MOON SONGS

A greatest hits collection of unclassifiable speculative fiction.

How do you condense a 60-plus-year writing career into just 19 stories? For this lovingly curated retrospective of short fiction from Emshwiller (1921-2019), you identify the motifs that make these tales stunningly prescient (especially those published in the 1950s), and then you put your personal mark on them. Kelly Link’s foreword shares fond memories of the writer, while Matthew Cheney contextualizes his keen choices in an editor’s preface. Duos drive much of the tension and catharsis here, from siblings competing over ownership of alien creatures in “Moon Songs” and “Mrs. Jones” to shadowy doubles stalking their neighbors in the equally creepy “Sex and/or Mr. Morrison” and “I Live With You and You Don’t Know It.” Rescue is a key theme for child soldiers (“Boys”), the eponymous “Bird Painter in Time of War,” and for the retired superhero “Grandma,” who struggles to pass on her ethos to an unremarkable granddaughter. The book’s sections are set off by quotes from Emshwiller. One proclaims her love for unreliable narrators; another disclaims any intention to provide “meaning,” asserting, “I just try to write a good, well-formed story.” And she does just that, establishing eerie atmospheres in mere handfuls of words, often and most effectively through a set of characters encountering something out of their norm—alien, or wrong, or just different—which in turn draws the inhuman out of them. Her final published story, the post-apocalyptic “All I Know of Freedom,” closes the collection with grim hope that resonates long after its 2012 publication. This compellingly assembled retrospective gives longtime Emshwiller fans a chance to savor her unique sensibility again, while lucky newcomers enjoy the thrill of discovery.

Wickedly astute and surreally funny.