If All Else Fails...

by Craig Kee Strete

A collection. The pages reek with despair at the loss of Native American culture. With an Introduction by Jorge Luis Borges. Craig Strete, one of the few Native American SF authors, picked up three Nebula Award nominations for short SF, two of which are included in this collection of his excellent work. The television, an embodiment of the white man's control of mass culture, declares the Native American is a figment of the past, not of the present. Original authors such as Craig Strete, with distinct and diverse voices, who tackle tough themes such as oppression, the effects of technology, and Native American myth in a literary and experimental manner, are too often neglected in the grand narratives of SF’s past.
Contents:
Saturday Night at the White Woman Watching Hole (1980) / short fiction by Craig Kee Strete
All My Statues Have Stone Wings (1980) / short fiction by Craig Kee Strete
Ten Times Your Fingers and Double Your Toes (1980) / short fiction by Craig Kee Strete
Piano Bird (1980) / short fiction by Craig Kee Strete
To See the City Sitting on Its Buildings (1975) / short fiction by Craig Kee Strete
A Horse of a Different Technicolor (1975) / short fiction by Craig Kee Strete
Time Deer (1974) / short fiction by Craig Kee Strete
Where They Put the Staples and Why She Laughed (1980) / short fiction by Craig Kee Strete
A Place to Die on the Photograph of Your Soul (1980) / short fiction by Craig Kee Strete
With the Pain It Loves and Hates (1976) / short fiction by Craig Kee Strete
When They Go Away (1980) / short fiction by Craig Kee Strete
Who Was the First Oscar to Win a Negro? (1976) / short fiction by Craig Kee Strete
Every World with a String Attached (1980) / short fiction by Craig Kee Strete
Why Has the Virgin Mary Never Entered the Wigwam of Standing Bear? (1976) / short fiction by Craig Kee Strete
Your Cruel Face (1976) / short fiction by Craig Kee Strete
Just Like Gene Autry: A Foxtrot (1976) / short fiction by Craig Kee Strete
Old, So Very Old, and in That Wisdom, Ageless (1980) / short fiction by Craig Kee Strete
When They Find You (1977) / short fiction by Craig Kee Strete
The Bleeding Man (1974) / short fiction by Craig Kee Strete

.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction

182 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1980

About the author

Craig Strete is a Native American science fiction writer. He is noted for his use of American Indian themes and has had multiple Nebula Award nominations.
Beginning in the early 1970s, while working in the Film and Television industry, Strete began writing emotional Native American themed, and science fiction short stories and novellas. He has had three Nebula Award nominations: two for the short stories Time Deer and A Sunday Visit with Great-grandfather and one for the novelette The Bleeding Man.
REANIMUS PRESS NEW RELEASES
The Game of Cat and Eagle novel
If All Else Fails
The World in Grandfather's Hands novel
When Grandfather Journeys Into Winter novel
A Knife In The Mind novel
Dreams That Burn in the Night
Death Chants
Burn Down the Night novel
The Angry Dead novel
The Bleeding Man and Other Science Fiction Stories
My Gun Is Not So Quick novel
The Star Killer novel
To Make Death Love Us novel
Dark Journey
The Bouncing Bride novel
The Mammoth Project novel
Nobody Rides Forever novel
Paint Your Face On A Drowning In The River novel
Strete Food. A book of plays.
The Dinosaur Project novel
Cloudboy Juvenile
Russell Raven Isn't Scared Anymore Juvenile
Death In The Spirit House Novel
New Books.
THE DIRE WOLF PROJECT Novel
THE BLOOD OF OTHERS SF Novel

BLOOD TELLS ME ABOUT THE NIGHT and
THE NIGHT BROTHER
BY R. WRIGHT CAMPBELL AND CRAIG STRETE Horror Novels

MOOSE AND RACCOON
ALL GROWN UP UNDER A BIG MOON SKY
Juveniles

all the books are available in kindle, epub format from Reanimus press.

