The human body has its shortcomings. For instance, it can't fly like a bird, or burrow to the center of the earth, or breathe underwater. Our genes have not been engineered into the perfect regularity envisioned in the science fiction futures of Vonda McIntyre's Fireflood and Other Stories. It may, of course, be interesting to imagine what life would be like if they were, but after reading these stories, one is left wondering, why all this fuss about biological change?

The answer comes from McIntyre's feminism, her desire to show a future in which sex roles have been radically changed by evolution. But it is one thing to vaunt a much improved society, another to show real people in it without resorting to clichés of the moronic "I'm okay, you're okay" variety. Unfortunately, McIntyre's stories succumb to this impoverished psychology so utterly that they lose their critical...