Status Updates From The Collected Stories of Ca...

'Foster Mother' and 'Creature' - Two interlinked stories about genetically engineered monsters (probably the same one) who aren't as monstrous as they were intended to be.

'Grandma' - Scenes from the retirement of a superheroine, as witnessed by her gawky, unsuperpowered granddaughter.

But really there isn't a single bad story after p. 378.

'Mr. Jones' - A spinster finds a weird bat-winged homunculus on the grounds of the house she shares with her sister - and decides to marry it.

'Venus Rising' - The Perils of Mitochondrial Eve.

'Modillion' - The secrets of the lost civilisation of Modillion are written in silver-point on a sheet of unbleached paper, and only one woman can see them - when the light is just right.

'In the manuscript is written, "Oh my love, oh my love, come back before dawn," and the spaces between the words stand for words that have been left unwritten. First there would have been shouts and curses, then prayers, then this.'

'Janice has a slight stutter. Normally she speaks rapidly and in a kind of shorthand so as not to take up anyone's precious time, but with her stutter, she can hold people's attention for a moment longer than she would otherwise dare.'

'Looking Down' - A winged man, left behind when his flock moves off for the winter, is nursed back to health by one of his human worshippers: but why?

'If The Word Was To The Wise' - What lies in the secret safe of banned books in the subbasement of the great library?

'There Is No Evil Angel But Love' - An old lady, secretly in love with her neighbour, takes advantage of a bad cold to move into his apartment.

'Secrets of the Native Tongue' - A woman uses a mistakenly-sent invitation to a symposium to reinvent herself as a glamorous intellectual.

'Moon Songs' - A brother and sister find a tiny insect that sings incredibly eerie songs, but only when pricked with a pin.

'Acceptance Speech' - A man is abducted by aliens and forced to become their Poet Laureate.

'They belted my dagger about me, they coiled my whip over my shoulder, and led me to the arena, a place where I'd only heard poetry before, though I'd often wondered at the brown stains on the far wall. When I'd asked about them, you'd always answered that they were the stains of bad poems.'

'Clerestory' - A young couple squat in a public exhibit: but is it art?

'Living At The Centre' - A bored old woman decides, in lieu of senicide, to go on a quest to a bay enshrined in local legend.

'As If' - All the world's artists and intellectuals are rounded up and tortured, that they might better reveal the secrets of their homeworld.

'Fledged' - A man's dinner party plans are thrown into disarray when his long-lost first wife blows in off the patio during a storm, wearing a huge and inexplicable set of wings.

'Not Burning' - A lonely librarian, 'only slightly deranged', reads a self-help book and decides to turn her life around, with decidedly mixed results.

'Being Mysterious Strangers...' - Another long march; this time only 67 strong.

'One wishes the best for them. That they should lie down (exhausted in the dark) [...] on the sands of a drab beach and wake up to a thousand ships in a sparkling bay. Or that they should sleep (exhausted in the dark) next to what seems like only a large square stone and yet wake up to a thousand ornate plinths in long rows [...] and upon each, the golden feet of the statues that once stood there[.]'

'Eclipse' - A woman, in accidentally attending the wrong dinner party, suddenly finds herself self-confident - for a couple of hours or so.

'The Circular Library of Stones' - A mad old woman unearths the ruins of an ancient matriarchy - or is it just senile wishful thinking?

'Vilcabamba' - A forcibly civilised Indian tries to make sense of his early memories while en route (he hopes) to his ancestral homeland.

'At first I didn't notice that I still held the flute. I certainly could be arrested for stealing a flute.

'A flute is, actually, quite large and noticeable. People did notice it. And me. They would look at the flute and study my face as though they were thinking: So that's what a flute player looks like.'

'The Start of the End of It All' - Sinister aliens recruit a kitchen network of divorced and disenfranchised women to help destroy humanity, but are Really Only After One Thing.

'Queen Kong' - The world's largest woman comes to New York, and makes a boob of herself at the WTC.

'Verging On The Pertinent' - A lady tourist becomes the unwitting religious icon of a third-world nation (Take One).

'Nobody glances up [...] and that's not so surprising since she's hunching her shoulders, squatting down, one hand on the sidewalk, other hand trying to keep the lower part of her hair from tangling in the upper branches of trees. Seeing her, therefore, one doesn't think: My God, here on this very street, the largest woman in the world! but rather, glances aside, hoping for a better view of what's behind her.'

'Maybe Another Long March...' - Thousands of women embark on a protest/quest up into the mountains. The men do not, in general, handle this well.

'Escape Is No Accident' - An injured space pilot finds herself - suddenly, 'Overboard'-like - an Earthman's overworked wife - or did she just fall out the upstairs window?

'Abominable' - A team of explorers search for signs of the elusive, long-vanished Woman.

Some of the alien invaders' Project Mayhem-like schemes in 'The Start of the End of It All' are amusingly Current™:

'The one I think is Klimp is on the lawn chair figuring how to get rid of all the bees by too much spraying of fruit trees or how best to distribute guns to the quick-tempered[.]'

'Here are the facts: The storm came out of the North and I probably came with it.'

'There are several different ways of going mad. There are almost as many ways to go mad as there are people going mad. There's a best way for everybody. As yet, I'm not in any serious financial trouble, so I can afford to go mad in almost any way I like and pay for whatever damage I do.'

'I'm writing this with careless abandon, partly because I know it will not be my last story. (They say always do something as though it were your last chance, but I'm pretty sure I'm not going to die tomorrow.)'

'The children lose their baby teeth and bring them, one by one, to their mothers. The new teeth are the teeth of reasoning, including the judgment of distance, time and volume, and if the new teeth should, at some later date, fall out, that would be the time of the loss of time and understanding.'

'As an artist, you could draw me writing at the kitchen table like this or doing dishes or wiping cat throw-up off the rug. As a poet, you could do the lyrics to my tunes. As a filmmaker, do me walking in the woods.

'You did that.'

He did!

'Woman Waiting' - A woman waits hopelessly for a postponed flight, only to find that she's already departed...for the Twilight Zone.

'Al' - A plane crash survivor comes to live in a Shangri-La-like valley of artistes and poseurs.

'The Childhood of the Human Hero' and 'Autobiography' - Two back-to-back autobiographical pieces, about Emshwiller's young son and writing respectively. Completely charming.

'She was the sort who would have cut off her right breast the better to bow her violin, but, happily, she played the harpsichord.'

'She's five hundred years old though she doesn't look a day over sixteen and plays the virginal like an angel. Did her undergraduate work at the University of Utah (around 1776, I would say). If she crossed the Alleghenies now she'd crumble into her real age and die, so later on I tried to get them to take a trip to the Ann Arbor Film Festival together, but naturally she had something else to do.'

'I Love You' - A woman locked out of a party waits for her husband to realise she's gone; he fails to.

'The Queen of Sleep' - Woman vs. insomnia; no clear winner.

'Peninsula' - An isolated widow begins to receive threatening calls at her home, and feels events taking an eerie and threatening pattern around her. Completely sinister.

'Debut' - A blind princess in an all-female society comes of age.

'Where I come from, after you mate you're no longer an autonomous individual, but the male rides between your legs and carries on all his business affairs from there while you become a personally attached secretary and chauffeur. (Our clothes are adapted to the situation and to the female's natural feelings of modesty under these circumstances.)'