Reviews

[Graham P · Rating 4 out of 5]

Painted in bold and delirious colors, this collection shows disillusionment with the limits of the SF genre, and only Strete can unfold and re-stitch the future American mythology to be nothing more than a flea market relic handed down from a skewered culture, where even its ghosts no longer care about their distant past lives. 'If All Else Fails...' consists of otherworldly tales not to be deemed 'hopeful' and full of 'wonder.' No, none of that. Be forewarned that as a reader, you'll have little room to scale higher, very little to grasp. Strete doesn't care really about heights, acension. He's more concerned with The Fall, The Drop, The Farewell, the gutter's view from below. No use throwing glitter on a genocide, but still, Strete has fun trying to do so.

The Native American myth is embodied as a decaying expanse full of self-anguish, dislocation, destruction, and even embarrassment and shame. Strete's American West is a future-fucked, time-slipped world where ghosts of the Space Age dematerialize a culture's core, as easy as cutting chapters out of a history book or white-washing a fable handed down one too many times, and all that may be left is genocidal disillusionment. Look through those lenses and all one can see is shame and abandonment.

Native American astronauts defy ancestry to rebuild a future on a hellish planet with little room for mythology. A child born to bleed grows into adulthood, ushering in a new madness into a bureaucratic 'white' medicine. Mystical fawn unfold reality on a journey in animism and alien intelligence ('Time Deer'). Two Cherokee men put on their best threads and attend an unwelcome bar in hopes to assimilate a norm not their own. Drugs are taken, hopes are abandoned, every character seems lost in their own personal reality shifts. Nothing is sacred. There's nowhere to map, nowhere to settle, it's just escaping and running the dead end, and breaking hearts along the way. And where do our proud ancestors end up in the digital world of high technology - well, nothing more than cliches abandoned to themselves (read 'Who Was the First Oscar to Win a Negro?').

Not for everybody, and by no means a fluid collection, but a sole, lonely lament into our psychedelic wastelands. Important as it is esoteric and depressing.

[Joachim Boaz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Full review: https://sciencefictionruminations.com...

"Craig Strete, one of the few Native American SF authors, picked up three Nebula Award nominations for short SF over the 70s and early 80s (“The Bleeding Man” in 1976, “Time Deer” in 1976, and “A Sunday Visit With Great-Grandfather” in 1981 although it was withdrawn). The first two are in If All Else Fails… (1980). They are both far from the best of the collection.

Favorites: “All My Statues Have Stone Wings” (1980), “To See the City Sitting on Its Buildings” (1975), [...]"

[Alexander Winzfield · Rating 4 out of 5]

Short Review: Jorge Louis Borges liked these stories so much, he wrote the introduction. Longer Review: Very much a product of the experimental New Wave Sci Fi of the 70s, this collection of short stories runs the gamut from the entrancing to the intriguing to the outright perplexing. Strete, an author of Cherokee descent, brings a critical eye to a modern society whose promises of progress and peace he well knows to be holy. While a few of these stories dabble a bit too deeply in dense, experimental prose for my liking, many a subtly described, faintly nightmarish visions. Hard SF fans probably won't find what they're looking for here, but folks who like there SF with a foot deep in magical realism would do well to seek out this collection.

[Phil reading_fastandslow · Rating 2 out of 5]

“Raising his hands into the air, he let the sky pull him away from the earth. He took the air in his lungs and thrust it out with a shout. Silently his lips formed words.”

Favorite Stories: The Bleeding Man, To See the City Sitting on its Buildings

Craig Strete's If All Else Fails is a short story collections that resonates with a sense of dislocation and survival, themes intimately tied to Strete's own life as a Cherokee writer. He was one of the first Indigenous American science fiction writers, and his work often touches on identity, loss, and the clash of cultures.

Strete brings these themes to life in stories that blend the surreal with sharp cultural critique. One of my favorites from the collection is "The Bleeding Man," which portrays a man whose wounds are both literal and metaphorical, reflecting the broader trauma of cultural erasure. Strete writes, "Sometimes I wonder if he is bleeding history, and no one cares to stop it." This line encapsulates the broader emotional weight of the story, where personal suffering mirrors collective loss.