Book Review: An Astronaut Among the Flowers

The Astronaut Among the Flowers and Other Stories
PA Cornell
Stars and Sabers Publishing (August 18, 2026)
Reviewed by Andrew Byers

I recently ran PA at Cornell About fear, corruption and doomStars and Sabers in the horror anthology, where he did a lake monster story called “From Ice and Darkness,” which was one of the best installments in the crowded book. There, his author biography marked the debut collection, which was released from the same press in August. That’s it, and after reading it now, I’m going to make it clear that the bio undersold it. Cornell is a Chilean-Canadian writer who has been quietly amassing credentials for eight years—Once Upon a Time in Oakmont was a Nebula, World Fantasy, and Aurora finalist in the same year—and this collection is an argument for why you should be paying attention already. Jonathan Maber contributes an introduction that essentially takes the same case and compares it to William F. To Nolan, which seems appropriate.

Twenty-one stories, just over two hundred pages, divided into four sections: Artificial Minds, Unusual Circumstances, Time Distortion, and Visions of the Future. Almost all are reprints between 2018 and 2024 —Cossmass Infinities, Galaxy’s Edge, Apex, fantasy, natureSeveral Firewood anthologies—with two original book parts, Title and All That I Am. Reprint sources will tell you something: this is a writer who has been publishing good places for years without drawing the attention of book-lengths that will make you stand out to the general reader. This is the gap that this collection aims to fill.

It stands out, apparently, in Once Upon a Time in Oakmont, a Manhattan apartment building where residents live in different decades and can visit each other under strict rules — mainly that you don’t tell your ex-resident what to expect. Sarah is in our present; Roger is in 1941, reading a newspaper about a war that America has yet to enter, he knows about Pearl Harbor and is speechless. It’s a wonderful engine for a love story, and Cornell drives it to perfection. But I would also point to “El Bordado,” an epistolary story about a Chilean family emigrating to Mars, which Cornell says in his notes is the most personal thing he’s written and read. Letters Home, Customs Officers Trained Not to Smile, Embroidery – this is a little immigration story dressed in a very thin sci-fi jacket, and I suspect it will appeal to many readers.

Elsewhere: “The Body Remembers” is a really nasty piece about soldiers whose wounds are technologically regrown so that they can be put back into a meat grinder, and it’s found its way onto Nebula and Stoker’s recommended lists. “The Wisdom of Vinyl” follows an aging punk and his grandson scavenging a post-apocalyptic city to find cans and records. Into the Frozen Wilds is a Christmas story in which a plague destroys Santa’s village in the pursuit of Christmas magic, narrated by an elf named Mistletoe who spots something in the snow that is clearly not a deer; It shouldn’t work and yet it works, very well. “The 8 Laws I Broke While Trying to Restore My Timeline” is a 750-word joke told at just the right length. And the title story, one of two originals, is a beautiful closed loop about a girl on a colonial world obsessed with a dead astronaut found in a field of violets whose suit is more advanced and older than humanity.

Cornell took many of these stories from his writing group’s flash fiction contests, and he says so in the back matter, and you can feel it in some places. A few works – “Tabula Rasa”, “A Fall Backward Through the Hourglass”, “In Grip of Yesterday” – still essentially flicker, and the third part in particular moves so quickly that Oakmont’s novel at the end of it must carry an entire section. More importantly, Cornell writes what he calls “Death Without Darkness.” It circles the same warm territory again and again: parents and children, memory, old age, the comfort of being connected to something that will last you. When it stands as “in the universe”—a disabled robot that rusts away on a bench and decides it’s had enough of becoming soil for the plants around it—humanism is exactly what makes it worth reading. But read all the way through, the twenty-one stories in this register can feel overwhelming, and readers who have come to the Stars and Sabers in their horror line should know that only three or four of the stories here have real teeth.

Quibbles aside, this is a strong debut collection from a writer who has been in the works for some time. If you like your sci-fi humane, unremarkable, and more interested in people than tech – in a Bradbury Nolan way, with a Chilean-Canadian accent and a fixation on watches – you should pick this up. Start with The Oakmont or El Bordado and you’ll know within twenty pages if it’s for you. He was there for me. It is recommended.