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"Baby, baby, baby! Baby, baby, baby!" Cousin Alphonse must have thought he looked like James Brown. He looked like what he was, just a little boy with a big peanut head, squirming around, kicking up dust in the driveway. Oneida thought about threatening to tell on him for messing his pants up. Even Alphonse ought to know better. He had worn holes in both his knees, begging "Please, please, please" into the broken microphone he'd found in Mr. Early's trash barrel. And she'd heard a loud rip the last time he did the splits, though nothing showed. Yet.
—from "Wallamellon"

Aqueduct Press is pleased to announce the release of Filter House, a collection of short fiction by Nisi Shawl, with an introduction by Eileen Gunn (author of Stable Strategies). The collection's fourteen tales offer a haunting montage that works its magic subtly on the reader's subconscious. As Karen Joy Fowler says, "This lovely collection will take you, like a magic carpet, to some strange and wonderful places."

"From the exotic, baroque complexities of 'At the Huts of Ajala' to the stark, folktale purity of 'The Beads of Ku,' these fourteen superbly written stories will weave around you a ring of dark, dark magic."
— Ursula K. Le Guin, author of Lavinia

"A traveling story-bazaar, offering treasures and curios from diverse lands of wonder."
— Matt Ruff, author of Set This House In Order and Bad Monkeys

"Nisi Shawl uses the tools of future and fable, usually used to explore the other, the future, and the mysterious, to magically reveal what and who we all are here and today."
— Tobias Buckell, author of Crystal Rain and Ragamuffin

"Sometimes enigmatic, often surprising, always marvelous. This lovely collection will take you, like a magic carpet, to some strange and wonderful places." — Karen Joy Fowler, author of At Wit's End and The Jane Austen Book Club

"Remarkably involving stories that pull you along a path of wonder, word by word, in worlds where everything is a bit different."
— Eileen Gunn, author of Stable Strategies

Stretto: Book Five of the Marq`ssan Cycle
L. Timmel Duchamp

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Stretto, the grand finale of the Marq'ssan Cycle, weaves together the major threads of the Marq'ssan story and encourages readers, as Joan Haran says, "to write beyond the ending." The novel, like the series as a whole, inquires Whose world is it? and shows several possible ways of answering the question through the respective perceptions and perspectives of the novel's five viewpoint characters: Alexandra Sedgewick, heir to the Sedgewick estate; Anne Hawthorne, Security operative; Hazel Bell, subversive activist; Celia Espin, human rights lawyer; and Emily Madden, star pupil of the maverick Marq'ssan, Astrea l Betut san Imu. As always, never predictable, never finished, the consequences of all that has gone before continues to play out.

The final volume in the Marq'ssan series will encourage its readers to write beyond the ending. There are no gift-wrapped resolutions or easy redemptions on offer, rather there is a clear-sighted focus on the always-unfolding consequences-intended and unintended-of personal and political action taken. This is a series that is deeply invested in social transformation while resisting any temptation to consolation. As a resolute utopian, I see this as a hopeful strategy.
— Joan Haran, author of Human Cloning in the Media

Like its predecessors, this is very much a novel of ideas and personal relations rather than of action or adventure. The author is more interested in the clash of ideas than in describing pitched battles in the streets of Washington. If you enjoy books designed to stimulate thought as well as entertain you, Duchamp's speculations about the forms of government and the ways in which people in power interact should prove very rewarding.
— Donald D'Ammassa, Critical Mass

The WisCon Chronicles: Volume 2
edited by L. Timmel Duchamp and Eileen Gunn

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Provocative essays on feminism, race, revolution, and the future.

Remember WisCon 31?
Wit flashed.
Sparks flew.
Eagles carried off the guests of honor.

The world’s leading feminist sf convention just won’t fit into Memorial Day weekend. Some forty contributors—too many to list here—take WisCon 2007 a step further.

Kelly Link and Laurie J. Marks on books they love and asbestos pants Chris Nakashima Brown, L. Timmel Duchamp, and K. Joyce Tsai on the volatile “Romance of the Revolution” panel, with a transcript by Laura Quilter Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu, Naamen G. Tilahun, Catherynne Valente, Wendy Walker, and others on issues of race and gender Rachel Swirsky (and sixteen others) on how to deal with racism and sexism in writers’ workshops Plus Elizabeth Bear, Rosalyn Berne, Susan Simensky Bietila, Nicola Griffith, Jacqueline A. Gross, Joan Haran, M.J. Hardman, Nora Jemison, Tom LaFarge, Mark Rich, Kate Schaefer, and Lawrence Schimel on WisCon past and future

WisCon 31 lives! Enjoy it. (Eagles not included.)

