Ordinary People

Spanning thirty years, this volume collects six stories, one poem, and a WisCon Guest of Honor speech. In the richly ironic ''Warlords of Saturn s Moons,'' first published in 1974, a cigar-puffing woman writes space-opera while the drama of real-life inner-city Detroit goes on around her; ''The Grammarian's Five Daughters'' offers a playful explication of the uses of the parts of speech; ''A Ceremony of Discontent'' takes a humorous approach to a modern-day feminist problem; and Arnason's wise, earthy tales of hwarhath serve up new myths explaining the origins of the world and morality (among other things). The work in this collection entertains with its wit, delights with its precision and imagination, and challenges and provokes with its bluntness. Ordinary People offers a small, potent taste of the oeuvre of an important author of feminist sf.

Eleanor Arnason s award-winning novel, A Woman of the Iron People, has won high praise from some of today's finest writers, including Ursula K. LeGuin, who wrote of it, ''At last, a nonpredictable, thought-through, can t-stop-reading-it story, full of complicated and irresistible people, some of them human. This fascinating novel asks some big, serious questions, and it gives no easy answers.'' And so with the stories in this collection. All of Arnason's characters, however ordinary, are complicated and irresistible, even or especially when they re being stubborn and grumpy.


Genre: Science Fiction