INTRODUCTION
Caroline and I first met at Clarion West 2006. In January 2009, we tried co-writing our first story. I had failed at this several times already, but Caroline and I decided to try a new way—we would each write an outline to an entirely different story, and then switch. Ideally, we thought, we would eventually end up with two complete stories. And a key component of this new collaboration? It would be zero-stress, with no deadlines, and no guilt.
This turned out to be lucky, because not long after we exchanged the outlines, Caroline had a baby, and then, a year later, I did. We finished the first story—“Flash Bang Remember,” which started with Caroline’s outline—in January 2012, three years after we’d first started. Caroline immediately sent it off to Lightspeed and as immediately John Joseph Adams bought it. The second story (“We Will Wake Among the Gods, Among the Stars”) was completed a couple years after that, and just came out—as I write this—in the January 2016 issue of Analog. In between all this we decided really late one night that we’d better conquer all the forms, and we co-wrote a flash story (“Coin Flips”) and sold it to Daily SF. So we’ve had a pretty good track record so far—even if it sometimes takes several years between the initial idea and final product. (I’ll tell you now that we’ve just started batting around ideas for a novella—you’ll probably see that in 2025.)
So. Ten years out from Clarion West, and we have three jointly written published stories, and we each have another fifty or so published stories out there. (Including flash. We both love flash.) So we were pretty delighted to end up each publishing our first collections at the same time, exactly ten years from the completion of our workshop. People talk a lot about how going through one of the six-week workshops changes you—Clarion, Clarion West, Odyssey—and it does. We both leveled up in writing—and became fast friends and critique partners along the way.
Caroline got into Clarion West with one of the very first stories she ever wrote. (Go on, be jealous with me. I’ll wait.) The first two stories she turned in during the workshop—one about birds who ferry the souls of the dead, the other about art and spiders and dark chocolate—were striking for their lush language and imagery. It had taken me many years of work prior to Clarion West to discover a voice of my own—Caroline seemed to have one already. Her stories were dark and beautiful, full of strong images and feelings.
Caroline went home from the workshop and took those dark and beautiful images, and buckled down to the task of turning them into striking stories. She has a background in child psychology and brain development, and it shows up most clearly in stories like “The Philosophy of Ships” and “Four Seasons in the Forest of Your Mind” (two stories that were written almost a decade apart).
Let me tell you about flash fiction, which is a feature of this collection. I love flash. I love what can be done with the form. The very best flash is like espresso. It is a pure shot of—something, straight to the heart. Caroline is one of the very best people working in flash right now, and some of my all-time favorite flash stories are hers, and are represented in this collection.
I ran a flash fiction podcast (Toasted Cake) for a couple years, and I of course immediately knew I wanted some Caroline flash stories. For a while we had been matching each other in flash output—then I started writing novels and Caroline shot past me. Toasted Cake ran for 150 episodes—nine of those episodes are stories by Caroline, including the first and last, bookending my podcast. That last one is included here in this book—“A Million Oysters for Chiyoko,” which is beautiful.
Another of my all-time favorite flash stories is “Mother Ship,” which I ran to close out the first year of Toasted Cake. Okay, so at 1,375 words it’s maybe a touch longer than most flash. Still. “Mother Ship” is epic. It is vast. It spans time and space and it does it all in less time than it takes a novelist to describe someone having breakfast. Also it will make you cry. (It is a sad thing for a podcaster when they can’t get through the story they’re narrating without choking up, but I had a heck of a time getting through this one.)
Some of my favorite things flash stories can do: worldbuilding (see “One Last Night at the Carnival, Before the Stars Go Out,” which creates a gorgeous universe with a few well-chosen words). The emotional turn at the end of a story where a character makes a choice, where the reader feels the emotional impact (see “Mother Ship”). And pyrotechnics, by which I generally mean doing something inventive with the form or amazing with language. (“Harmonies of Time” is a pyrotechnics story—Caroline plays with time and tenses to convey what the narrator is trying to grasp and explain.)
