Sarah Pinsker’s 'And Then There Were (N-One)'

What if you could meet every possible version of yourself?

That’s the premise of Sarah Pinsker’s novella “And Then There Were (N-One),” which was first published by Uncanny Magazine but came to my attention through the Escape Pod podcast.

Pinsker casts herself as first-person narrator, a choice that could easily come off as egotistical but that works here because of the self-deprecating humor and earnestness.

The story opens with Pinsker considering whether to accept an odd invitation—to an alternate-reality event called SaraCon, attended by hundreds of Sarah Pinskers from different universes.

At the event, Pinsker mingles with others who share her name, birthday, and DNA. But these Sarahs hail from worlds with varying degrees of similarity to our own—exposing each Sarah to a different set of circumstances, leading to so-called life “divergence points.” Some Sarahs are writers; others are scientists, teachers, and barn managers.

“The occupation list read like a collection of every ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ I’d ever answered,” writes the Sarah from our world.

The story takes a macabre turn when one of the Sarahs is murdered. What would motivate one Sarah to kill another? Our Sarah, an insurance investigator, sets out to find the answer.

The brilliance of the story is that it’s impossible to read without contemplating our own alternate selves. What would my life be like if I’d chosen a different college or occupation? The story forces us to reckon with the fact that each decision we make, big or small, has profound consequences for our future selves.

The best paragraph:

Why did I go into detective work, not one of the sciences? I hated my calculus teacher, dropped it after a few weeks; because of him, I didn’t get far enough in math to pursue a college major in bio or physics. Maybe he didn’t exist in the other worlds, or maybe the science Sarahs hadn’t let him get the better of them. Maybe they pushed themselves to spite him. Some went on to become geneticists or researchers or science fiction writers. Same mind, applied differently. Choices, chances, undecisions, non-decisions, decisions good and bad.

James A. Michener's 'Sayonara'

James A. Michener's 'Sayonara' is a brilliant novel about a hotshot U.S. Air Force pilot's forbidden romance with a Japanese woman in 1952, when he's stationed in Kobe during the Korean War.

It's a breezy read at 208 pages, with hardly a word wasted -- a rarity for Michener, known for his lengthy historical tomes.

The novel is engrossing because of its authenticity, which makes sense given that it's loosely autobiographical. The first-person narration feels like the honest musings of a lovesick 28-year-old, torn between his lust for his Japanese lover and his father's expectation that he will marry an upstanding white woman from a military family.

Michener confronts the U.S. government's racist policies that deterred military men from marrying foreign women, with the novel defining love as a product of our common humanity that transcends racial, cultural, and legal barriers.

The best paragraph (p. 102):

It was breathlessly apparent to us as the sun sank below the distant hills that in terribly crowded Japan Hana-ogi and I were seeking a place in which to make love. There was now no thought of Japanese or American. We were timeless human beings without nation or speech or different color. I now understood the answer to the second question that had perplexed me in Korea: "How can an American who fought the Japs actually go to bed with a Jap girl?" The answer was so simple. Nearly a half million of our men had found the simple answer. You find a girl as lovely as Hana-ogi -- and she is not Japanese and you are not American.