The Start of the End of It All and Other Stories

by Carol Emshwiller

Eighteen stories deal with alien worlds, extraterrestrial invaders, crossbreeds, animals, and lonely city-dwellers

Genres: Science Fiction, Short Stories, Speculative Fiction, Fiction, Womens, Collections

192 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 1990

About the author

Carol Emshwiller is an American writer of avant garde short stories and science fiction who has won prizes including the Nebula and Philip K. Dick Awards. Ursula K. Le Guin has called her "a major fabulist, a marvelous magical realist, one of the strongest, most complex, most consistently feminist voices in fiction." In 2005, she was awarded the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement. Her most recent novel, The Secret City, was published in April 2007.

She is the widow of the artist and experimental filmmaker Ed Emshwiller . Their son is the actor, artist, screenwriter, and novelist Peter Emshwiller .

Reviews

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quite a quirky and unusual collections of stories that are not easy to categorize, but are very good and thought provoking. Published by The Women's Press, the cover says science fiction, they won a fantasy award and they are most certainly feminist. A few are clearly science fiction, sort of, but they reflect on life and society now. Some are just straightforward short stories that are easily set in our present, many are open ended and have no obvious setting.
Having said that, these are good stories for a number of reasons. Emshwiller moves easily from lightness and humour to sadness and has a nice touch in satire. In many of these stories the lead role is taken by women, no surprise, but they are almost entirely older women in their 50s and above. They are strong, human surprising, often lonely characters (loneliness is one of the themes). All the characters have flaws, but that makes them all the more attractive and the stories all the better. Many of the female characters feel they don't belong and that is also a theme, as is resolution of this lack of belonging, in ways that vary and are not always entirely comfortable.
These stories do take some reading, often because Emshwiller makes you work for resolutions; it isn't all neatly wrapped for the reader and sometimes thought and a re-read is necessary.
I'm deliberately avoiding much detail about the stories because to describe most of them is almost to tell the stories; there are lots of subliminal and psychoanalytic half-references (watch out for the Jungian psychoanalyst). The alien invaders who promise women an end to the tyranny of men, only to replace it by, yes, you've guessed it! "Meet the new boss! Same as the old boss!"
The best stories are the ones which don't really have a direct science fiction element, they are often much more subtle and a couple of them reminded me of Virginia Woolf's shorter fiction.
All in all a good collection of stimulating short stories.

[T.D. Whittle · Rating 2 out of 5]

I have read about half the stories but am setting this collection aside for now. I might return to finish it later. I do like a few of the stories very much, and others ... not so much. They are consistently clever and frequently funny but the tone of all of the stories is that of detached amusement which, given that they are about women in various life-changing contexts, is underwhelming. Perhaps inevitably, I began to feel detached and indifferent too, because the women of Emshwiller's creation cannot be known from the inside out; there's no point of emotional connection or even fleeting intimacy with these protagonists. Indifference to the main characters is not a response I like to have to my books.

[Stef Rozitis · Rating 4 out of 5]

This anthology is frequently dark and disturbing. It goes into some psycho-social places I for one like to avoid. It is full of the irrational- desires and cruelty and various asymmetries of power (which at times get turned on their heads). There is tragedy, inevitable break-down and pain and the reoccurring themes seem to be the ageing female body and smallness. The characters in these stories frequently make choices between the rational and commonplace and the mythic "other". These choices are presented as complex, characters throughout the stories do not all make the same choice and the same choice is not always "right" nor is any choice unproblematical there is always a heavy price paid which some of the characters seem to find worthwhile and others may not.

I didn't enjoy every moment of reading this complex and dark weave of stories and the darkness and suffering in them was too extreme. I found them well crafted, stunningly original and thought provoking so at the end I am glad I read them.

[nabila · Rating 4 out of 5]

She wrote this for the freaks and I love her for it

[Karol · Rating 4 out of 5]

I honestly don’t know how to rate this. You read one story after another and you’re wondering if it’s still the same author. There’s always something unexpected that the character will do or decide on. But by the end of the last story in this book, you’ll know. Like everything revealed but not written in every end of each story.

[Jack Deighton · Rating 4 out of 5]

In these stories Emshwiller’s style tends to the intellectual and reflective, and always told with a female slant on the world. Very few are straightforward narratives but all of them are intriguing – and well written.

