My latest discovery was momentous, to say the least. Who would have thought it: a great, white, stone, circular library to be danced in!

Emshwiller's like a wild mixture of Italo Calvino (intellectual games) and Grace Paley (perfect honesty) and Fay Weldon (outrageous wit) and Jorge Luis Borges (pure luminosity), but no—her voice is perfectly her own. She isn't like anybody. She's different.

"The SF community . . . was such a sort of cozy place. . . . Everybody knows everybody. People help each other. It's smaller than the mainstream, therefore more wieldy."