In case anyone victimised by a couple of gaming session digressions is at the precise point of confusion and curiosity as to want to know the following details (or on the off-chance it's of interest to anyone else, without benefit/detriment of any such context)...
The Chandleresque story I mentioned with the 'aliens employing the Bush doctrine on a grand scale' premise is James Patrick Kelly's Nebula-losing (to the short fiction award juggernaut that was Kelly Link that year) novelette "Men are Trouble". It seems to now be available free online in a couple of places, including
here as an ebook. (That's the one with the "grannies", "fluffs", and yes, though very much in passing, the "furries".)
The other story that I touched on, and was mixing up on a "too-many Ws" basis with "Whileaway", is Wanderground, by Sally Miller Gearhart. Who, in some bizarre synchronicity, was just on the telly! A Culture Show segment of the film Milk included a talking-head of her from the '70s. (She and Harvey Milk were both heavily involved in the anti-Proposition 6 campaign of the time.) I haven't actually read it myself, just came across a precis someplace. (If I buy a copy, I'll have to offset concerns that I'm funding political advocacy of making my own half of the species extinct -- if not actual scientific research in that direction -- by reminding myself I have a couple of OSC volumes someplace that I brought when I was young and foolish. Some sort of "fairness and balance" in there someplace, on the "head in the freezer, feet in the furnace" sort of basis.)
(In another instance of "it's a small world, but you wouldn't want to paint it", while rummaging around for the Jim Kelly story, I also came across
this review of one of the Kelly Links from the same collection by one
nwhyte , an LJ distance of a mere 2 away from here.)