"Signs of Life" by Sarah Pinsker in Uncanny Magazine Issue 59: July/August 2024 by Sarah Pinsker Narrator: Erika Ensign
Format: ebook, podcast
Source: podcast, supplied by publisher via Hugo Packet
Formats available: magazine, podcast
Genres: magical realism, short stories
Series: Uncanny Magazine Issue 58
Pages: 35
Length: 1 hour
Published by Uncanny Magazine on July 2, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo
Goodreads
The July/August 2024 issue of Hugo Award-winning Uncanny Magazine.
Featuring new fiction by Sarah Pinsker, Greg van Eekhout, Sunwoo Jeong, John Chu, AnaMaria Curtis, Eleanna Castroianni, and Megan Chee. Essays by John Scalzi, Marissa Lingen, Del Sandeen, and Natania Barron, poetry by Terese Mason Pierre, Natasha King, Roshani Chokshi, and Abdulkareem Abdulkareem, interviews with Greg van Eekhout and AnaMaria Curtis by Caroline M. Yoachim, a cover by Broci, and an editorial by Lynne M. Thomas and Michael Damian Thomas.
Uncanny Magazine is a bimonthly science fiction and fantasy magazine first published in November 2014. Edited by 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2022, 2023 Hugo award winners for best semiprozine, and 2018 Hugo award winners for Best Editor, Short Form, Lynne M. Thomas and Michael Damian Thomas, and Monte Lin, each issue of Uncanny includes new stories, poetry, articles, and interviews.
My Review:
I’m attempting to be a bit – just a bit – more deliberate in my Hugo reading this year, so I’ll be reviewing all of the Best Novelette nominees before moving on to the Best Short Story nominees. With one exception for Lake of Souls by Ann Leckie because I reviewed that year for Library Journal as one of the two not previously published stories in the author’s collection of the same title.
The story here in “Signs of Life” is more speculative fiction than either SF or fantasy – and I spent most of my listen/read of it wondering exactly when the spec fic element was going to come in, because if I hadn’t known there had to be one for most of the story I wouldn’t have guessed that a specifically speculative element was coming.
For most of its length, this is a story about sisters reconnecting after spending their entire adult lives on the outs with each other. The story is told from the perspective of Veronica, the sister who left – although she’s not the most reliable narrator.
Not because she lies to the reader, but because her desire to heal the rift with her sister Violet after FOUR DECADES of estrangement is at war with her need not to touch that third rail in her head about how it came about in the first place. As Veronica looks back, the cause of their rift is unforgivable and all her own fault. A fault she feels the need to apologize for before that rift can be healed.
And she doesn’t really want to bring it up, out of fear that raising those old ghosts will widen the rift instead of being a prelude to healing it.
It turns out that this story – as much as it’s about two sisters reconnecting after a lifetime of being apart – isn’t so much about the rift or even the sisters as it is about LONELINESS and their very different responses to it. And that’s where the speculative aspects of the story come in.
It’s a huge spoiler and more than a bit of a wow at the end. I’ll leave it for you to discover just how much of a wow that wow is for yourself.
Escape Rating B: For about half of the length of this story, I was wondering when it was going to get to the point. Or at least to the point of what made it eligible for the Hugos in the first place. It’s kind of appropriate that this story appeared in Uncanny Magazine, because that’s the right word for it, uncanny.
If I had to assign a genre to it – and I sorta/kinda do – I’d call this one “magical realism”. Except the words should be switched around, because it’s very much grounded in the real until that halfway point when we start to get hints of the magic behind it all.
At that halfway point I did get a pretty big hint about what the magical part of the story was – I just didn’t think that element went nearly as far as it turned out that it did.
I started this one from the podcast, as I do whenever possible with short works like this one. The reading by Erika Ensign was well done, and she did a particularly good job of letting the listener into Veronica’s head. I always love a good first-person perspective in audio when the narrator’s voice is a good match for the head they are in, and this one was. The reader made it easy to feel all of Veronica’s very mixed emotions along with the mental ellipses where her reminiscences took her places that she just didn’t want to go.
In the end, I had a surprisingly similar reaction to “Signs of Life” that I did to this author’s 2024 nominated novelette, “One Man’s Treasure”, but like the reference to “magical realism” above, just a bit backwards. In that previous story, I LOVED the story but didn’t think it stuck the dismount. It didn’t feel like the story got the closure it needed.
This time around, the ending was a WOW of a close. It ended with a bang and it was just the right bang. It did a pretty good job of making the story that led up to it worth the read. At the same time, I was really glad this was a short work, because the first half meandered in a whole lot of places that just didn’t feel speculative or magical at all. A longer story would have meant more of that meandering and that’s not what I was looking for.
I’m planning to review one story a week, mostly, so I’ll be back next week with the story I’m most looking forward to even if there isn’t a podcast. It’s “The Four Sisters Overlooking the Sea” by last year’s Best Novelette WINNER, Naomi Kritzer.
