“Featherbed of Chlyntha”: Clever, entertaining, creative, engrossing… and just a bit disturbing.

Here deFord has written a multi-thousand-year tale that perhaps even Asimov would appreciate. The use of hard science and the experiment's purpose helped me overcome my usual antipathy to time travel, which I find illogical in principle. “The Children”: Admirably ambitious in its sweeping scope. Volume closer “The Last Generation?” was written in a similar style but its premise was engaging-until the tedious final message, that is.

Book opener “The Daughter of the Tree” just feels out of place within the whole-plus any hyper-sensitive readers will find the dialogue “problematic.” “The Transit of Venus” is all “tell,” so I never got into the story. Sometimes the prose can be a bit clunky, but overall there are only two real duds. Especially because deFord discusses gender across space and time in a curious and playful manner, rather than taking a militant approach. All in all, I'd say the winners make this a worthwhile collection. It's at times ambitious and daring, but occasionally gets bogged down by too much “telling” or a heavy-handed approach. An imaginative and thoughtful collection of stories centered around the common theme of exploring different avenues of procreation, and how societies influence or are influenced by them. I hope more folks will read this book and learn from it - she had a lot to say that's of great value to feminist activists, even ones living in 2012, like me.ģ.5 stars. I like to think that if she were alive today, deFord would be glad to see women rising up and taking control of their reproduction, but I have a feeling she'd be writing dystopic visions of the Republicans and their war on women. Her witty, clever, critical eye takes it all in and spits it all out, reflecting our own cultural frailties and inanities back at us. deFord was writing in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s, a sexist era wherein scientists and governments dabbled in eugenics. But they're imaginative and creative, and of great social value. Some of the stories are quite intense they all focus on reproduction, and some tales are decidedly dystopian. Anyway, it was a lot of fun to discover this one. It's not every day you stumble on well-written feminist sci fi like that - I should know, I scour the sci fi section at my local library and don't have luck like this. I picked this up at a second-hand shop for a dollar, and wowee am I glad I did.

Xenogenesis by Miriam Allen deFord