uninhibited sex, making meaningful art, and trying to find where they belong in the world (the answer usually being: San Francisco). This was quite a long and varied read and I’d expect there would be something for most everyone in it. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
Anders helpfully introduces each story (explaining its inspiration or process; adding content warnings where appropriate), and as an example of something I found interesting, she noted that If You Take My Meaning is a sort of sequel to the novel The City in the Middle of the Night; and although I hadn’t read that book, it wasn’t necessary to have found the short story moving and meaningful (I could feel that these characters had a complete back story, even if I didn’t know it.) On the other hand, I learned that the story Clover was written as a followup to the novel All the Birds in the Sky (which I have read, and loved), but I didn’t get much out of that story; hit and miss. Move on. I loved the concept behind Six Months, Three Days: A woman who can see every possible future for herself (and who spends her life arranging things to her best advantage) is finally about to have her first date (which she has anticipated her entire life) with the only other clairvoyant on Earth — a man who can only see the actual future that will occur. They both know that they are about to experience the happiest days of their lives and that the affair will end terribly: what does this say about free will and the power of love? From the story:
“I don’t think you’re any more or less powerful than me. Our powers are just different,” Doug says. “But I think you’re a selfish person. I think you’re used to the idea that you can cheat on everything, and it’s made your soul a little bit rotten. I think you’re going to hate me for the next few weeks until you figure out how to cast me out. I think I love you more than my own arms and legs and I would shorten my already short life by a decade to have you stick around one more year. I think you’re brave as hell for keeping your head up on our journey together into the mouth of hell. I think you’re the most beautiful human being I’ve ever met, and you have a good heart despite how much you’re going to tear me to shreds.”
When I was reading Love Might be Too Strong a Word (about a spaceship manned by a variety of specially-bred humanoids), I couldn’t decide how I felt about the main character’s use of confusing pronouns. Mab uses “be and ber” when referring to Dot the pilot (“I came up with the correct pronoun by instinct, even before my mind took in the fact that a pilot was touching my hand”), “yr and ym” when referencing their roommate Idra, and I couldn’t decide if that was really inventive or an unnecessary barrier to my own understanding. When I asked Kennedy what she thought, she said that was the coolest thing she ever heard: Why should nonfamiliar characters, who don’t even have human genitals, need to be divided only into standard males/females? And especially in the realm of scifi — where geeks and nerds turn for belonging — why not be ultimately inclusive? When she put it like that, my own understanding was expanded, and I have to thank Anders for that. (As a trans author, Anders goes on to explore more ideas regarding gender and invents more pronouns in these stories, and if someone is looking for a truly horrifying story that goes a long way towards explaining why these ideas are important, Don’t Press Charges and I Won’t Sue is about a stomach-churning “conversion therapy” for trans folks.) From Love Might be Too Strong a Word:
“I can’t stand it among the other pilots anymore, or any of the upper dars. The spirers with all those fingers, with their base-twenty-seven cleverness. The breeders, tending those breedpods as if they’re going to amount to something. It all makes me feel so hopeless. But when I’m with you, it’s different. I feel alive. Like life is worth something after all.”
Anders introduces Rock Manning Goes for Broke as “a meditation on violence, slapstick comedy, and the relationship between the two. The part of us that lets us laugh at someone else’s pratfall might also be what allows us to tolerate horrific violence against people who aren’t part of our in-group.” (The exploration of societal ills through niche artforms comes up again with the use of standup comedy in Ghost Champagne and mural painting in My Breath is a Rudder) A group of outlandish antifascist filmmakers find themselves even more popular after some kind of pressure bomb destroys everyone’s hearing:
Sneaking up on people was suddenly way easier — but so was getting snuck up on. The fear of somebody creeping up behind me and cutting my throat was the only thing that kept me from being bored all the time. I always thought noise was boring, but silence bored me even worse. If you walked up behind someone, especially a member of the red bandana militia who were keeping order on our streets, you had to be very careful how you caught their attention. You did not want a red bandana to think you were sneaking up on them.
And I was really intrigued by the concept of Captain Roger in Heaven: As Anders writes, “Marith didn’t mean to start a sex cult, she just wanted to feel sexy for once.” But Marith does start a sex cult (attributing all of the esoteric teachings to some absent guru) in order to combat loneliness, and once her group gets large enough to attract Christian protestors, they are required by law to own a “Visualizer”; a device that will show where any given person is spending their afterlife. When a member of the cult dies and ends up in a fiery hell, the rest of the group scrambles to invent an afterlife worth living for:
The longer he stared, the more it seemed to Leon that the Christians were generating their afterlife, focusing psychic energy so that they made a stable conduit and created something on the other side of it. They were almost writing lines of code in the fabric of reality.
Again, there’s a lot of variety in this collection — not everything worked for me — but it’s overall smart and heartfelt and relatable. I need to remember to read more of Anders’ novels.
