This is not a review. Dale Bailey’s collection, THE END OF THE END OF EVERYTHING (Arche Press, 2015), tells a series of short science fiction stories where the science fiction is besides the point. It’s there, in the background, providing a canvas for Bailey’s work, and though, yes, these fantastical elements are part of the story and cannot be divorced, they are hardly the point of the work. Instead, like canvas, they provide a substrate upon which Bailey paints his tales of the complexity of interpersonal relationships, of how people interact in groups versus intimately, and just how disruptive it can be when the barriers between those two weaken and blur. You don’t read stories like these for the surprise and inventiveness of their speculative aspects—although to be clear, the speculative in these tales is always surprising and inventive—but instead you read them in order to try and piece together just how it is people can ever understand something as utterly unknowable as other people.