I have not decided whether to rate this or not. Some people may like her work, from the ratings some people do like her work, but it is way too "literary" for me.

One of the most haunting stories that I ever read was written by Carol Emshwiller, Unfortunately, it is not in this book, although it was of this time period, but having found "Adapted" again, I decided that I wanted to read her other work. Carol Emshwiller tends to be described as a science fiction writer, but Luis Ortiz tell us in Emshwiller infinity x two, a biography chiefly of her husband, but secondarily of Carol, that she decided to break out of the genre and into more literary work. She certainly seems to have succeeded.

Emshwiller tells us in her introduction that she went through three stages in her writing" first, learning to plot. Next, learning to hit her subconscious, and last, learning not to plot. I enjoyed the earliest stories, but most of these works seem to be after she stopped plotting. After much labor, I am about halfway through this book, and I suppose I will finish the it, but I find most of her work to be as enthralling as reading the cereal box during breakfast, and some of the worst could be collections of nonsense syllables.

Emschwiller has real writing ability, and a gift for description, but most of her works after the first dozen simply don't interest me. She prefers not to explain the situation in which the character finds him or herself, but to let the reader put it together from the generally first-person narrative, which does a bit to replace the lack of a plot. Otherwise, I lived through this school of writing when it was new, and it hasn't improved with age.

On the matter of hitting one's self-conscious, I remember a college professor explaining that feeling something doesn't mean that it is a good work. As he said, perhaps one sees flies on a window and suddenly the meaning of life becomes clear and one writes down "Flies." That isn't a meaningful piece of work, although absurdists might argue that it is.

If one wants to argue that life doesn't have a plot, that is true, but we live life, we shouldn't need to read it. Emshwiller does appear to have returned to plotting later in life, so maybe I will try some of her later work.

"Adapted", which I still recommend, especially for anyone who has wondered if they are on the wrong planet, originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, May 1961, and later in Rod Serling's Devils and Demons.