Sarah Pinsker Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of Short Story Collections

Publication Order of Short Stories/Novellas

Publication Order of The Year's Best Military & Adventure SF Books

Publication Order of Anthologies

Sarah Pinsker is an award winning author and singer/songwriter who lives in Baltimore, Maryland. In Baltimore she has put together grants for a non-profit organization.

In her life, she has played music in about twenty states in the United States, lived in five states, and been to forty-eight states as well as Canada.

Pinsker has a degree in history. She is a research buff, even if something does not end up in the story. Sarah finds herself happiest when she is pointed to an archive and allowed to take it from there.

Pinsker’s first sale was for a story called “20 Ways the Desert Could Kill You” in the year 2012. Her work has appeared in such magazines as: Fantasy & Science Fiction, Strange Horizons, Asimov’s, Lightspeed, Fireside, Daily Science Fiction, and Uncanny. She has had work appear in the following anthologies: Fierce Family, Long Hidden, Accessing the Future, as well as many of the year’s bests. Pinsker’s work has also been translated into such languages as: French, Chinese, Spanish, and Italian, as well as others.

Her novelette “In Joy, Knowing the Abyss Behind” won a Sturgeon Award in the year 2014 and was a finalist for a Nebula in the year 2013; the story placed third in Asimov’s Readers’ Poll. Her novelette “Our Lady of the Open Road” won a 2016 Nebula Award. “No Lonely Seafarer” was picked to be an honorable mention for a Tiptree Award in the year 2014. “A Stretch of Highway Two Lanes Wide” was a finalist for a Nebula Award in the year 2015.

She has been writing stories since her family got their first computer, when she was only about six or seven years old. Since there was no internet at the time, she got a lot more written, as life was a lot less distracting.

Pinsker has stated that her writing has been influenced by the literary fiction and science fiction books that were in her home as a kid. She is one of the rare writers that reads short stories just as much as novels while she was young. Some of her earliest influences, include Kate Wilhelm and Ursula K. Le Guin, with later influences including Kij Johnson, Octavia Butler, Kelly Link, and Karen Joy Fowler.

Sarah Pinsker started her first band when she was just thirteen years old, right after her cousin gave her the first guitar she would ever own. The band was called Hellbound Train, which is also the name of the band’s only song. She prefers not to talk about this band at all.

Sarah has released multiple albums on various independent labels with her band Stalking Horses. She has toured both with and without her band all over the country, with the car repair bills to prove it. At one time, she had an incredibly awesome van; it had curtains, a bed, a dashboard lizard, and a haunted radio. It was stolen, and later brought back without the lizard and the front axle was wrecked.

Pinsker’s fiction has been called creepy, thoughtful, subtle, and dreamlike. She feels that it’s a good time to be writing about a personal experience or group that has yet to be touched on yet. Science fiction is a genre that sees the world through a different lens, and it is fun to put this lens on new experiences.

She came up with one of her stories, “Wind Will Rove”, during at an old time music jam she attended with one of her aunts, that plays guitar too. Someone told her that the word kiwi can be a native of New Zealand, a fruit, and a bird. She realized that language and history distorts over time, making it so a person might be aware of a single definition of a word, but not multiple. This would lead to a textual misread.

While at a weekend writers’ retreat, she and the other authors were mashing up “And Then There Were None”, marshmallow peeps, and “Hamilton”. She originally had the story being about a murder happening at a convention of alternate selves, but instead of having different Sarahs, she was picturing different Darias. This is the character from the nineties cartoon. That idea did not quite click for her.

Then she found a book she had filled out when she was younger about herself. There was a big spread talking about what the person might want to be when they grew up. A lot of the choices were circled. It made her wonder why she had abandoned most of them, and how things would be different for her if she had stuck to any one of them.

The story, she says, is full of autobiographical information, stuff that is not true, things she wishes were true, and stuff that is true she wishes was not. Sarah does not know if it really matters which are which, just that she wishes Seattle the best of futures and that it was one of her favorite places to be, adoring the time she spent there. Not to mention the fact that she does not have homicidal intent at all.

“And Then There Were (N-One)” is a novelette, which was released in the year 2017. Sarah Pinsker, an insurance investigator, is asked to investigate the murder of Sarah Pinsker (who is a physicist) who got killed at PinskerCon. PinskerCon is an interdimensional convention where all the attendees are Sarah Pinsker from all the alternate timelines. The convention is put on, organized and attended only by the different Sarah Pinskers. In this case, the only suspect is going to be… well, Sarah Pinsker, obviously.

This story features a lot of thoughts about identity, and an interesting view of the many worlds/ multiple versions of one person idea. This is an interesting twist on a murder mystery, seeing as how the investigator, killer, and victim are different versions of the same person. Pinsker is able to take a fresh angle on the idea of multiverse to answer how our lives are able to diverge, and how minor choices and events shape our lives. The story is clever, funny, and thoughtful.