The Start of the End of it All is an alien invasion story. “‘Politics,’ they say, ‘begins at home, and most especially in the kitchen’” - a good place for a revolution to start. But first they have to get rid of the cats. The aliens seem to have targeted divorced, post-menopausal women for their infiltration. A tinge of alarm strikes when one of the aliens says, ‘Time to find lots of little dark, wet places.’ But our narrator isn’t keen on giving up cats.
Looking Down is narrated by a sentient bird (or flying creature at least) who allows himself to be captured by humans to function as an oracle and protector.
In Eclipse a woman stumbles into the wrong party and is taken for either a pianist or flautist. She is neither. But a student of Jung gives her confidence.
The Circular Library of Stones is found by our narrator who collects stones and imagines the circle as a library. Her story can be read as if she has lost some marbles though.
In Fledged a winged woman who looks remarkably like the narrator’s ex-wife comes crashing into his house during a storm.
Vilcabamba finds a man displaced from his people but able to remember gestures they made and bits of their language. He sets out to try to find his way back home.
In Acceptance Speech a man abducted from his own world makes his speech on being made Humble-Master-of-the-Poem.
If the Word Was to the Wise is a story about the importance of the word, and its dangers. In the tallest building in the city are two safes. One contains the law, all that keeps the city secure, the other, all the banned books. A young prince of the library (despite the title, really an underling) falls for the chief librarian’s daughter, Josephine. They begin to plan to open the “banned” safe.
The centre of the universe in Living at the Centre is Omphalo, of whose fabulous beached women the mountain men have heard tell. One old woman goes down there to find out if the tales are true.
In Moon Songs a brother and his older sister encounter an unusual insect which when pricked with a pin “sings” for ten minutes. The sister tries to parlay this discovery into a stage career.
But soft, what light... is a variation on the 100 monkeys eventually typing out Shakespeare thing. Uniq-o-fax (rather quaintly now in 2019,) thirty nine typewriters and a word bank, “all those wires and tubes,” and the female narrator fall in love and write poems to each other.
Pelt is set on Jaxa, an ice planet on which a human has landed, with his dog, to hunt for furs. The viewpoint character is the dog, and the hunter finds more – and less – than he bargained for.
Début could be seen as a variation on Snow White. An apparently blind girl is brought before the Queen only for her mask to be removed before she is banished to the hills. There, the story diverges from that template.
The titular organisation of The Institute is the Old Ladies Institute of Higher Learning (the OLI of HL,) the story one that features an embedded drawing and ends with a piece of musical notation for a song. The narrator’s grandmother, an alumna of the OLI of HL, was quite a gal.
Woman Waiting is the stream of consciousness of a woman waiting for her postponed flight, retreating ever into herself.
In Chicken Icarus a man who is a head and torso but little else (but that little - or not so little - is important,) schemes to have himself displayed more widely.
Sex and/or Mr Morrison features a woman looking for the Others amongst us spying on her upstairs neighbour.
In Glory, Glory a woman on holiday with her husband in a country where they don’t know the language is taken by the locals for a goddess.

Pedant’s corner:- six storey (six storeys,) “bit for the tower, I also, would have done” (either no comma after ‘also’ or an extra comma after ‘I’,) “‘the first snows will be coming’ he says. ‘The tower..” (that ‘he says’ is part of a sentence the character is speaking so it should not be outside the quotation marks,) “in order fit my own ears” in order to fit,) “the forsythia were not in bloom” (either ‘forsythias’, or ‘was not in bloom’, largess (USianism for largesse?) stachel (satchel,) contraposto (contrapposto.)

[Beth · Rating 3 out of 5]

A strange little anthology, that I have found terribly hard to describe whenever asked what I am reading.

I enjoyed several of the stories, though a fair few of them aren't particularly worth the effort that reading took.
Every story had a degree of detachment from the narrative, which worked better for some stories than others.

Definitely an intriguing read.

[Ellen Sandberg · Rating 4 out of 5]

Row 4, 4 down SCIENCE FICTION OR FANTASY, 216 pages

[Mach-X · Rating 5 out of 5]

It look cool

[Sam Macuga · Rating 2 out of 5]

That was weird

[Shira and Ari Evergreen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Yay feminism and animal rights! This book was full of unexpected perspectives, spellbinding weirdness, and startling clashes of everyday life with myth and history. The book ends with an exceptionally modest postscript explaining the writer's creative process. I put it down thinking that Emshwiller must be a very wise and compassionate person, to have crafted so many beautiful and haunting stories. She's able to speak truth to power while being entertaining and not at all heavy-handed.

[Fusako · Rating 4 out of 5]

　やっと読み終えた。半年前からぼつり、ぼつり、短篇集なので、少しずつ。やはり私にはＳＦは難しい。奇想天外なＳＦ的要素が強いと、しらけるのだ。字面を追うだけで、作品世界に入り込めない。大事なのは「心の動き」なのに、道具ばかりが目についてしまう。でも、比較的ＳＦ色の薄いこの本は読めたと言える。
　好きなのはまず、最後のWisCon Speech。これを読めただけで、望外の喜び。この日本独自の短篇集を編んでくれた出版社に感謝。ウイスコン大会がどんなところなのか、どんな解説書よりわかるのでは？　
　それからよかったのは　Secrets of the Native Tongue　と　Prejudice and Pride.
　エムシュウイラーは楽しい人だ。そして１９２１年生まれなのに、いまだ謙虚な人だ。こんな人なら友だちになってみたい、と思う。９０歳になる大好きな伯母とダブった。

[Leah · Rating 5 out of 5]

This shit will blow your mind. Artfully, poetically, written. humanist spec/sci fiction. Just enough humor and absurdity to keep you smiling--but tragically beautiful stories. I can't recommend this collection of short stories highly enough. She will blow you away!

[Jenn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Most of these stories are 5s.

[Bri Fidelity · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you want to know what all the fuss is about, start with this collection.