Everything here sucks: The protagonists are all a mix of stupid, unreflected, and plain assholes. There’s a distinct lack of imagination: e.g. in a world without men, lesbians are still somehow repulsive and gender roles are well and alive. All the stories left me with an icky and depressed feeling (apart from the alien picnic one, I suppose).
There’s a tendency to blame the translators for this, but first of all, these issues are with the content way more than with the language, and secondly, these issues are stable across all the stories and different translators, so I really think it’s just the text that’s … nah.
Plot summary
Beware: full spoilers! Also probably incomplete and possibly incomprehensible.
- Women and Women: World inhabited only by women with men shoved off to camps, myths saying there once were only women in paradise etc. Gender roles are explicitly unchanged with butch women taking up the slack. Civilisation is clearly decaying – because women and technology?
- You May Dream: Protagonist is a people pleaser and will say whatever the other person wants to hear, which means she’s friends with people while despising them, and constantly mocking them internally. Just icky.
- Night Picnic: aliens pretend to be human without really getting anything, basically replaying assorted telenovelas. Most bearable story in there.
- That Old Seaside Club: Trippy hotel stay that is kinda virtual therapy. Odd, unpleasant, but not as bad as the first stories.
- Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: Protagonist is aging rapidly, and also grossed out by aging, and it’s rather unpleasant.
- Forgotten: SSIA. Something something alien sex.
- Terminal Boredom: SSIA
