Life Among the Terranauts
Caitlin Horrocks
Reviewed by D.C. Eichelberger
Brimming with loneliness, isolation, and hope in impossible places, Caitlin Horrocks’s short story collection Life Among the Terranauts is a masterclass in how fiction may be “sweeter than the truth” and still haunting.
Bookended by “The Sleep” (a 2011 Best American Short Story) and the collection’s namesake “Life Among the Terranauts,” Horrocks’s stories encapsulate lives trapped in places they must call home while they look out at unattainable possibilities. The people of Bounty, Minnesota sleeping through the depression of winter and the demise of their small town and the “terranauts'' scrabbling to survive in their biodome in the desert remind readers of the all-too-familiar anxieties of being trapped in one location, needing money that has no chance of arriving, and living in a place humanity has built and cannot sustain.
Between these two behemoths lies a personal mixtape of stories for the lonely. People take pleasure in what intimacy is available, and comfort in regret because it reminds them of who they are. Yet, there is no pity, no questions of “if only” or “what if.” Buried within Horrocks’s collection lies “Chance Me, ” a story whose often-forgotten optimism asserts “uncertainty could be a superpower. It could even be a love story, if you looked at it from the right angle.”
All-too-relevant for a world coming out of quarantine and into the Anthropocene, Life Among the Terranauts is essential reading for the twenty-first century.