Annal:1991 World Fantasy Award for Collection
From AwardAnnals
Results of the World Fantasy Award in the year 1991. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- World Fantasy Award for Collection
- Fantasy books
- Fantasy authors
- Speculative Fiction books
- Speculative Fiction authors.
The Start of the End of It All: Short Fiction
- 1991 WFA–Collection winner
- Score: 10.41
“It is important and salutary to speak of incomprehensible things,” aliens advise the middle-aged divorcée in “The Start of the End of It All.” So begins a master plan to change the world, eliminating cats and establishing a “vast kitchen network.”
Replete with fierce humor and insight, Carol Emshwiller’s stories turn reality upside down. Humans are seen by soaring bird-men as those creatures “with heavy thighs, flat faces, funny little teeth all in a row.” And everyday life is seldom predictable: One morning a man awakens in his small, neat apartment to find a winged, naked woman with wild eyes.
Emshwiller’s tales are full of ordinary people discovering extraordinary lives. In “The Circular Library of Stones,” a woman finds a buried library in which she daily makes startling archaeological finds. In another story, a woman suddenly decides to move in with the man across the street whom she has watched for months but never talked to. As she moves her plants and throw-rug into his apartment while he is asleep, she asks herself, “Why hadn’t she ever taken action…
