The first information the reader gets about Alexander Finch is that his feet are sore. The reader soon learns that the bedsheets that Finch is nervously trying to hide are stolen, along with some other items. Finch is a thief, but that is not his greatest crime. A revolution has taken place and in the New World Order that has followed there is no greater sin and no more inhuman criminal act than obesity. But Finch has had enough. It is time to spark a counter-revolution and put an end to the overweight as the enemy of the people; the symbol of capitalist consumption run amok.
“Peeling”
The first person narrator of this story is an older man who lives in the apartment just below a young woman named Nile. She works in a clinic providing abortions, but also takes the time to tend to tasks that assist her neighbor that might otherwise be done by his wife. Except for the sex. The narrator learns that that is yet another ritualistic aspect to the woman’s life; this one rather unusual and not a little creepy. Her doll collection is characterized by missing hair and facial features which have been painted over in white. Things get only stranger and more metaphorical from that point. The key element is not so much the events which transpire, but the narrator’s construction of the narrative as a wish-fulfilment commenting upon male domination.
“Do You Love Me?”
The rock stars of the society being written about in this story are not rock stars or movie stars or athletes. The elite of the elite—those members of the community held in the highest regard—are its Cartographers. So influential are they in working hard all year drawing up lists to compile the annual census that the entire society as collective unit has emulated them: everyone is obsessed with lists. Pretty soon, however, and with no apparent explanation, the cause has arisen for a brand new and quite disturbing list. The list of people in this society who have begun inexplicably disappearing one by one.
“The Last Days of a Famous Mime”
The mime arrives on an Italian jet and immediately proceeds—through sixteen individually focused and tightly constructed snapshots—take the country by storm with his unique ability to inspire terror through pantomime. Everything is going great until a critic wonders if inspiring terror in an audience should be the goal of entertainers. What is the purpose? Everything goes downhill from there.
“The Chance”
Three years before the narration begins, the Fastalogians arrived and implemented the Genetic Lottery. The lottery is chance not to win money necessarily, but to reboot one’s entire life by changing their physical appearance. The subtext is made clear: great alterations can be made to ugly lives by looking more aesthetically pleasing. The story takes an unexpected route, however, when a beautiful political revolutionary imagines that her activism could be improved if she looked more the part of the oppressed than the oppressor.
“War Crimes”
This is the perfect story for all those who have rolled their eyes when those in the business world compare themselves to soldiers on a battlefield. Marketing is not a jungle and Wall Street is no more Anzio than the Wharton School of Business is Vietnam. The narrator opens with the prediction that his legacy is destined to be one that regularly includes words like psychopath and tyrant, but for some strange reason believes that he—like a soldier killing just to keep from being killed—deserving of being thought in a higher regard. He then proceeds to unveil a narrative in which marketing is treated like jungle warfare and bloodshed for the purpose of profit is not muddle in murky political symbolism.
“Windmill in the West”
This is an unusually claustrophobic tale about a soldier situated in a small caravan isolated within a large expansive desert border territory. The strangeness of it is that this desert acts a border between Australia and the United States. In reality, the soldier does not know where he is. Nor what his mission is. It’s been two weeks since his mission started and he has remained alone, at the mercy of his superiors who have kept him blind and in the dark and, to make matters much worse the entire purpose of a border guard is to keep unwarranted passage from taking place to and fro. Except that nobody ever even seems to exist capable of trying to cross the border. Wherever it is. Then there's the windmill which seems to serve no purpose and in this relentlessly windless heat should not be making clanking sounds. If it was making sounds at all; might have been something he just imagined.
