Unforseen is Molly Gloss's career retrospective collection of short stories, including two brand-new, original tales and her best-known story, "Lambing Season."
In 1938, nineteen-year-old ranch hand Bud Frazer sets out for Hollywood, his sights set on becoming a stunt rider in the movies—and rubbing shoulders with the great screen cowboys of his youth. On the long bus ride south from Echol Creek, Bud meets a young woman who also harbors dreams of making it in the movies, not as a starlet but as a writer. Lily Shaw is bold and outspoken, more confident than her small frame and bookish looks seem to allow. The two strike up an unlikely kinship that will carry them through their tumultuous days in Hollywood. Through the wide eyes and lofty dreams of two people trying to make their mark on the world, Molly Gloss weaves a remarkable tale of humans and horses, hope and heartbreak, told by one of the most winning narrators ever to walk off the page.
Vren, a young boy who can communicate with animals, is exiled to the forest where the Shadowed people live, and begins a new life with another outcast, Rusche, a fatherly man who can control the local weather. When Rusche disappears, Vren and his wolf friend Trim set out in search of him; and together with an old woman, Shel, they embark on a dangerous and exhausting journey. When they discover that a spellbinder holds Rusche and other outcasts in thrall, it seems that even Vren cannot resist the spellbinder. But in the end his love for Rusche helps him find a way to free them all from the spellbinder’s grip.
The Dazzle of Day is a brilliant and widely celebrated mixture of mainstream literary fiction and hard Sci-Fi. Molly Gloss turns her attention to the frontiers of the future, when the people of our over-polluted planet Earth voyage out to the stars to settle new worlds, to survive unknown and unpredictable hardships, and to make new human homes. Specifically, it is a story about people who have grown up on a ship that is traveling to a new world, and about the society and culture that have evolved among them by the time they arrive at their new home planet.
