Sooner or Later Everything Falls Into the Sea: Stories

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The baker's dozen stories gathered here (including a new, previously unpublished story) turn readers into travelers to the past, the future, and explorers of the weirder points of the present.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.

• ISBN13: 9781618731555
• Publish Date: 19 March 2019
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: US
• Imprint: Small Beer Press
• Format: Paperback (US Trade)
• Pages: 288
• Language: English

Reviews

[empressbrooke]

I can't be truly objective about this book - Sarah is my friend. I remember when she sold her first story, and when she received her first award nomination. And now she has her first book release and every time award nominations for SFF awards come out my question isn't whether she was nominated but rather which story of hers was nominated this time.

But I can be objective enough to know that this collection competes with some of the best. I've read plenty of SFF short story collections - including Ted Chiang and Connie Willis and NK Jemisin - that swept me off my feet left me dazzled, and Sarah's belongs in their ranks. Sarah immediately drops the reader in the middle of a fully realized world and tells a story that is achingly human despite the fantastical settings, as all the best SFF does. Like all the greats, she creates so much with so few words, doing more in two dozen pages than many authors do in entire novels. These stories are sticky - the ones I read in the past stayed in the corners of my brain and the ones that are new to me are already sneaking up on me when I'm busy at work or reading other things. I can't recommend this collection enough.