Curiosity Elevates This Cait
Speculative Shorts: Stories that fell out of my brain, Cait Gordon. Dinsdale Press, 2025.
This review is being written under duress. No, Cait Gordon isn’t holding a gun to my head or anything. She’s more subtle than that. Instead, Cait (pronounced “Cat”) went and put together a short story collection so remarkable that anyone reading her book HAS to sing its praises.
Not that Cait needs my efforts. She already is a “name” in many circles. Her self-described “disability-hopepunk adventure” Season One: Iris and the Crew Tear Through Space! won the 2023 Indie Ink Award for Writing the Future We Need: Disability Representation by a Disabled Author and tops many a to-be-read pile.
Being familiar with Cait’s work — I appeared in her (and Talia C. Johnson’s) Prix Aurora Award-winning anthology Nothing Without Us Too (Renaissance Press, 2022), and we were both a part of Mighty: An Anthology of Disabled Superheroes (Renaissance Press, 2023) — I should have expected unrelenting excellence. But Speculative Shorts is, like Cait herself, so much more than “just” impressive.
Cait Gordon, who identifies as an “autistic, disabled, and queer Canadian writer of speculative fiction,” is something of an anomaly. Not only is she up front about her disabilities and the various limitations they entail, but she has embraced her disabled existence and chosen to actively celebrate “diverse bodyminds.” Whether she’s running the Spoonie Authors Network, hosting The Disabled Crone podcast, or co-founding her own mircopress (Dinsdale Press), Cait seems to have life all figured. And that confidence shows in her writing.
Right from the start, Speculative Shorts confidently takes readers in hand. “A Night at the Rabbit Hole” is not your average alien invasion tale — beginning with a low-key fashion crisis, it introduces a never-acted-upon crush before moving the action to a bar that none of us will ever be cool enough to enter. How our hero saves the day is Cait’s story to tell, but it proves a satisfyingly bizarre start to our journey.
Several of the stories in this collection are reprints, among them are a couple of my personal favourites. “Putting a Bee in Their Bonnet,” appears in the aforementioned , but its ABBA-powered superhero loses none of their punch in being reread. The disdain for ABA (Applied Behaviour Analysis) drips from the page — in a good way. Then there is “The Silken Eclipse,” a literal space opera. First appearing in Space Opera Libretti (Eds. Brian McNett and Jennifer Lee Rossman, 2019), it glories in the drama and spectacle of that often-overwrought artform. Full of obsession, fame, jealousy, duplicity, and forgiveness this story reaches high notes most divas would kill to hit. “Bev the Hacker Does Time” is a moving dive into unconscious ageism told, as only Cait can, with wit, wisdom, and a surprising twist ending. It’s no wonder this story was a 2025 Indieverse Award nominee.
The final story I want to highlight is one of the few where disability doesn’t play a major role. Instead, another debilitating daily reality dominates: bureaucracy. In “The Eclectic Collective from the Galaxy With No Name,” a committee is formed to complete an impossible task and somehow, miraculously, breaks free of the infinite meetings and unachievable schedules imposed by an uncaring boss to work the problem. Talk about science fiction, eh? Even in print this achievement seems especially poignant in our post(?)-Covid world.
Being disabled herself, Cait writes “our” stories with heart and humour, never shying from the darker aspects of handicap. She knows there’s a thousand (or more) shades of grey stretching between joy and despair and plumbs those depths for a wide variety of stories.
Cait’s stories range from fun and funny to determined and defiant. She is skilled at conveying her lived experience through the filter of story, shaping plots and characters around feelings familiar to many disabled Canadians’ experiences — from frustration to tired-of-this-shit-level exhaustion. Where others would force meaningful themes into their work, Cait Gordon is able to seamlessly blend big ideas into her writing while ensuring her stories remain personal.
Whether she’s doing a Frankenstein pastiche about body positivity and the importance of recognizing your own inherent value or writing a post-apocalyptic yarn featuring a pair of disabled survivors and their boring guard work in a nascent utopia, Cait creates compelling characters who feel real. These protagonists are flawed — not because of their disabilities but in spite of them — with relationship problems, confidence issues, and all the other lingering doubts that plague your average person, disabled or not.
Cait’s stories resonate well beyond the disabled community. Having said that, as a disabled Canadian, I cannot stress how significant it felt to read a short story collection that offers such impactful representation. Speculative Shorts: Stories that fell out of my brain is a diverse collection that maintains a powerful through-line while offering a range of tones and subject matters. Cait doesn’t dwell on disability but, instead, uses it as an assistive device to reveal the hope and humour found in unexpected places — be that relatable characters in weird situations or bizarre characters in all-too-normal situations. Often the book’s most moving moments are the most subtle: self-doubt, personality conflict, and small gestures of human kindness. There are laugh-out-loud non-sequiturs and social commentary so scathing that those it skewers (the rich, the oblivious, the self-absorbed, etc.) should seek medical assistance. Cait Gordon manages to be engaging and entertaining in a way readers will appreciate.
— Matthew D. Del Papa is the author of Jerry Lewis Told Me I Was Going to Die (Latitude 46 Publishing, 2023), a collection of humorous essays about living with disability.
Read this review and many others in Issue 308 (Summer 2026) Disability: The Revolution. Order the issue now:
Order Issue 308 (Summer 2026) Disability: The Revolution (Canadian Addresses)
Order Issue 308 (Summer 2026) Disability: The Revolution (International Addresses)
