If All Else Fails — Craig Strete

With an Introduction by Jorge Luis Borges. Craig Strete, one of the few Native American SF authors, picked up three Nebula Award nominations for short SF, two of which are included in this collection of his excellent work. "The pages reek with despair at the loss of Native American culture .... The narrator of the "All My Statues" is reminded of his "grandfather who died humming all the songs he had kept silent because there was no one left to sing them" (11). In "To See the City" the dead try to escape the concrete prisons of the cities that desecrate the holy places: "Buried animal and ground people were trying to reach out through the cracks in sidewalks. The ground people moved restlessly under the concrete" (36). The television, an embodiment of the white man's control of mass culture, declares the Native American is a figment of the past, not of the present: "We make decisions for you. Take you hand of the silver screen. You are interfering with the projectionist. Yes, we listen, we tell you, you are a book, and having been written, you cannot cancel a line of it" (46). "Filled with gorgeous lines, evocative images..." -Science Fiction Ruminations