I love short stories. I love everything about them. When done right they can pack an emotional punch that novels can’t touch. In the right hands, they’re like magic, making you care about characters in just a few pages. Everything you get from them is stronger for their brevity. With Even Greater Mistakes, Charlie Jane Anders weaves the words of her own short stories like an ancient sorcerer, enchanting you with stories of genies, cats, fairy werewolves, and time travel, then destroying you with stories that deal with the tragedy of dementia and the “what if” of transphobia taken to its extremes.

I was a fan of Anders before I read this book. I read All the Birds in The Sky (2016) a few years ago and it stuck with me for many reasons; so when I saw she was releasing a collection of short stories I was ridiculously excited. It will probably come as no surprise, then, that I went into this book fully expecting to adore every moment of it. And I did, but I also discovered just how great Anders actually is. She writes in the collection’s acknowledgments that her agent encouraged her to show her range, rather than playing it safe, and I’m so glad he did, since Anders is just as adept at writing comedy, romance, and tragedy as she is at writing horror and SF.

Take the finest story in these pages: “Don’t Press Charges and I Won’t Sue.” Written in the months leading up to Trump’s inauguration in January, 2017, it is the most scared, disturbing, and viscerally angry story I have ever read. It deals with Anders fears of how she, a trans woman, would survive in Trump’s America. The result left me drained, as her emotions seep from every word, and the amount you care for Rachel, the protagonist, is amplified because you know Rachel is, in some form, the author.

Another story, “Rat Catcher’s Yellows,” hit me almost as hard. It’s a love story and deals with how love endures, even when your partner is taken away from you by something as life changing as dementia. In the story, a character is affected by a mutated form of Weil’s disease—or, as it used to be known (because it was caught from animals such as rats and one of the symptoms was jaundice), Rat Catcher’s Yellows. Here, the disease has mutated to the point where it is causing a form of dementia, and one of the latest therapies for those afflicted is a game set in a virtual world in which cats rule everything. This story gives Anders the chance to show how deftly she can weave humour into tragedy. The cats’ names are delightfully silly—Lord Hairballington, for example—and the things that need to be done in the game are just as daft, but you watch the main character, Grace, slowly fall apart while watching her partner, Shary, become more and more reliant on the game. The story is another tour de force because the reader first watches all this unfold—and then sees how Grace learns to live with everything through her pure love for Shary.

Some of the stories move along at pace like “A Temporary Embarrassment in Spacetime,” in which we meet Kango and Sharon, two con artists who whizz around in their spaceship, The Spicy Meatball, stealing stuff for profit. In this story, though, they get pulled into a mission to save the universe. You know—as you do. The story is a romp. It’s Indiana Jones in space. It funny, it’s exciting, and at the start (she has written an introduction for each story) Anders asks if she should write more about these characters and this world; this is me saying write more. Make it a running series, make it a comic, just do more.

Sex plays a big part in “A Temporary Embarrassment in Spacetime.” We learn that the two main characters used to live in a sex-led society that in this story provides both a traumatic backstory for the characters and a comedic situation for them to enter. Sex comes up again, and is used as a major plot point, in “My Breath Is a Rudder,” but unlike the other story this one proceeds not at a clip but languishes in its own little world. That’s not to say it pulls punches—it doesn’t. It’s set in the near future, in a walled-off San Francisco as it tries to stop being drowned by rising sea levels, and in some ways seems hopeless at times, even on its way to a dystopia, but through the eyes of its protagonist, Julie, it feels dreamlike. Julie is an artist, commissioned to paint a large mural for the city, but they remain uninspired. The story follows them as they try to get their mojo back, and in doing so the story becomes a metaphor for hope in desperate times.

Anders’s use of sex in her stories is the very definition of “necessary for the plot.” It is always used as a turning point for a character, either seen or unseen, and never feels forced. At the same time, she seems to feel especially comfortable writing about sex, and it plays a big part in her stories. Take “Love Might Be Too Strong a Word,” for example. The story takes place on a colony ship heading to a new habitable planet. The beings onboard have been engineered to each have their own gender and sexuality, but there is a hierarchy—and the protagonist, Mab, is a rebel. Sex, the way Mab experiences it, is written about in a way that turns the act into something more akin to poetry than straight prose. This is perhaps on purpose because, in the story, the character who attempts to woo Mab uses poetry to do so—and Mab hates it. Perhaps sex is here to be presented as Mab’s version of poetry.

In another highlight of the collection, and the story that closes the collection, “The Visitmothers,” the main character, Cait, is given what she needs rather than what she wants. Short and sweet at only five pages long, this reversing of the usual wish-come-true story is so interesting because it still ends happily.

Throughout the collection, Anders is very honest about her process. In the introduction and acknowledgments, she mentions how long she has been working at writing short stories, how many short stories she submitted to various markets, including Strange Horizons. When you read a collection as accomplished as Even Greater Mistakes, it’s easy to forget that the majority of writers flail away in obscurity for years. However, two of the stories in this collection reward those who have read Anders’sprevious work. One is “Clover,” which is set in the world of All the Birds in The Sky, and the other, “If You Take My Meaning,” is set after the events of The City in The Middle of The Night (2019).

Anders wrote “Clover” to answer questions about what happened to a specific character, in this case a cat named Clover. Of the two sequel stories, it is the easiest to read as a standalone because the central conceit is easy to pick up: a witch has been turned into a cat and must find a way to turn back into a human. It is a fun story that is really about a relationship that may be on the edge of falling apart; it’s just one that has talking cats. “If You Take My Meaning,” though, is a little bit harder to get to grips with if you haven’t read The City(which I haven’t), but it rewards you in other ways—not least whetting your appetite for The City, since it alludes to the events in that book while making you care about them in a very short space of time.

A lot of the stories in Even Greater Mistakes share the common theme of learning, of peeling back layers. But really, after reading this collection you soon realise that the unifying theme throughout is one of accepting who you are, and as you learn about the Divine Right of Cats, or what Ghost Champagne actually is, you realise something else: that Charlie Jane Anders is one of SFF’s greatest living writers, and we need to protect her at all costs.