s a collection of 12 stories that runs the gamut from fantasies and mainstream mysteries to tales of mankind's decline and a number of visits with Genghis Khan, Thumbprints provides a taste of one of science fiction's most versatile writers. Among the many highlights:
"Out of Place": When everybody gains the ability to hear what animals are thinking, people find themselves shocked and disturbed to discover what their pets and livestock really think of them, the meat industry goes into (temporary) decline, and marriages are thrown into turmoil when cats broadcast idle comments about infidelity. Then humanity's callousness runs true to its usual form.
"Climb the Wind": When the mounted horsemen of Genghis Khan appear as ghostly visitations above modern-day Mongolia, a bored and jaded American on a package tour passes up a chance to leave the country and instead follows the locals into the desert in a quest to determine just what the specters want.
"Amphibians": A woman struggling to come to terms with her feelings about her departed father revisits the lake he loved and finds him waiting for her there.
"Shrinker": A couple struggling with bills uses a shrinking machine to minimize the work-at-home hubby, thus saving on groceries and water consumption, a compromise that has unintended consequences as she finds herself increasingly forced to cater to his whims.
A powerful prosesmith
Pamela Sargent is a skilled, versatile wordsmith whose evocative prose brings her stories to heartfelt life. The stories in Thumbprints may feature settings from the fabled past to the far future, but they all feel immediate, and they all resonate in the emotions. The collection highlight, the already-cited "Climb the Wind," features such a vivid portrait of a dusty, poverty-stricken and despairing modern-day Mongolia that the fantasy element, as powerful as it happens to be, is almost unnecessary: She has already captured the soul of the place, with an eloquence that shames many writers of nonfiction.
The title story, "Thumbprints," original to this volume, has no fantasy element unless you're willing to count wish fulfillment. A small-town author of fringe popularity, working in a bookstore "where those of my books that weren't out of print had to be special-ordered whenever a customer deigned to show interest in them" begins to suspect a murderous conspiracy when a number of best-selling authors suffer untimely deaths just as their own popularity begins to decline. The dead authors include figures with names like Cormac O'Malley and Mona Dart. Any similarity between these figures, their careers as described at length and certain real-life best-sellers is of course strictly coincidental. James Morrow, in his witty introduction to the volume, uses this story an excuse to declare, "Sargent Peppers Phony Arts Dubbed Grand," a pun of truly heroic proportions for which he should be applauded and flogged.
Other collection highlights include "Gather Blue Roses," in which the daughter of a Holocaust survivor finds that her mother's trauma rebounds upon her as well, the time-travel love story "If Ever I Should Leave You" and the closing "Utmost Bones," a haunting and imaginative tale of an alienated immortal. Thumbprints is a treasure.
