Not every writer has the stamina to set words on paper with one foot in a cast and one arm in a sling; but there is at least one who has, and that one is a member of what we are taught to think of as the frailer sex, by name Miriam Allen deFord. And not every writer, too, has the talent to find a delightful explanation, in science-fiction terms, for one of the grislier riddles of the Decade of ...