The Girl Who Loved Animals and Other Stories
Bruce McAllister has been a past master at American speculative fiction for decades, now, and is still going strong, as evidenced by the nomination of his short story, Kin, for a Hugo Award this year.
Kin is included in McAllister’s new collection of stories, The Girl Who Loved Animals and Other Stories, along with 16 other selections, ranging from the far-flung, far-future Assassin to the flat-out funny and nostalgic look at 1950s horror movies that is Hero, The Movie (which... this is true... started off as a treatment for a movie for the sci-fi action-flick producer Gale Ann Hurd).
McAllister started publishing at the tender age of 16, when his story The Faces Outside was published in if: Worlds of Science Fiction, a now-defunct magazine. A young man’s interests can be glimpsed in the story: grotesque aliens, randy humans who need to mate so as to increase their numbers and conquer their tyrannical subjugators (though their means of insurrection is more magical, or perhaps philosophical, than armed and violent), and there’s a wry commentary on the nature of bureaucracy and tyranny in the memorable sentence, "The disintegrator was fired once more, this time into the orange eye of the beush himself, by himself, and for the good of himself.
That sense of play recurs in the story The Man Inside, which pivots an a kind of typographical visual pun, and in the alternate-history story Southpaw, in which Fidel Castro, instead of leading a revolution, settles for playing pro baseball.
There are more sombre moods in this collection, as well; Moving On is a tale of shattering romance, and of how life and passion linger, hover, and then burn away; Benji’s Pencil foresees a distant future where the world is grim place, but where the human need for poetry still clings to self-expression though metaphor.
The adventurous Dream Baby is here, too, the short story that later grew into a novel; and long before Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth hit cineplexes, McAllister was working out the costs and consequences of a world in which most other forms of animal life have been driven to the very brink of extinction.
Golden Gryphon Press has never issued a book that did not feel essential for the well-stocked library of speculative fiction, but McAllister’s new collection certainly belongs in the top twelve.
Publisher: Golden Gryphon Press. Publication Date: October, 2007. Pages: 306. Price: $24.95. Format: Hardcover Original. ISBN 1-930-846-49-5
