Unforeseen: Stories

by Molly Gloss

From bestselling and award-winning author Molly Gloss comes her first complete collection of short stories—including three never-before-published original tales!

Award-winning and critically acclaimed author Molly Gloss’s career retrospective collection, Unforseen, includes sixteen celebrated short stories that have never been published together before and three new stories.

This collection includes:
“Interlocking Pieces”
“Joining”
“Seaborne”
“Wenonah’s Gift”
“Personal Silence”
“Lambing Season”
“Downstream”
“Verano”
“The Visited Man”
“Unforeseen”
“The Grinnell Method”
“The Presley Brothers”
“Dead Men Rise Up Never”
“Eating Ashes”
“Personal Silence”
“A Story”
“Little Hills”
“The Everlasting Humming of the Earth”

Genres: Short Stories, Fantasy, Fiction, Science Fiction, Speculative Fiction, Anthologies, Horses

352 pages, Hardcover

First published July 16, 2019

About the author

Molly Gloss is a fourth-generation Oregonian who lives in Portland.

Her novel The Jump-Off Creek was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for American Fiction, and a winner of both the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award and the Oregon Book Award. In 1996 Molly was a recipient of a Whiting Writers Award.

The Dazzle of Day was named a New York Times Notable Book and was awarded the PEN Center West Fiction Prize.

Wild Life won the James Tiptree Jr. Award and was chosen as the 2002 selection for "If All Seattle Read the Same Book."

Reviews

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

This collection, like everything Molly Gloss writes, is absolutely gorgeous. I love almost every story, but I'd like to give a special shoutout to "The Presley Brothers," which is one of those stories I'm eternally jealous of not having written.

[Ian · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.7⭐️

Molly Gloss is a terrific story teller. In the 17 short stories in this book her eloquent prose and quick, detailed characterization catch you up and carry you away. To 19th century Paris; the Washington coast during World War Two; to an unnamed western US sheep range; to an undated far future.

A few of of the tales could be labeled science fiction, the rest mainstream fiction. They're all good, not a clunker in the bunch. Some of them deal with encounters with the uncanny: aliens; ghosts; a hole in the sky; death, in various forms.

Gloss has a talent for creating settings and atmospheres that can be eerie and unsettling but at the same time completely believable. A tolerance for ambiguity is an asset when reading this book, Gloss doesn't spoon feed her audience ( something I like, personally). You can also catch glimpses of a dry, wry sense of humour.

The highlights include Lambing Season, an unusual, slow burning first contact story ( which was nominated for both Hugo and Nebula awards), The Grinell Method, about the hole in the sky (and ornithology). One story, Wenonah's Gift, bears some resemblance to the Hunger Games, except it was written 20 years earlier.

I came late to Gloss' writing, which means I have a lot of her work to catch up ( a good thing!)

[alicebme · Rating 4 out of 5]

Molly Gloss goes on my very short list of favorite writers now. I always thought details made me an impatient reader, but it turns out that I just hadn’t read details about anything I cared much about before.

[MargaretDH · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars, rounded down.

I don't think it's possible for me to give a short story collection 5 stars, but this comes very close.

I bought this book years ago in Portland, Oregon at Powell's bookstore. It was on their local authors shelf, and I loved the cover. I brought it home, shelved it, and let it languish. I have so many regrets! This was a wonderful collection, and an excellent mix of genre. A lot of it was quite striking, and Gloss can make a short story sing. I'll definitely be reading more Gloss after this.

[Lauren Bourke · Rating 5 out of 5]

A good collection of short stories. Each one has just enough science fiction added to make them surreal, but not so much that they are hard to understand or relate to. The otherness enhances the stories and the humanity of the characters in them.

[Devin · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collection of short stories somewhere between Annie Proulx and Phillip K. Dick, with a consistent focus on unexpected loss. The standouts are "Lambing Season," "The Blue Roan," and "Little Hills."

[Ctgt · Rating 3 out of 5]

6/10

[Avery Barrett · Rating 1 out of 5]

The topic of this short story had the potential to be very interesting, however, I found it to be very boring. There was far too much unnecessary information at the beginning of the story that had little importance to the overall topic and didn't contain any elements of science fiction. Toward the end of the story, when the science fiction elements were introduced, the story seemed to lack the details that would have made it interesting. I think I would have enjoyed this story if there were fewer details at the beginning and more details at the end. I wish the author went into greater detail about the alien and the UFO.

[Judy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've always enjoyed Molly Gloss' writing. This collection of stories is superb. A paragraph in the story called The Grinnell Method, she writes: "Overnight, as blood will clot in a wound, the clouds thickened and hardened, and in the morning what remained was a black flaw stretching out of sight to the north and south, a long, shifting vein of darkness, glossy and depthless." Astounding!

[Sophie · Rating 1 out of 5]

This short story was not good in my opinion. The idea of this story was good, but the way the author executed it was not good. There was too much detail in the beginning that was not necessary. This entire story was realistic fiction and it was very confusing. I don't understand why the alien was buried under rocks. This story was boring and I do not recommend for others.

[Sophia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lambing Season started out slow and maintained that pace throughout the story. It did not have much of a climax and built minimal suspense around a subject that could have been made out to be more interesting and intense. I think that the story was well written, however lacked the hook Sci-Fi stories are known to have.

