Points of Departure is a collection of short stories tinged with barbed humor that won the 1991 Philip K. Dick Award. Alternating between hope and despair, Pat Murphy's stories range from "Rachel in Love," which portrays a chimpanzee whose brain is implanted with the personality of a young girl who has died to "His Vegetable Wife," the story of a farmer who grows a spouse from a packet of seed only to find that she is more quiet than docile. All but one of the 19 stories in this collection have been published previously in magazines and anthologies.