The Best Of Both Worlds And Other Ambiguous Tales — Brian Stableford

In the longest story in this collection, an eleven-year-old girl has a strange adventure in an overgrown garden, and probably saves the world from a fate worse than any conventional apocalypse. Her parents would undoubtedly think that she's been dreaming if she attempted to explain what had happened, but that's what parents do, because they think it's what they ought to do. The other stories all describe similarly equivocal victories, which sometimes don't appear to the other characters in the stories to be victories at all -- but they are: every last one of them. You just have to look at them the right way -- and it really is worth doing that? After all, who among us really wants to get stuck in the way things want to seem? Eight scintillating stories of science fiction by a master of the genre!