A stable of stable staples

kw: book reviews, science fiction, anthologies

Writer after editor after fan bemoans the modest quantity of Eileen Gunn's fiction. As one editor put it, her normal pace is two or three stories per decade. For Gunn, quality trumps quantity. We might wish for more...what we have is what we get.

The 2004 collection of her short stories, Stable Strategies and others, shows just how diverse her mind is. Their publication dates ranging over thirty years, these twelve gems range from a very, very generic and adaptable recipe, to the barely fictional, to as far out as you care to go. As a bonus, in the introduction, she offers "the secret of writing" which is a friend's advice: "You must learn to overcom your...revulsion for your own work." Perhaps she took it, and increased her output to three, rather than two, stories per decade.

The stories, ideas and my comments:

• Stable Strategies for Middle Management - take Kafka's "Metamorphosis" and put it in a business setting where people gradually morph (she really shouldn't use the word mutate) into insects that reflect their characteristics.
• Fellow Americans - Dick Nixon got out of politics and went into television; the Presidency took a different turn in his absence. Make it wildly hilarious...
• Computer Friendly - Revolutions restore the diversity of society that bureaucracy seeks to eliminate. The genesis of a revolutionary or two.
• The Sock Story - Surreal sock steals soul!
• Coming to Terms - Packing up the belongings of one's dead searches the soul. A deft story of such a search, with touch of the fantastic.
• Lichen and Rock - As we grow, we realize that the world changes us. What if we could change—i.e. switch—worlds?
• Contact - A beautiful rendering of an old idea: the (literal) meeting of minds with an alien. So many stories, this included, rely on telepathy, I wonder if most SciFi writers are wise enough to despair that we'll ever learn to communicate with aliens once we find some. After all, we are no smarter than dolphins, and haven't got very far in generations of trying.
• What Are Friends For? - The destruction of Earth and most of humanity, and the forced removal of a very few, awaits only the cultural recording of an alien ethologist. How do you slow it down?
• Ideologically Labile Fruit Crisp - Philosophically deconstructed, generic recipe.
• Spring Conditions - A piece of amorphous horror that won praise from Stephen King.
• Nirvana High (with Leslie What) - Telepaths and others with "special talents" are likely to pose a discipline problem in public schools. Is putting them all in one school system likely to make things any better? By the way, in my opinion, if there is a mechanism of telepathy, it'll work only between two brains of exquisitely similar construction. Two telepaths could read each others' minds, but nobody else's.
• Green Fire (with Andy Duncan, Pat Murphy, & Michael Swanwick) - This was a round-robin story, so wrenching twists are the norm. Mix a Tesla coil with other experimental circuitry, all mounted in a battleship...could it affect the structure or properties of matter...or of spacetime? (not really, but it's a fun read)