“Listen, There's a Story for you…”

Retreat As It Was! Donna J. Young (The Naiad Press, 7800 Westside Dr., Weatherby Lake, Missouri, 64152, 120pp., $5.00).

In Literary Women Ellen Moers notes that nineteenth-century women writers' insistent presentation of public acclaim for female genius in their fiction is due to “the impossibility of ever having [it] in real life” and that the embarrassingly “raw fantasy” of such scenes comes from having been “starved for centuries.”

Retreat: As It Was! by Donna J. Young is a heartbreaking non-book, although with training – especially someone to stand over her, yelling “Details!” every time she drifts into summary – she might eventually become some sort of writer. Retreat was written out of sheer starvation, published ditto (unless we're to believe that Naiad is simply being opportunistic), and will be read for no other reason, if it's read at all.

Ostensibly science fiction, Retreat's science comes from incoherently bad television; it's a mixture of faster-than-light communications and spacedrive, inexplicably endless sources of light and power, and no other method of transporting the wounded from a grounded spaceship to a provincial settlement than “pack animals” (with “spines” but otherwise undescribed), a grueling six-or-seven-day, hypothermia-inducing journey which looks bafflingly like a rather Darwinian version of triage. Since the wounded receive only psionic healing (the women disdaining such primitive devices as bandages, food, water, antibiotics, etc.), why not send the healers to the ship? But Retreat mystifies all its technology. Here are the book's only descriptions of technological activity, quoted entire: