Pamela Sargent's latest collection assembles 10 of her recent stories, including "Puss in D.C.," "Strawberry Birdies," and "A Smaller Government," showing why she's one of the most popular authors currently writing science fiction today.

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's persistence. Writing is a hard life. Many good woman writers I admired in the 1970s, '80s and '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."