“Even Greater Mistakes: Stories” by Charlie Jane Anders
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Rating: 3/5 Stars
An interesting collecting of stories from an interesting writer. Not all the stories are to my taste (which is more into Worldbuilding and Hard SFF) but they reveal the concerns the author has with society’s interaction with the LGBT community.
What follows are individual reviews of the stories in the collection.
- As Good As New: the world has ended, apart from one person. In the aftermath, she finds a genie in a bottle who can grant her three wishes, including the wish to restore the world. But an off-hand comment by the genie makes her pause: so while thinking about the wishes, she has conversations with the genie, which turned out to be a former play critic. This suits her fine, as she is a former writer of plays (now studying to be a doctor). In the course of the conversations, she gets an idea for a new play and, in the process, come up with three wishes that may just save the world.
- Rat Catcher’s Yellow: a woman gets a Cat Kingdom game for her partner, who is suffering for a neurological disease (Rat Catcher’s Yellow) and is only responsive when playing the game. And it turns out the partner is very good at the game, to the point where an organisation asks them to join a competition. And it is at the competition that the woman discovers that she doesn’t have to be alone in taking care of others with the affliction.
- If You Take my Meaning: a follow-up to a book by the author (who suggests skipping the story to avoid spoilers), it concerns a girl who goes on a journey to get alien tendrils embedded into her. The tendrils enable a person to send and get emotional messages from others, and she wants to use it to send political messages. But it is only after the surgery does she realise that she has another mission to fulfil.
- The Time Travel Club: a club of people who talk about their fictional time-travels is shown a real time-travelling machine. Problem is, the machine moves objects only through time and not space, so it ends up somewhere else (since the Earth has moved). Close to giving up after other plans to use the time machine fail, one girl convinces the group to try one more time to make the machine work. The end result should be expected to those who know what happens to people to make the first time travel journey.
- Six Months, Three Days: a man who can see the future dates a girl who can see alternate futures. Their lives together for six months and three days would be full of love and conflicts over what kind of future can they have when one expects events to always happen while the other sees alternative events that can happen.
- Love Might Be Too Strong a Word: a on city sized ship heading to a colony world, a ‘higher’ level pilot falls in love with a ‘lowly’ general cleaner and sets out to woo the cleaner. In between the romantic letters being sent, we see a ship where genders have been split between different types of city inhabitants (the gender for the pilot is ‘Be’) making you wonder how such trysts are seen and handled by the ship’s inhabitants.
- Fairy Werewolf vs. Vampire Zombie: a ‘wild’ story mostly set in a bar that hires a fairy singer before discovering the fairy is also a werewolf. Her singing makes a person falls for her: a person who later is found to be a vampire and a zombie and has designs on her. The only way out is, via a spur of the moment thought, a karaoke contest. But that doesn’t go as planned, leading to general mayhem.
- Ghost Champagne: a depressive project manager, who also moonlights as a comedian, sees a ghost that looks like her. Her thoughts on the ghost, and wondering what she did to become one, only make the ghost appear closer to her and become more of a mental and physical distraction. Until one day, at a wedding, she ‘steals’ the drink the ghost is holding. The effects would cause a re-evaluation of her mental condition and to see things from the ghost’s perspective that would change her own life.
- My Breath is a Rudder: in a future San Francisco, now protected by a sea wall against the sea, an artist is contemplating the mural she has been asked to create on a section of the wall, to help remind the inhabitants about the ocean they can no longer see and the danger it represents.
- Power Couple: a couple who want to Change the World start a relationship, but it gets interrupted by their studies. Then, the girl gets an idea on how to delay their relationship until they have done their work, which involves hibernation. You have to read the story to see how this idea for delayed gratification turns out.
- Rock Manning Goes For Broke: a hilarious story set in a future America whose society is crumbling. Rock Manning is a well-meaning person who loves to do stunts and gets involved with a girl doing film studies, which means lots of short meme-type films will no storyline but lots of dangerous stunts, distracting people as the world slowly goes to bits. But things get serious when a school bully becomes a big-time bully and tries to enlist him into making films for him to gain support; or else. And we follow their lives, we see a country tearing itself apart.
- Because Change Was The Ocean and We Lived by Her Mercy: in the future, when climate change has raise sea levels by metres, society is slowly rebuilding itself. We follow a person as he leaves a city which he feels is becoming too civilised and moves to a fringe town to lead his own life. But the call of civilisation is strong.
- Captain Roger in Heaven: one woman meets another; to keep her interested, she invents a sex prophet on the spot. This snowballs into a popular cult that is picketed by other religions, claiming that the sex cultist are going to (of course) Hell. Then, a device reveals where people go after death, and now the cult will have to invent a kind of heaven for themselves to go to.
- Clover: a cat abandoned by a girl is given to a couple by a mysterious person. After the cat settles in, another stranger gives them another cat. The first cat is not happy with this. But then the second cat does something unexpected, and now it is up to the one member of the couple and the first cat to do all they can to protect her from the strangers.
- This is Why We Can’t Have Nasty Things: two friends get together for the last time at a bar that is closing down, with one of them contemplating moving away.
- A Temporary Embarrassment in Spacetime: a hilarious story of two people who engineer a heist from a large space organism. They then discover a stowaway, and offer to infiltrate a planet to find out information about a weapon, in return for being able to open a restaurant (their dream). Events would bring the organism and weapon together in a rather embarrassing climax.
- Don’t Press Charges, and I Won’t Sue: a disturbing story about a person who is abducted by the government to undergo a rather radical gender change treatment to give the person the expected ‘body’ type to match the gender. Further tension is raised in the story when one of the administrators of the treatment is a long-time friend who is now in two-minds over the treatment.
- The Bookstore At The End of America: a bookshop on the border between an independent California and the rest of the US is a meeting point for people on both sides. But a crisis between the countries forces people to shelter in the shop, and now they have to manage their tensions in the only was possible in a bookshop while waiting for the conflict to end.
- The Visitmothers: aliens grant ‘wishes’ to certain people who seek them. But like genies, you have to be careful what you wish for. One girl who wishes not be alone any more gets her wish answered in a most unusual way.
Book read from 2025/03/17 to 2025/03/30