Puss in D.C. and Other Stories

Pamela Sargent&apos;s latest collection assembles 10 of her recent stories, including «Puss in D.C.,» «Strawberry Birdies,» and «A Smaller Government,» showing why she&apos;s one of the most popular authors currently writing science fiction today.<P> From the introduction by Eleanor Arnason: «Sargent has a quality usually associated with hard SF: a certain kind of intellectual rigor. With her, it carries through all of her work. She thinks things through. … Notice, when you read this collection, how many different kinds of stories are here and notice the range of moods: the stories go from really funny to really dark, with a lot in between. … I also want to mention Sargent&apos;s persistence. Writing is a hard life. Many good woman writers I admired in the 1970s, &apos;80s and &apos;90s have vanished. They stopped writing or stopped trying to sell their fiction or changed their names and moved to writing romance, gay romance, generic fantasy – whatever they could sell. In one way or another, they were silenced. Sargent has kept doing thoughtful, serious fiction, dealing with the issues that interested her.»