Just got an absolutely lovely review for the short stories in Androids and Aliens (now part of my new collection Tomorrow Retold from author K.D. Falcom:
There’s a moment in J. Scott Coatsworth’s “Rise,” the opening story in his collection Androids & Aliens, that captures the collection’s emotional core.
An elderly Italian woman named Cinzia watches a scientific marvel unfold over what was once Venice. Half a century after rising seas swallowed the city, it’s being coaxed back to life from the depths of the lagoon.
It’s an extraordinary moment, the kind that should feel triumphant. And it does. But another current runs beneath it. Cinzia wishes her daughter were there. The daughter who ran off and left her granddaughter behind. The granddaughter who is, frankly, a handful.
The moment is threaded with memories of Cinzia’s own mother and childhood walks through Venice, watching her stop to talk with shopkeepers along the way. Those memories arrive with such force that they briefly eclipse the present.
In just a few pages, Coatsworth constructs a fully realized future world, stages an act of environmental resurrection, and delivers a portrait of a woman balancing joy, grief, and weary affection all at once.
That’s the thing about short fiction. It has to earn everything fast. And Coatsworth is more than up for the challenge.
Then there’s “Ping,” which begins with a first date at a bar. The narrator studies his date, a cute programmer, while weighing whether to reveal what he witnessed during a mysterious light show over the Space Needle. He’s carried the story alone, waiting for the right person. Someone who won’t dismiss him. Someone who might understand.
On its surface, it’s a story about alien contact. Underneath, it explores a quieter fear: what it means to carry something immense inside yourself with nowhere safe to set it down. And alongside that fear sits another possibility, delicate and charged: the hope of finally finding someone who can hold it with you.
This is what the best science fiction does. It uses impossible futures, alien skies, and drowned cities to reach emotions that remain stubbornly, recognizably human. Technology changes. Longing doesn’t.
Coatsworth’s collection moves with impressive range. Across eight stories, he explores cyborgs and climate refugees, comedic alien encounters and intergenerational love. Some stories are melancholic. Others are more humorous. A few manage both at once. Each one, as Coatsworth aptly puts it, “sparkles with a light of its own.”
And that light, even in the darker stories, feels deliberate. “Rise” was written in 2020, during the first year of the pandemic, inspired by photos of an empty Venice. At a moment when the world felt defined by uncertainty, Coatsworth wrote a story about humanity getting something right. About a city reclaimed. About a woman taking her granddaughter’s hand and saying, “We’re finally home.”
In a genre that loves its dystopian doom, that optimism feels quietly radical.