I've never read anything by L. Timmel Duchamp before, but her work has been published often in the 'Conversation Pieces' series to which this volume belongs. She was the first author with a book in the series and the first to get to two books, three books, four books, five books (ahead of the wonderful Cynthia Ward) and now six books. Then again, she did found Aqueduct Press, who publish this series so it's understandable. This is the ninety-sixth volume in the series, an impressive feat on its own, and I've enjoyed the dozen or so that I've read thus far.

Most of the 'Conversation Series' collections that I've read and reviewed have featured many stories by a particular author, with few of them being substantial in length. This takes a wildly different tack, presenting four long short stories averaging forty pages each. As always, with a collection, they're varied, arguably in quality and certainly in how they spoke to me. However, I enjoyed all four and they all sparked thought; which is ultimately one primary point of science fiction, though not always perhaps in the best ways.

For instance, the first story carries a punch from the start, with a young lady being interviewed by the CDC about a virus that her boyfriend apparently gave her. She's Patricia Merrow, Patty by choice, and she's a nineteen-year-old girl. We sympathise with her immediately, because the men—of course—doing the interviewing are asking very personal questions indeed and it's an awkward ordeal, especially given that there isn't any suggestion that Patty has done anything wrong. However, we soon learn that the virus is changing her gender, for reasons I won't spoil, and that makes her a unique specimen to science.

It's not a bad story at all and it has a lot to say about gender. The genders of those involved is a telling thing, for a start, but what initially feels like yet another invasion of female privacy by older men changes into a conversation about choice from a completely fresh perspective. This virus has deep ramifications, not just to those who want to physically change gender, but to the rest of us too, because it can be made to happen without consent, just like pregnancy, hence its title of 'Motherhood, Etc.'.

My biggest problem with it isn't what's there but what isn't there. It feels to me like a strong beginning, but there's an odd shift to get to the reveal and a gap between the two sections. I wonder how it would play as a novella with a middle added and the ending extended. Inquiring minds want to know.

The fourth story, 'When Joy Came to the World' is thoughtful too, but I didn't quite grasp what it was trying to do. It's framed as a set of e-mails from an American student in Florence, Denise Loreau, to Nicholas Baring, back home in Washington state. They were sent in 2019, as a weird occurrence was unfolding, but they're being studied in 2147 as evidence preserved in a family archive. Put simply, she's enjoying Italy but having trouble adapting, until "snow" falls into the rivers and the tone shifts. Everything gets happier, as the title suggests, and the U.S. panics in the way we might expect and may or may not start a war.

There's commentary about gender here, but much more about nationality. This seems to me to be about culture shock, something often encountered by people living on the other side of the pond, including myself. What makes it odd is that it's written by an American author with a firm anti-American stance. Now, that shouldn't surprise me, but it's vaguely done, never targetting any particular person, party or institution, only subtly addressing cultural norms. So I'm not too sure what it's trying to do, but it's still thoughtful.

Those are the bookends, but my favourite two stories serve as the meat found in the middle of this book sandwich. 'Welcome, Kid, to the Real World' may be the best of the two, but I believe that 'The Last Nostalgia' may stay with me longer and affect me deeper.

'Welcome, Kid' looks at a future where gender has absolutely become a choice for everybody, a decision to be made around a particular age, until which point they're neuter. No viruses need to be involved, because technology takes care of it all. However, universal choice of gender isn't the only design choice to be made, occupation being another one and all sorts of special extras to consider too. It's a serious choice for any child to make and it's particularly hard for the two characters we meet because they're clearly attracted to each other but that might not survive their respective choices.

It's initially a confusing story, as indeed is 'The Last Nostalgia', because we're not sure if these children are robots or cyborgs. I ended up of the opinion that they're the latter, but enhanced by AI implants that are switched on all the time and loaded with ads. I was never quite sure if JL and NA are the characters or the AIs implanted into them. Of course, that's a choice too, and an overlooked proportion of society choose to be Neanderthals and avoid the implants. There's an awful lot here and I'm sure I'll be thinking up new parallels to apply six weeks from now.

'The Last Nostalgia' is hard to grasp because of geography. There are two separate worlds in an ostensibly fantasy universe, the Real World and the Excellent World, the only connection from one to the other being the City. Some people live their entire lives in one, but others live in one and work in the other.  Daisy Q is a child of both, her father hailing from the Real World and her mother from the Excellent World. She now spends her time in the City with an abiding drive to map it.

Initially, I wondered if they were reality and imagination, but I couldn't figure out how the City might play into that, because it's the most imaginative place in the story. The piece is initially confusing and repetitive but for a good reason, because we're surely meant to share all of the frustrations that Daisy feels. As the story grows, we become far more comfortable with what's around us and so does Daisy, even though she's never able to complete her map.

Again, I'm not sure of what Duchamp was trying to do, but I ended up feeling relatively strong in the belief that the City is our lives, which are ever changing and so impossible to map. What Daisy is trying to do is to map physical places that function like people, constantly growing and both coming into our lives and leaving them again. Everything is flavoured by moments and it's no trivial task to document moments on a map, especially on the scale needed here. The City is a constantly changing thing, not just in the way that any city is, but in ways that remind us of a magical location, like the staircases in Hogwarts. Moments, after all, are ephemeral.

While these four stories connected with me to different degrees, I enjoyed all of them and was very happy to see them breathe over many pages. As a film festival director, I love short films and made a conscious decision to program sets of substantial shorts, whatever the genre, that fail to make the cut at most other festivals for no better reason than room. The choice is often between one short film of thirty minutes, two of fifteen or four of seven or eight. The many are usually picked over the one, but the one is often the best of them, because half an hour gives a serious opportunity to build characters and strengthen plot. I was very happy to read a volume of 'Conversation Pieces' that was comprised of short stories that do precisely that and take the time they need to do so.

Three digits are just around the corner for this series, so congratulations to Duchamp right now for founding the publisher and kicking off 'Conversation Pieces'. I look forward to celebrating a hundredth anniversary. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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