Points of Departure

Although infused with a gentle sort of magic, the stories in Murphy's ( The City, Not Long After ) enjoyable collection are also tinged with barbed humor, alternating between hope and despair. Nebula Award-winner ``Rachel in Love'' portrays a chimpanzee whose brain is implanted with the personality of a young girl who has died. When the researcher who cared for the chimp dies, the hybrid draws on her mingled primate and human knowledge to make her way in a world that can be at once hostile and kind. In ``Prescience,'' a fortune-teller learns that there's a difference between seeing the future and changing it. Conversely, in ``Orange Blossom Time,'' a woman who travels through time cannot change the past or the present as she watches the city and the man she loves suffer painful deaths from rampant disease and the exhaustion of resources. Unappreciated wives get the last word in two stories: a wife's spirit escapes her abusive husband to join the ``Women in the Trees,'' and a farmer who grows a spouse from a packet of seeds finds that ``His Vegetable Wife'' is more quiet than docile. All but one of these 19 stories have been published previously in SF magazines and book anthologies. (July)