I did not enjoy this. The writing is very direct, without much sensory detail. As a result, I found it difficult to get invested in the characters or the action, and often found myself scratching my head at the end of the stories wondering what the point was. I am not the target audience, though I'm glad to see that over reviewers have enjoyed it more than I did. I found lines like the following frustrating: "[Kulli's] eyes were raw from crying, but Min can see no trace of tears." What am I supposed to picture here? How can there be evidence of her crying, and yet no evidence of her crying? This kind of thing encapsulated how I felt about a lot of the prose and about the structure of the stories themselves.

I received this book as an ARC through NetGalley. I have met the author, and would be excited to shout this book's praises from the rooftops if I enjoyed it, but since I did not, I won't be sharing my review on other platforms.

Super interesting collection of science fiction short stories. I enjoyed the varied themes and formatting throughout the book as it felt innovative and unique. I also enjoyed how the stories threaded together in some aspects. I

A great collection of sci-fi stories. Really interesting concepts, with great writing and different formats.
Would love to read more by this author!

The Butterfly Disjunct and Other Stories is a collection of very human experiences in across time, planets, and bodies told in vignettes, program manuals, diplomatic conversations, snippets of academic research.

Instead of approaching the genre as one sprawling epic, Baker instead takes us to the smallest pockets of different universes and slows down the world just enough for the readers to witness the mundane moments upon which we hinge our understanding of time, humanity, and memory. In one story, it’s the moment before a character meets her destined soulmate. In another, it’s the lull while they wait in line to present their immigration papers.

In “How to break causality and write the perfect time travel story”, an unnamed author hatches the perfect shortcut to producing a bestseller: hopping across time, assassinating H. G. Wells along the way, getting back at an annoying critique group, and realizing too late that things have veered too off course.

And yes, isn’t it so human of us to jump into a very wild and hare-brained scheme instead of logically confronting our problems?

Just like how there is no one way to document life, Baker makes the most out of alternative formats to serve his characters. Space exploration logs hold space for the memory of a fallen astronaut, while transcripts of calls with very confused hotel staff across centuries unravel a sweet and strange love story between two academic rivals.

He even transforms proceedings from an academic gathering into a harrowing tale of one scientist’s quest to test, prove, and ultimately demonstrate the wonders, horrors, and limits of bending time. The story “Proceedings from the First and Only Sixteenth Annual One-Woman Symposium on Time Manipulation” is honestly one of the standout pieces in the book, and one that can only be produced after a little too much familiarity with journal articles and surviving tenure lectures.

In doing so, Baker’s love for all kinds of knowledge- and memory-keeping shines through. He goes through great lengths to show that the most technical reports carry a person’s yearning to understand the world and the wish to be seen as they are.

I usually stay away from science fiction because I feel so stupid and small around anything related to STEM, but the vibe of the stories here is very welcoming. Baker does not dumb down concepts to appeal to the widest audience; rather, he subtly equips the reader with skills and cues to enjoy the worlds he has built. I feel smart while reading, and that to me is the mark of a great writer.

Even with all the experimental formats, I still found the writing style easy to digest and friendly after a long day of corporate brainrot. Since the stories are also quite short, I read most of the book on bus trips, train rides, and afternoon office breaks. I think these quick escapes from my mundane life made these interstellar stories even more relatable.

Overall, I love this book. It kept me going through the year-end rush at work, and it inspired me to pick up my pen and write again. Sometimes, writing may take the form of news articles, reports, or recipes. Sometimes, it’s an accounting ledger. In all those cases, I can imagine another Baker character hunched over the desk working on a cosmic equivalent. It makes me feel more alive and less alone.

And sometimes, that’s all I need from good art.

I am not going to be finishing this book sadly. I got over 75% of the way through which is why I feel ok giving this a review and star rating other than just I dnfed this. I could not vibe with the writing style in anyway shape or form and I do not think this author is for me. The stories themselves were pretty decent concepts I just could not get past the writing, I could not get into the writing it just felt odd and somewhat rushed.

3.75⭐
Couldn't give this book a solid 4⭐ because even though 85% of these stories took my breath away, the other 15% fell really, really flat for me, which put a strain on the momentum for the rest of the book.
Other than that, I highly recommend.

Thank you NetGalley, Interstellar Flight Press & BookSirens for this ARC in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.

This is a really interesting collection of science fiction short stories. Baker toys with themes of loss, grief, and sentience in interesting ways. He also does some really interesting format experiments, such as annotated bibliographies, excerpts from an index, and dictionary entries. The unique formatting was my favorite part, followed by the subtle (and less-subtle) connections between some of the stories.

Baker is a new-to-me author and after reading this short-stories collection, i am eager to discover more of his works.
This book was captivating. Baker's approach to the themes of love, forgetting, grief, hope (and so many more) was so very well served by the different formats he used to recount his stories. Oscillating between pure sci-fi and anticipation narratives, we've got traditional stories as well as lists, indexes, handbooks, etc. What a refreshing read ! Lots of food for thought in these pages as well as truly heart wrenching moments. I might be repeating myself but the structure of it all was really what stayed with me the most after reading "The Butterfly Disjunct", and how it all seemed to fit together. I laughed (there's a lot of really funny bits), i cried, i stopped and thought, i pondered, i smiled... All in all, i really loved this collection.

I will most certainly be re-reading this books or at least parts of it. I want to go back to some of these worlds, some of these times. I feel it would also be something i'd enjoy reading again with new eyes, a new comprehension of the whole. Surely, i'll find even more meaning there.

It's a collection i'll decidedly recommend to all sci-fi lovers, as well as to all lovers of the art of writing. I think the latter will find in these pages a vast source of inspiration on how to tell a story, without seeming to write a story at all.

Thanks to NetGalley for providing me with an arc of this book.

I've read so many brilliant stories by Baker through the years, and it's a real treat to have them all gathered together in this short story collection. These stories are mindbending, heart-rending, sometimes slyly funny, with unexpected twists and turns. Also, Baker's prose is always wonderful. A wonderful collection that shows the breadth and depth of this writer's imagination.

This is a collection of somewhat interconnected science fiction short stories, many of which take place in a dystopian landscape.

I thought that the characters were the shining stars of this short story collection. Each character felt complex but easy to understand. I wanted to know more about each of the characters and their stories.

I do think that some of the stories were a little difficult to understand, especially with how short they were. Additionally, I thought that some just didn’t fit the theme of the book.

However, I overall enjoyed this short story collection.

I think this book helped me learn that short story collections of science fiction are not my favorite. I will say I still enjoyed parts of this book, but I don't think I am the target audience.

The cover is quite cool and I appreciate the artistic writing style. It just didn't quite work with my brain.

I received an advanced copy for free and am leaving this review voluntarily. Thank you for allowing me to read this!

It took me a minute, but I got quite enamoured of this quirky collection. That’s possibly because the more you read, the more links you see between stories; and some themes start to emerge, too. Time. Love. Memory. Forgiveness. Ghosts—on Mars. Other things on Mars. Space. A couple of empires. Post-apocalypses. Deadly feuds. Beginnings, middles, endings, and further beginnings.

Baker likes headings—you’ll see them a lot, and so I imagine he likes grouping things and ideas—like in the very cool vision of a ruined Toronto after humanity’s lost the ability to use technology, and many of the other stories. There’s a great deal more. The title story is mind-blowing, and very strange. There are feuding time travellers who leave a message in a bottle. There’s the dad who has surgery to forget everything. Also the story of an archive; a quantum game; a time loop and a sentient ship; a one-woman symposium where her many iterations are to present papers; a little cli-fi; and a dog called Little Bastard. There’s even a whole thing on Basho. Oh, and story about ship names.

There are modified humans. There’s a confectioner’s shop on Mars. There’s diving to find exotic life on Europa. *doge coefficient* is an amusing story about language. *love and relativity* is a heartbreaking series of letters to a man lost in time and space. *images across a shattered sea* is fascinating for its imaginary tech and how Baker imagines that world; also for world-building in miniature. *???. [error: out of timeline, unable to process]* is my favourite story, and I won’t spoil it for you, but it has a really wonderful structure, and is a “hermit crab” (there are quite a few of these). I enjoyed Baker’s instructions on *how to break causality and write the perfect time travel story*. I also loved *an evening of theatre at floating world station*, which is about goats, love gone wrong, and a sentient space station. (Aren’t all these titles so cool?!)

Anyway. This is a book I want to read again soon, and I will. So many great ideas, and so much great structure. Read if you love SF ideas, and read if you’re a writer who’s interested in the many ways you can tell a story. Highly recommended.

Thanks to Interstellar Flight Press and NetGalley for DRC access.

This short story collection is a nice sci fi one. Overall are the stories read-worthy. Some better than the others. I enjoyed it!

Thanks to NetGalley, the author and the publisher for this free e-ARC in exchange for an honest opinion.

The Butterfly Disjunct is a collection of short stories covering a range of science fiction ideas from AI, body modification, to time travel. Some stories hit hard emotionally hitting on the topics of grief and the hopelessness of post-apocalyptic worlds. Other stories are really funny serving a reprieve from the darker ones. These are great thought experiments that brings in just the right amount of human emotion to make them relatable. Some of the stories left me confused or wanting more, but overall this was a great collection. I would recommend it to those who like short, punchy, varied science fiction stories.

While this book had an interesting premise and seemed well paced. I could not connect with the characters and the writing.

It might simply be a style issue for me. I did not finish it and will therefore not be publishing a review on my storygraph, Since it might work well for other readers.

Thank you to the author and publisher for giving me access to this book as an ARC.

This is a pretty good collection of science fiction short stories, but I was amazed or wowed in any meaningful way. I will say the cover of the book is not enticing, it has a very amateurish element to it that made me reconsidering reading it. It's a good but not great book, but I don't regret reading it.

Thank you net gallery for the advanced copy of this book. This was a book of short stories, mostly set in space. A few stories were connected, most were not. The stories were quirky and fun, and I would recommend this book.

Thanks to Netgalley for the arc.

The Butterfly Disjunct is a collection of sci-fi short stories and the premise sounded so good I just had to check it out for myself and it didn't disappoint.

I'll first talk about the writing style. It didn't quite live up to my expectations and at times felt a bit choppy with too many scene changes (in video editing language it'd be parallel to having too many cuts) and that's why felt past paced. So, definitely took sometime to adjust with it.

The stories were unique and if I say so, many of them could be adapted into short films as well. My favourite among them was 'Masks'. It was chilling and brilliant. I don't want to spoil it further but at first I was as confused as the MC and then could feel everything as the story progressed further.

In conclusion, this book could've been a hit for me if not for the writing style.

Thanks to netgalley for this ARC! This book had a lot of heavy material stuffed into one small book. I enjoyed the stories of grief and how beautifully tragic it was described. Overall, this book wasn’t for me but it was a quick read

The writing in this collection is fast-paced, flowery and descriptive, packing as much detail about the world as possible into each short story. However, I feel that in an attempt to fit each story into just a short chapter has left many holes in the stories, causing me quite a bit of confusion while reading. Concepts are introduced with little to no background or follow up, and characters are not fully developed and so feel very one-dimensional. I feel that this collection has so much potential should the stories be expanded upon more. Many just needed more time to shine and to fully flesh out the characters and settings and to fully elaborate on the concepts introduced within each chapter.

Finally, thank you to NetGalley and Interstellar Flight Press for this ARC