Heat Death
I've had Pamela Zoline's The Heat Death of the Universe and Other Stories on my bookshelf for who knows how many years. So when the title story was reprinted at Sci Fiction I figured it was time to finally read it. And I was right.
Lovely story, nicely done, some great images. It feels to me like it's part of a subgenre, or at least a style of story, that I've seen other examples of from the New Wave: a series of numbered paragraphs that don't exactly form a linear narrative, a story about a normal person's disaffection or existential crisis or alienation, a story that draws on science-related ideas as metaphors but is not, by my usual definitions, itself science fiction per se. I'd call it literary fiction, but it was published in New Worlds in '67, which I suppose makes it SF or possibly slipstream, or at least New Wave. (Where did the New Wave disappear to during the '80s? I blame cyberpunk.) More and more I begin to think that some of the genre-b(l)ending we're seeing these days is in some ways a return to what the New Wave writers were trying to do thirty years ago, only now without the sense of it being a Movement.
Also, Zoline's bio is worth reading (click her name at the top of the story); she's spent the last quarter-century in Telluride, working on art and sustainability.