The human body has its shortcomings. For instance, it can't fly like a bird, or burrow to the center of the earth, or breathe underwater. Our genes have not been engineered into the perfect regularity envisioned in the science fiction futures of Vonda McIntyre's Fireflood and Other Stories. It may, of course, be interesting to imagine what life would be like if they were, but after reading these stories, one is left wondering, why all this fuss about biological change?

The answer comes from McIntyre's feminism, her desire to show a future in which sex roles have been radically changed by evolution. But it is one thing to vaunt a much improved society, another to show real people in it without resorting to clichés of the moronic "I'm okay, you're okay" variety. Unfortunately, McIntyre's stories succumb to this impoverished psychology so utterly that they lose their critical point of view. And without this, they reveal the unpleasantness that, I'm convinced, lurks in most science fiction: the cult of the quantitative intelligence.

To McIntyre's credit, she mulls over the notion that a perfect mind would resemble a super-computer from a different angle. Though this assumption is the usual sci-fi excuse for yielding the reins of government to an autocratic higher being, in her story "Genius Freaks," she puts the higher beings on the bottom of the social ladder. McIntyre's test-tube wizards slave their brains away in state-run institutes. But the assumption remains that smart is best and smart means good with numbers.

For McIntyre, apparently, there are no terms outside those given by sci-fi conventions, no such thing as reason, for example, as distinct from calculation, the golden calf of technocratic lore. Indeed, the characters in all these stories are obsessed with subjecting their bodies to their brains. In "Aztecs," the heroine willingly has her heart cut out and replaced with an artificial one, in order to join an elite corps of pilots…. McIntyre regards such actions in some future world with benign interest and indeed praise for the self-control, above all the body-control that is implied. But the moral of the story gets somewhat muddled: that the really awful price of belonging to the ruling class is not having sex with inferiors.

Some of these stories tackle social hierarchy more successfully…. "Spectra" shows those in power appropriating people's bodies in parts—first the eyes, next the kidneys, etc. It is not surprising that a sci-fi writer should envision future social victimization taking these forms. But McIntyre's ambivalence about the scarring, deformity, and mutilation that fill these pages diffuses her attack. It might be okay, she seems to be saying, if it weren't inflicted by the oppressor.

This refusal to make complete judgments amounts through-out to a real failure of nerve. Reverence for technology and specialization doesn't compensate. On the contrary, the working out of this and other abstract attitudes repeatedly truncates narrative development. Somehow, at least in [Fireflood and Other Stories], the science can't save the fiction.