The final two parts are not available on the ASSM or DejaNews archive, I guess they have been miss-placed.

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"Miss-placed" by Stephanie (stephanie@nym.alias.net). Julian and Tony live some time in the future, and they have decided to take their vacation for two weeks at Dodge City, where androids recreate activities from the American Wild West. In addition, a sophisticated form of virtual reality enables the customers to project themselves into the bodies of android replicas of themselves, thus giving them the chance to experience the Wild West firsthand. As fate would have it, something goes awry, and Julian finds himself placed inside the body of an attractive female android. To be specific, he is inside the body of a dancing girl - and dancing girls in the nineteenth century sometimes moonlighted at a profession even older than dancing.

I'm sure there are bad TG stories on Usenet, but those that I have read are almost always well written and extremely creative. This probably has something to do with the authors whose work I select. Almost all TG stories reflect on what a person might feel like if he (it's almost always a man) suddenly changes his gender. It becomes necessary for him to look at sexual activities from a different perspective. Guys who used to be exploitive in their relationships with women have the opportunity to find their tender side, and they eventually get the opportunity to be on the receiving rather than the giving end of a fucking relationship. This all happens in this story against a background of both futuristic science fiction and an old-fashioned cowboy story.

I found what I thought were some logical fallacies in this story. For example, Julian goes an awful long time without food. I'm sure that if you look closely, you'll find more. But don't bother. The "Back to the Future" movies had major logical inconsistencies; but if I didn't look too hard, I enjoyed those shows immensely. The same thing is true here. Don't analyze too much: just read the story and enjoy it.

A more serious annoyance arose from the fact that the author posted this story in serial fashion. This means that the author could not make adjustments in earlier chapters when these became necessary because of later plot developments. This also necessitated occasional summaries that disrupted the logical progression of the story. For example, Part 8 begins with several paragraphs that review the action up to that point. This information was necessary only because there had been a time lag between the author's posting of the 7th and 8th parts; but since I was reading the story consecutively, I did not need this summary, and it was distracting. Finally, I wasn't as impressed with the ending as I was with the rest of the story. I thought it was a bit forced. I honestly believe that this sort of letdown is likely to happen more often in serialized stories than when the author writes the whole story before posting it.

However these shortcomings are minor. I suppose I just feel the urge to lecture a really good author once in a while - kinda like the way I like to tell my husband what he could have done better after he has given me a really great rim job. This is a really creative story. Read it and enjoy it - even if you're not a TG fan.