What is an act of kindness? Some are easy to identify: helping up a stranger who has fallen, donating to disaster relief, not pointing out that your spouse has told the story about the wheelbarrow six times to the same people. But what about more ambiguous acts? Is it a kindness to stop a suicide who desperately wants to die? My father lives far out in the country, and his woods and field are overpopulated with deer. In the winter, many starve. Culling a deer herd by killing a bunch of them—is that a kindness? Not to the dead ones, but to the survivors, who then will not starve? What about an overpopulated planet? The mind recoils from the idea, but one of the functions of SF is to examine ideas that the mind recoils from. The result, as here, is often an ambiguous and bleak story. It’s bleak for Jenny, too, and I got some negative email about this story’s ending. Sometimes, however, hatred is “a great heartener,” enabling a person to go on when nothing else will. Perhaps you didn’t like “The Kindness of Strangers.”
