“The Designers swore—they swore upon their souls, even those that do not have souls—[that] man could be molded to any shape as needed, and that his taste would follow, like any other arbitrary convention. They said the soul of man would somehow still see beauty there, after the beauty had vanished.”

Amphitricia said, surprised, “They were right, weren’t they?”

I gave her a long look, and said gravely, “All men dream of Earth-women.”

I enjoyed science fiction when I was a kid, when the stuff available to me was simple enough for my simple mind. Later on, I began to find most SF kind of cold-blooded – but I also found the best works dauntingly complex. So I don’t read much of it anymore. But I’m fond of John C. Wright, and I figured I’d try his recently released story collection, All Men Dream of Earthwomen.

I found it challenging – a bit like Gene Wolfe, but – unlike Wolfe’s work – just comprehensible enough to accommodate my simplicity. It was also engaging, provocative, and highly enjoyable.

 About a third of the book consists of the novella that provides the collection’s title. It’s set in the far, far distant future, when Earth is a dimly-remembered home world to dozens of (sometimes barely recognizable) humanoid races, bioengineered to survive on whatever planet they’ve colonized.

The hero of All Men, James Ingersoll, is (or claims to be) a librarian, an emissary from a distant, high-gravity planet whose inhabitants are immensely strong. He comes to an Earth space station to negotiate for historical information. When he sees a man trying to kill a beautiful earth woman, he leaps in to rescue her, which oddly gets him into legal trouble due to the myriad nonsensical regulations that govern the station. However, it also makes him an instant celebrity, which – in this society – literally constitutes sudden wealth. As he shakes things up in the traditional manner of hard-boiled heroes, his true mission is revealed.

One particularly fun feature of this story is that it’s footnoted, explaining obscure earth references for readers of the future. These footnotes are very often wildly wrong, in a thought-provoking way.

Ten short stories follow – each of them a highly inventive picture of a possible distant future, where many things have changed but some remain constant. These stories are outstanding in their variety and inventiveness.

I should mention one consideration that will give many Christian readers pause – there’s quite a lot of female nudity, especially in a couple stories (among the best of them, too). The nudity isn’t gratuitous; it’s integral to the stories’ meanings. As a child of Pietism, I find this a little hard to handle in the context of Christian fiction – but I also think Wright may be Right.

It occurs to me that in our times, when a new kind of secular Puritanism has taken hold, it may be the duty of Christian writers to take the initiative in celebrating sex – not Sex as a commercial commodity, but old-fashioned, organic, procreative, heterosexual sex. Every kind of sexual congress is celebrated in our popular culture today, except for the kind that makes babies. It might be time for us to champion Procreative Sex, and manly men and feminine women, as a kind of subversive art. There are still plenty of young people who are curious about that kind of sex, in spite of all the advertising to the contrary.

In any case, for those willing to handle its challenges, All Men Dream of Earthwomen is a very fine story collection. Cautions for sexual situations (as mentioned) and for some rough language.

I do have to report that this book could have used better proofreading. There are lots – I mean lots – of misspellings, wrong words and word omissions.