*Bangs & Whimpers*

“Besides science fiction, she loved Faulkner and Shakespeare and cacti (there were always several on her windowsill) and Foreigner and Guns N’ Roses….”

This book was my grandmother’s favorite short-story collection, and it’s a great example of the kind of stories she read me when I was growing up. Nannee was a huge science-fiction/fantasy nerd, a trait she passed to me, to the point where I write sci-fi/fantasy myself. Of course, even between close family members, taste can be quite different. I go for horror romances and swashbuckling stories about heroic swordsmen, while Nannee loved space operas and—more than anything else—stories about the apocalypse and its aftermath. 

She read book after book where viruses or climate change or even magic destroyed the world and people had to figure out how to live on afterwards. The characters faced ethical quandaries like which is more important, morality or survival?—which always seemed curious to me since the ethical quandaries my grandmother faced in suburban Denver were more on the order of whether she should flip off the homeowners-association president or how much she should tip the take-out driver from our favorite Chinese restaurant. 

She came from a middle-class Scots-Irish family. After studying American literature at the University of Kansas, she had an offer to go for a PhD in American studies but turned it down to marry my grandfather. After they divorced, she worked as an archivist for the Superconducting Super Collider project, then as an aid to Gov. Dick Lamm and finally at various nonprofits promoting the economic development of the western U.S. She retired early, when I was eight, to take care of me and my cat after my mother—her daughter—died. Nannee also had been raised by grandparents. She had some personal tragedy in her life.

Besides science fiction, she loved Faulkner and Shakespeare and cacti (there were always several on her windowsill) and Foreigner and Guns N’ Roses (both were always playing in her house). She loved the British TV show Doc Martin (except for the actress who played the love interest; for some reason, my grandmother seriously disliked her and refused to watch anything else she’d ever acted in, even in a minor role). And she loved genealogy research, which led her to become incredibly pro–Scottish independence. 

In her later life Nannee lost faith in real science, and in 2022, after having refused to see a doctor for several years, she died at the age of 79. Though she’d long since convinced the family that she had terminal cancer, in the end she died of heart disease that could have been treated as she was in fact cancer-free. 

When she was alive, my grandmother spent a lot of time trying to use stories about the end of the world to teach me things, even if I never quite understood exactly what I was being taught. I hope I’ll never need to think about whether it’s ethical to kill someone who poses a threat to my family, or have to survive a disaster by hoarding food that would have kept other people alive, but those were some of Nannee’s favorite hypotheticals. 

I’m sure similar scenarios can be found in the stories in Bangs & Whimpers. Though the collection has lived on my bookshelf for more than a year now, I’ve never gotten around to reading it. Maybe that’s because, while I usually enjoyed the adventure parts of the books my grandmother recommended, it was kind of depressing to read about the end of the world over and over again. Or maybe it’s because I’m just busy figuring out how to live on.

—Connlyn Sinclair

My grandmother and I at my middle-school graduation.

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Connlyn Sinclair is a geography major at the University of Kansas. Thanks to his grandmother’s encouragement, he also writes fiction and nonfiction, some of which you can read here.

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