FICTION

THE START OF THE END OF IT ALL by Carol Emshwiller (Mercury House: $17.95; 206 pp.) . Reading these 18 stories by Carol Emshwiller is like trekking through a moderate hailstorm. The stones aren’t big enough to crack our skulls, but they tickle and sting us and inflict little bumps of puzzlement and delight.

Some of these tales, which might be classified as science fiction but really defy classification, feature divinities (usually female), birds, dogs and creatures from outer space. In the title story, an unlikely group of aliens--they wear raincoats--plans to take over the Earth by getting rid of cats and impregnating certain women--”the rejected, the divorced, the growing older, the left out”--with their minnow-like progeny.

Indeed, old and middle-aged women, bit players in most people’s fiction, get starring roles in Emshwiller’s. A tourist in India casts aside “rationality”--and her husband--to accept the role of cult goddess in a Himalayan village. A woman about to be consigned to a nursing home believes that by digging in the back yard she is unearthing a prehistoric library.

“Little slave, what have you done that is free today?” a huge, fur-bearing creature asks the dog accompanying a human hunter on “the planet Jaxa, in winter.” Freedom of one sort or another is the theme of this whole collection. Disdaining realism to create worlds where anything can happen, and forgoing common idiom in favor of a nervous, edgy, witty style all her own, Emshwiller leads each of her protagonists to the moment of decision. Freedom or not? It’s proof of her storytelling powers that the question matters to us, and that we rarely can predict what the answer will be.