n "Stable Strategies for Middle Management," near-future corporate employees must evolve in order to succeed. Ambitious manager Margaret signs up with the Bioengineering Department to facilitate her personal evolution, and soon thereafter wakes with her tongue changed into an insect's specialized mouth-part: specifically, a stiletto. But why? It doesn't seem useful. It doesn't let her drink coffee, and she finds herself trying to suck blood from the arm of a new manager, who reacts by manipulating office politics to steal her power. If that's not bad enough, Margaret's boyfriend is turning into a flighty butterfly instead of an industrious hive insect, and her own evolution seems to have stalled in an unfinished, useless form.
In the World War II of "Green Fire," the Navy ships Isaac Asimov and Robert A. Heinlein out to sea on a top-secret mission. They're to conduct the experiment they devised with L. Sprague de Camp, using Tesla coils in an attempt to render the warship invisible to radar. Instead, the test kills several sailors and flips the ship into alternate dimensions, where the survivors find themselves facing bare-breasted women pirates and a powerful god who rides on the back of a giant sea turtle.
In the alternate history of "Fellow Americans," the New York World's Fair celebrates the theme of Diminished Expectations, while aging Gov. Robert Kennedy considers finally making a run for the presidency. In Arizona, respected PBS commentator Geraldo Rivera questions ex-president Barry Goldwater about his use of tactical nukes. Farther west, former vice president Richard Nixon finds his true calling, on a TV game show. ...
Visions of an unstable future
Witty, sometimes absurd and always unpredictable, Stable Strategies and Others is the first collection from Eileen Gunn, one of SF's few undisputed masters of the short story. Like the equally well-regarded Howard Waldrop (who wrote the book's afterword), Gunn is a painstaking writer; as a result, she produces few stories. But every story is a marvel of precision, insight and originality.
A lesser writer's tale of corporate power struggles would have depicted the miserable downside of middle management. But Gunn, in her rightfully oft-reprinted "Stable Strategies for Middle Management," gleefully creates a success story; it makes for a far sharper and funnier satire of corporate America. A lesser writer's "Fellow Americans" would have focused on how Tricky Dick became a game-show star, and perhaps lambasted that easiest of targets, people who watch TV. Gunn, however, avoids these simplistic approaches; instead, she shows how a very different alternate America would not, after all, have been all that different. "Green Fire" (written in collaboration with Andy Duncan, Pat Murphy and Michael Swanwick) goes beyond insider jokes to find genuine courage as it reveals what really happened when three great SF writers served their country during World War II.
Gunn doesn't confine her considerable talents to SF. The collection's 12 stories (two original) range from the pure horror of "Spring Conditions" to the surreal fantasy of "Lichen and Rock." "The Sock Story" invents a funny yet disturbing urban legend about a stocking lost in the wash. "Coming to Terms," an unsettling story of loss, balances delicately between fantasy and mainstream. "Ideologically Labile Fruit Crisp" turns a recipe into an examination of the reader. Regardless of genre, Gunn flenses the obvious to reveal the hidden truths.
