（外文电子版资料）When I Was Miss Dow by Sonya Dorman.docVIP

Mrs. Dorman raises Akita dogs, looks after her husband and small daughter, and writes fiction very well andsince all of the capable female writers of science fiction can be counted on one truncated hand, hers is a welcome addition to their ranks. She brings us here a sense of strangeness, more than a hint of human warmth, as well as a good strong whiff of alien chillness. Sonya Dorman WHEN I WAS MISS DOW These hungry, mother-haunted people come and find us living in what they like to call crystal palaces, though really we live in glass places, some of them highly ornamented and others plain as paper. They come first as explorers, and perhaps realize we are a race of one sex only, rather amorphous beings of proteide; and we, even baby I, are Protean, also, being able to take various shapes at will. One sex, one brain. lobe, we live in more or less glass bridges over the humanoid chasm, eating, recreating, attending races and playing other games like most living creatures. Eventually, were all dumped into the cell banks and reproduced once more. After the explorers comes the colony of miners and scien-tists. The warden and some of the other elders put on faces to greet them, agreeing to help with the mining of some ores, even giving them a koota or two as they become interested in our racing dogs. They set up their places of life, pop up their machines, bang-bang, chug-chug; we put on our faces, forms, smiles and costumes; I am old enough to learn to change my shape, too. The Warden says to me, Its about time you made a change, yourself. Some of your friends are already working for these people, bringing home credits and sulfas. My Uncle (by the Wardens fourth conjunction) made himself over at the start, being one of the first to realize how it could profit us. I protest to the Warden, Im educated and trained as a scholar. You always say I must remain deep in my mathemat-ics and other studies. My Uncle says, You have to do it. Theres only one way for us to get along