Caroline is strong in all these, and she is also able to take the concentrated images and worldbuilding that make her flash so powerful and delicately spin them out into longer stories. Several of her stories are quite carefully built out of flash stories. (I keep telling her that I expect to see a novel from her using this trick.) You might wonder if flashmashing stories ends up looking like three kids balancing on top of each other inside a trenchcoat, but the far more apt metaphor here is a lapidary one: a ring or bracelet made of many different gems.
The resulting stories have their own sort of pyrotechnics simply by being so careful with the structure. One of these stories is “Five Stages of Grief.” In it, each section of the whole stands on its own, but the five also build up to a stronger story in the end, jumping off a progression we’re all familiar with. “Rock, Paper, Scissors, Love, Death” is another one that works within its tight framework, this time to deliver a story of time travel and love.
Caroline regularly plays with time and memory. It’s here in the stories “Harmonies of Time” and “Honeybee.” But you can also see it in some of her more recent stories that start taking epic jumps into the future. She closes with the title story, “Seven Wonders of a Once and Future World,” her story that is the most forward-reaching. Each jump goes ahead into the future—and yet each section is carefully constructed around a familiar conceit to us—the seven wonders of the world. We are familiar with the earthly wonders—and that gives us a basis to understand these alien ones, as she takes us farther and farther out.
Caroline works well within these tight structures, which is something I understand. The structured scaffolding gives a grounding to her vivid imagination; it is a solid jumping off point. As with “Harmonies of Time,” she uses structure to good effect with “Press Play to Watch it Die,” and “Four Seasons in the Forest of Your Mind.” She is representing alien forms of thought; the structure helps rein in the breathtaking worldbuilding; it gives the reader something to hang on to while alien brains grow around her.
Pyrotechnics are fully evident in the worldbuilding of “On the Pages of a Sketchbook Universe”—an engaging conceit that does what it says on the tin. The fun is in watching the characters more or less literally think outside the box to solve their problems. “The Little Mermaid of Innsmouth” follows a different set of conceits—it wraps its Lovecraft story and its Andersen story neatly up together, and comments on both. It is a testament to Caroline’s skill that I had never before imagined this particular mash-up, and now I can’t think why I hadn’t.
Some of my favorite stories of Caroline’s are the ones that delicately touch on grief within the family. “Paperclips and Memories and Things That Won’t Be Missed,” “Mother Ship,” and “A Million Oysters for Chiyoko”—three of my favorite stories—all deal with mothers grieving the loss of their child, and figuring out how best to navigate their grief. In “Temporary Friends,” a mother debates on how best to explain death and loss to her own child. Loss is inevitable in life, and Caroline’s stories are dark but never hopeless. Somewhere, there is a way through—perhaps what you learn can help another.
Caroline’s stories still have the strong, dark images I grew to expect at Clarion West. From “Stone Wall Truth,” describing the process of opening someone up on the judging wall: “Only the face was still open, facial muscles splayed out in all directions from the woman’s skull like an exotic flower in full bloom.” That is an image equally beautiful and grotesque, that additionally paints an accurate picture of the event.
(What if you find out you’ve been doing something terrible all along? Would you risk all to put it right? What would you give up? )
From “Seasons Set in Skin,” while mother is tattooing daughter for war: “Around the lines, the skin turned pink and slightly swollen, a temporary effect that made the flowers look three-dimensional and almost real.”
(What if you risk everything and fail? Are there any winners in war?)
From “The Carnival Was Eaten, all Except the Clown,” an opening both delicious and visceral, that fully evokes the ephemeral and nostalgic air of a carnival: “Overnight, as the magician slept, sugar melted into candy sheets that billowed up into brightly colored tents.”
(And, what if you risk everything and succeed?)
They are hopeful stories for being so dark; there is light in Caroline’s darkness. The carnival glitters; the clown fights against her fate. After all, she fights to help others—that is a key theme in these stories, again and again. She loses much—she changes—but there is hope for another day.
Tina Connolly
January 2016