[Sarah Melissa · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a very recent collection. Her short stories are a mixture of what one might call mainstream fiction and science fiction. The stories are all very low key, and one does not really get the key points of "Personal Silence," for instance, until almost the end of the story. A veteran of the cleverly named "Third World's War" makes an intention in a Quaker meeting to walk all around the world without speaking, and other than that the only clue to how it goes is a Chilean delegate at a failed peace conference keeping public silence for a year in protest of his treatment, which does not take place in Chile, and which goes well beyond a beating. I like the story about the very dedicated cat who hears his person's voice on the answering machine even though the person has been dead four months; it emerges that it could be the person's blind brother who was never notified of the death, and who is now very ill himself, so the thing is ambiguous. "Wild Life," one of Gloss's excellent novels, is a little like that.

[Pat · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nice variety of style and points of view in this wonderful collection. My favorite is "The Visited Man," featuring post-impressionist painter Henri Rousseau and all his quirkiness. Lots hiding under the surface in this one! Another, "Interlocking Pieces" is not set in the past, but a not-so-distant future.

[Emalee · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book feels like Willa Cather meets Ursula K. Le Guin- both authors that I love, but very different. The stories sometimes are purely speculative or purely pastoral, but often a combination. I like the earthen characters and the understated elements here. People living quiet lives that have meaning. A few of the stories didn’t land but most were good.

[Janice · Rating 4 out of 5]

Apparently I'm destined to read everything by Molly Glass that I can find on Scribd.

This is a book of short stories. The writing is lovely. Some, of course, are better than others.

"Lambing Season" is an extraordinary story. I keep thinking about it.

Molly Gloss can WRITE.

[Samantha · Rating 2 out of 5]

I loved every single one of the ideas that sparked these short stories. It's indeed a fascinating world that the author is creating.
However, the delivery just wasn't for me. I ended up feeling the stories dragged on for too long. It really took me a long while to finish this book.

[Mills College Library]

Fiction G5631u 2019

[Marna Tisdel]

A collection of short stories. Most of,the stories had a somewhat science fiction quirk in them. Good. Towers book club.

[E. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Molly Gloss is such a treat.

[Kim Craig · Rating 5 out of 5]

Subtle, beautiful, thought-provoking.

[Mary Soon Lee · Rating 5 out of 5]

This may be my favorite collection I've ever read. Of the seventeen stories, I marked eight(*) as excellent. The stories range from mainstream, to fantasy, to science fiction. They display a breadth of voice and character, yet certain elements recur. A love of landscape, of birds and animals. Quiet, understated prose. Beautifully evoked characters. A tenderness. Grief. Loneliness. The use of detail, especially naturalistic detail, is superb.

Fourteen of the stories had been published previously between 1984 and 2016. Three are original to this collection. I had read several of them before, and they were as outstanding on re-reading as they had been the first time. One, "Personal Silence," had introduced me to Molly Gloss's work almost 30 years ago, and led me to her books, starting with "The Jump-Off Creek," a mainstream novel centered on a woman homesteader: a book I have read, and re-read, and read aloud to family.

A few weeks before this, I read Ted Chiang's collection "Stories of Your Life and Others," which is also excellent. Where Chiang's stories are deeply considered, fiercely intelligent explorations of fantastical premises, Gloss's stories, even when they are science fiction, explore character more than premise. They are deeply felt, deeply moving, compassionate works. Several remind me, in the best way, of Ursula K. Le Guin, another of my favorite authors.

One caveat. The stories tend toward the bleak. I loved them. I loved the characters. But I found it best to read them one a day, pacing myself.

(*) For the curious, those eight, in the order they appear in the book, are as follows: "Interlocking Pieces," "Personal Silence," "Seaborne," "Lambing Season," "The Blue Roan," "The Everlasting Humming of the Earth," "Joining," and "The Grinnell Method."

About my reviews: I try to review every book I read, including those that I don't end up enjoying. The reviews are not scholarly, but just indicate my reaction as a reader, reading being my addiction. I am miserly with 5-star reviews; 4 stars means I liked a book very much; 3 stars means I liked it; 2 stars means I didn't like it (though often the 2-star books are very popular with other readers and/or are by authors whose other work I've loved).

[Jan Priddy · Rating 5 out of 5]

These stories represent a board range of situations and people and approaches—science fiction and fantasy and what some like to call reality. There are a few horses, many birds, stormy weather and wild seas, city and lonely highlands. Physically detailed and unsentimental, what these share is a deeply human and humane approach to relationships. Siblings, friends—individuals seeking to maintain or create community. The younger sister determined to carry on her older brother's passion for wildlife, the man determined to hold on and sustain the life of his critically wounded partner. Set in the future and past, in France and the PNW, but nearly always including landscape, the deeply human connection to the land.

I was genuinely sorry to reach the end.

Merged review:

I loved this story the first time I read it. And I loved it the fifth or seventh time, just as much. So many stories are about money or romance, or more likely both: the prince marries the pretty girl, happily ever after. blah blah blah

Delia is not a young pretty princess disguised as a shepherdess. She is the real thing: an aging woman who camps out alone on rough land to keep sheep safe from coyotes, bringing them in for the winter and drinking away her wages, before lambing season and again out on the land. There is no purpose, goal, or meaning to her life. And then one night she sees something in the sky.

The story is widely anthologized and also included in Gloss's new collection, Unforeseen.

[Cynthia Davis · Rating 2 out of 5]

Of the five stories we read for class, this might have been my least favorite because it confused me. So much of the story is realistic fiction--all the details about Delia and her dogs herding the sheep, about what happens when it rains, about her trailer and her pistol, and about the ever-present danger of coyotes. Then there's the spaceship and the dog-man and her decision to stay by his side while he dies and the fact that she buries him. I wonder what my students think about the story.

[Kimmen Sjolander · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a simply beautiful and moving short story. It's unusual for sci-fi, in that the sci-fi aspects (involving a humanoid whose space ship lands in a deserted mountainous area) plays a deceptively relatively minor role. The writing is gorgeous. I loved it.