One theory of human consciousness is that it was a mistake.
Once upon a time, the theory goes, our evolutionary ancestors developed enough cognition to remember past events and imagine possible futures, two skills well-suited to evading harm (because you can’t avoid a danger you don’t remember) and seeking out vital resources (because you can’t search for something if you can’t imagine finding it). For the philosophical pessimist Peter Zapffe, the mistake is that these adaptations have evolved so far beyond their initial survival value in the Homo sapiens species that they’ve given rise to something completely ill-suited to life on earth: a self-reflective consciousness doomed by the awareness of its own, inevitable death and cursed by the constant desire to seek out meaning in an essentially meaningless universe.
Chris Vanjonack, author of the new short story collection Out of Body, seems to agree with Zapffe but with the caveat that human consciousness was probably doomed from the jump, cursed by the baseline adaptations of memory and speculative imagination. Vanjonack’s debut collection is about characters consumed by remembering what once was or imagining what might have been. Not incidentally, most of them are going through a bad breakup or coping with the aftermath of one. There are also ghost orgies, and interdimensional rifts, and a literal infinity of killer clowns.
I imagine a fair number of readers will compare Vanjonack’s collection to series like Black Mirror or The Twilight Zone. Either is decent-enough shorthand for the general structure of Out of Body wherein each story is driven by a different novum—a different fantastical device or supernatural conceit added to a world that is otherwise much like our own. But the comparison falls short in that the usual touchstones for sci-fi anthology tend to focus on answering the “what if?” of each episode (e.g. what if a six-year-old could rewrite reality with his mind?; what if you could express order a robo-replica of your dead husband?). Vanjonack, on the other hand, is less interested in plotting the consequences of his sci-fi conceits than exploring why they don’t matter.
A failed Denver tour guide joins an agency that uses time-travel to “maintain the dominant narrative” of historical events, but all he cares about is teleporting to the past to prevent his ex from leaving him. A middle school teacher begins to receive surreal phone calls from “an unidentified entity” (according to a CDC bulletin) known as the Speaker, and her primary reaction is to imagine the more meaningful life she might have lived if she had moved to LA in her twenties when she had the chance. A genius inventor creates a Language-Perfector Helmet that allows users to say precisely what they mean, and he still can’t get his girlfriend to understand his side of the argument they had about the windows last night. “How can you think about getting off at a time like this?” she later asks him, scrolling through headlines: “The government is collapsing. An earthquake has decimated a city an ocean away. A neighborhood has just been bombed into the earth. And Jimmy is concerned about their love life?” The human animal, as it appears within Vanjonack’s stories, is a simple creature no matter how many incredible technologies and ecological catastrophes it creates.
I should mention that—despite being more than a little colored by the existential dread of our post-Covid, increasingly fascistic, pre-climate-collapse present—Vanjonack’s stories are also very funny. “There’s Clowns in the Woods” is about paranoid violence as a fundament of American masculinity and politics, yes, but it’s also about three townie barflies who hunt killer clowns by following a trail of unicycle tracks and discarded banana peels through a forest. In “Phases,” there is something tragic and touching about a group of ghosts who try to maintain a post-mortem sense of community even as they are bodiless and completely invisible to one another—a fact of afterlife that holds radical feminist potential for a recently deceased college grad: “The male gaze is taken entirely out of the equation. Gendered physical dynamics too,” she tells her newfound ghost-friends, “We’ve got a real chance to build something positive here.”
The humor is another thing that sets Out of Body apart from other examples of anthologized sci-fi. But the real point of distinction is that Vanjonack’s collection is not, in fact, an anthology. The first story, “Invent Everything,” is a sort-of fairytale prelude about a boy who discovers that he is a Science Fiction Inventor and goes on to invent all sorts of things, including the sci-fi devices featured in some of the stories to come. First-time readers might also pick up on the fact that all of the stories seem to take place within the last five-or-so years and most are set in Denver. But the last story, “Heaven Is Fine for Girls Who Miss Their Mothers,” is where Vanjonack really ties the whole collection together.
It’s also where the collection evokes a more vibrant point of comparison than either Black Mirror or The Twilight Zone: the sci fi pseudo-anthology Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022): a movie I saw four months later than everyone else and found hugely overrated until the last 20-ish minutes, when—after being splintered across the multiverse—the mad-cap plot gels into a beautiful and totally bonkers montage that made me cry a little. Without giving anything away, “Heaven is Fine” achieves a similar effect. Like Everything Everywhere’s ending, it even stages its own version of a mother-daughter reconciliation. The difference in this case, however, is that the final scene of Vanjonack’s collection is perhaps the polar opposite of a sappy Hollywood climax, which feels appropriate. Out of Body’s present-day, present-time context doesn’t call for one.
There might be something in Vanjonack’s outlook that rhymes with the theories of a literal pessimist like Zapffe, but Out of Body didn’t leave me cold. One of the best things about the collection is that it resists the satisfaction of a happy ending while still providing the formal satisfaction of pulling a number of interwoven strands taught in its final story. Another is that it resists a happy ending without being nihilistic, which has become a dull and all-too-easy tack in contemporary fiction. Instead, Out of Body suggests that the very Homo sapien flaws of Vanjonack’s characters might also be our salvation. The world might be ending, but human beings will still fret about their connections to one another, still find time to seek out love and sex and joy in each other. And the universe might be meaningless, but then, for all the ways it leads us astray, isn’t there something admirable about the human drive to seek out meaning regardless?
Sam Norcross is a PhD candidate at Tufts University where he studies postmodern theories of language alongside biological concepts like the genetic code. His proudest athletic achievement is earning five extra points at a 2010 Quiz bowl tournament for buzzing in early with the correct answer: “the semaphore version of Wuthering Heights.”