An opera diva with tentacles, an unlikely superhero, and a hacker who is forced to do community time are some of the characters readers will encounter in Cait Gordon’s Speculative Shorts: Stories that fell out of my brain.
Speculative Shorts features characters who refuse to be beaten down by a society that often does not make them feel welcome. In this fifteen-story collection, tropes are upended and humour abounds. Along with the laughter, the stories also address important issues like eugenics, ableism, and ageism.
“The stories in Speculative Shorts display Gordon’s knack for making the reader privy to the protagonists’ thoughts and reactions in an empathetic and often amusing way as the action progresses.”
Like Gordon’s space opera Season One: Iris and the Crew Tear Through Space!, Speculative Shorts provides glimpses of future technology that might make things easier for those living with disabilities. At the same time, the collection encourages readers to appreciate the protagonists’ abilities. Ten of the stories have been previously published in venues like Laughs in Space, Mighty: An Anthology of Disabled Superheroes, and Space Opera Libretti.
One of my favourite stories was “Bev the Hacker Does Time.” Like many of the other stories, this one includes apt metaphors, humour, and a twist at the end. Another entertaining story was “Searching for Bunker Norms.” In this story, when things started to go south, the richest one percent of the population sought out bunkers, leaving the rest of the population to fend for themselves.
Outside the bunkers, there was a catastrophic death toll, in part “because of all the Deniers, those pawns who hadn’t the means to save themselves but voted for those who did. Most of them perished in the famine. Others in the fires. Still others in the turf wars, led by the corporations who thought they could outlast the EndTimes.”
Meanwhile, “anyone who identified as disabled, d/Deaf, neurodivergent, mentally ill or ‘mad’” was considered expendable. Fortunately, elders in the community had seen trouble coming for years, and prepared for it.
Now, forty years later, survivors like Shan stand guard to rescue the “Bunker Norms” when they emerge into a changed world. They help the Norms survive and adapt, provided they buy in to the new reality: that they will no longer be in charge. Like some of the other stories, “Searching for Bunker Norms” contains satire as well as penetrating observations about how society treats, and views, people living with disabilities.
“Putting a Bee in Their Bonnet” features an autistic protagonist who loves the band ABBA but dislikes Applied Behaviour Analysis, or ABA. At one point, the protagonist asks, “Why is it that people who don’t share certain lived experiences can be so insistent on speaking over those who have?” At the same time, they are able to laugh at themselves: “Bolting from awkward situations is something I can manage. In fact, I’ve been honing that skill since childhood.”
“Courier of the Skies,” in which a disabled space courier refuses to yield to the “Wellies” who try to prevent her from completing her mission, was also entertaining.
Gordon’s bio lists her as “an autistic, disabled, and queer Canadian writer of speculative fiction celebrating diverse bodyminds,” which makes many of these stories resonate with an “own voices” perspective.
Speculative Shorts offered two features that I appreciated and would welcome in other short story collections. First, at the start of each story, Gordon provides a brief content warning. I found that these prepared me for what was coming. Having content warnings accompanying the story directly made it easier to keep track of them than would be the case if they were elsewhere in the book.
The second feature I liked was the inclusion, directly after the story, of Gordon’s “neat facts about this story.” The “neat facts” segment often included information about the inspiration for the story in question, as well as other comments. For example, we learn that “The Hilltop Gathering” was Gordon’s first story with a disabled protagonist, while “Searching for Bunker Norms” was inspired by a utilities company shutdown affecting individuals with life-saving devices and machines that required electricity to power them.
In cases where authors put these sorts of explanatory notes at the end of the book, I frequently find it difficult to connect a given comment back to the story it relates to. Placing these notes directly after the story made it easier to grasp the significance of the information in the note.
In the “neat facts” section following “The Silken Eclipse,” Gordon notes “my favourite genre to write in is character-driven science fiction.” The stories in Speculative Shorts display Gordon’s knack for making the reader privy to the protagonists’ thoughts and reactions in an empathetic and often amusing way as the action progresses.
In the book’s Foreword, Derek Newman-Stille comments on why books like Speculative Shorts are important, noting, “By critically questioning the way we perceive our reality, speculative fiction can do social justice work. It presents us with the belief that things can change, that we can create a different world, which counters the message that ‘it is what it is’.”
Speculative Shorts offers stories of varying lengths, ranging from micro-fiction to longer works. The stories are also varied in genre, including space opera, near-future fiction, and fantasy. Sometimes absurd, sometimes satirical, the stories in Speculative Shorts are written with wit, pace, and a distinctive voice. A perspective-altering and entertaining collection.
About the Author
Cait Gordon is an autistic, disabled, and queer Canadian writer of speculative fiction celebrating diverse bodyminds. She is the author of the award-winning, disability-hopepunk adventure, Season One: Iris and the Crew Tear Through Space! Her short stories featuring disabled and/or neurodivergent heroes have appeared in several anthologies. Cait twice joined Talia C. Johnson to co-edit the (award-nominated) Nothing Without Us and (award-winning) Nothing Without Us Too disability fiction anthologies. She is also the host of The Disabled Crone podcast.
About the Reviewer
Lisa Timpf lives in Simcoe, Ontario, where she writes poetry, book reviews, short stories, and creative nonfiction. Lisa’s speculative poetry collections Cats and Dogs in Space (2025) and In Days to Come (2022) are available from Hiraeth Publishing in print and electronic formats. Lisa is a member of SF Canada and the Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association. You can find out more about her writing projects at http://lisatimpf.blogspot.com/. Lisa is also on Bluesky, @lisatimpf.bsky.social
Book Details
Publisher: Dinsdale Press
Publication date: Oct. 1 2025
Language: English
Print length: 203 pages
ISBN-13: 978-1069221513