Blood in the Fruit: Book Four of the Marq`ssan Cycle
L. Timmel Duchamp
Read Chapters One and Two

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Blood in the Fruit, the hard-hitting fourth volume of the five-novel Marq’ssan Cycle, focuses sharp, analytical attention on human rights issues. The novel opens in October 2086. After ten years’ absence, the Marq’ssan Fleet returns to Earth to determine whether humans should be quarantined, and a young alien, unprepared for the shock of human culture, becomes a dangerous loose cannon taking violent, unilateral action. In the Free Zone, a flood of renegades led by Elizabeth Weatherall establish a fortress; even Hazel Bell, Weatherall’s lover, doesn’t know what they’re up to. In the US, when the government responds to increasing dissent and civil disorder by ratcheting up its repressive tactics, brave and dedicated human rights activists like Celia Espin join forces with the Free Zones in a global challenge that threatens to undermine governments around the world. Blood in the Fruit offers a grand, sweeping story through the eyes of four individuals with markedly contrasting perspectives and experience.

"The latest book in the Marq'ssan Cycle might just be the best yet, part of a series that is the most important political SF published in the last decade. Praised by the likes of Cory Doctorow and Samuel Delany, Duchamp's accomplishment here is deadly, sharp, emotional, and intelligent."
— Jeff VanderMeer, OMNIVORACIOUS, March 18, 2008

"The novel - the series for that matter - is a distillation of political and ethical philosophy, a commentary on the importance and frailty of human rights, a feminist dystopia, and something of an adventure story, although most of the real conflict tends to be on the intellectual rather than physical level. This is the kind of novel which probably won't appeal to a mass audience, in part because it steps outside the usual genre rules. For those willing to invest the time to actually think about what they're reading and work out the implications, it's a treasure house."
— Don D'Ammassa, September 25, 2007 (read the whole review)

The WisCon Chronicles: Volume 1
edited by L. Timmel Duchamp

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In most cultures, women's space is understood as private space, while public space is coded male. WisCon explicitly aims to create a non-separatist "women's space" that is public. A women's space that is also a public space is such a rare occurrence in our world that it feels science fictional.
—from the Introduction

L. Timmel Duchamp has assembled a collage of diverse materials to document the thirtieth anniversary of WisCon, which was a grand reunion of most of the convention's previous Guests of Honor. These include the transcript of Samuel R. Delany's interview of Joanna Russ, several essays reflecting on the diverse aspects of the convention, as well as papers presented in the academic track, panel notes and transcripts, an original short story by Rosaleen Love, and Eileen Gunn's snappy series of Q&A with numerous WisCon attendees, among them Ursula K. Le Guin, Julie Phillips, Ted Chiang, Carol Emshwiller, and Suzy McKee Charnas.

"In addition to capturing the proceedings, [Duchamp] also was interested in exploring hot-button issues that emerged from the discussions. Homing in on those areas of discomfort fits with the convention's reputation as an event that goes beyond Feminism 101."
—The Capital Times, June 21, 2007

Dangerous Space
Kelley Eskridge
with an introduction by Geoff Ryman
a Locus-recommended book

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Dangerous Space showcases a collection of seven seductive stories by Kelley Eskridge, whose novel Solitaire was a New York Times Notable Book, with an introduction by Geoff Ryman (author of Was and Air). The opening story, "Strings," takes us to a world that tightly controls musical expression and values faithfulness to the canon above all else. By contrast, in the title novella, "Dangerous Space," we see the full power of music unleashed to sexually enthralling as well as risky effect; original to the volume, this tale features Mars, the intriguing narrator of "And Salome Danced" (short-listed for the Tiptree Award), on tour with an indie rock band on the verge of breaking out. Closing the volume, the moving, edgy "Alien Jane" (a finalist for the Nebula Award and adapted for the SciFi Channel's Welcome to Paradox series) delves into the importance of pain for the human organism and finds hope in the most unlikely of places.

"Richly imagined, moving, and very sexy, these stories about music, art, sex, and identity will make you rethink all the categories you thought you knew."
—Julie Phillips, author of James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award

"The archetypical herotale of feminist sf, the little girl who grows up furious with the irritations of femininity, is confronted with her mirror image: the woman so compliant that no matter what anyone does to her, no matter how much she suffers, she feels no pain, only the agony of alienation... A theatre director struggles with the vampire of desire, and with a shapeshifter who may be personification of her demons, in the extraordinary, tightly compressed 'And Salome Danced'; while 'Dangerous Space' sinks deep into the soul of an indie rock band at its moment of greatest meaning, just before the Big Time. Characters slip from story to story, role to role, delineating a fascination with the ruthless hunger for sensation that possesses all great artists, and the complicity of those who love them. Kelley Eskridge's collection is a treat: unassuming, deceptively gentle, packing a subtle punch."
—Gwyneth Jones, author of White Queen and Life

"It takes a special talent to write about emotions this raw without embarrassing yourself. In Dangerous Space, the very talented Kelley Eskridge offers tales of the human heart that are searing, moving, and true."
—Matt Ruff, author of Set This House in Order

"Eskridge is my favorite kind of science speculative fiction writer, the sort who is very interested in using the tropes of the genre to externalize that which we’d prefer not to discuss and force it into the spotlight." (read the whole review)
—Rick Kleffel, The Agony Column, March 23, 2007

"...sometimes a writer just sweeps me off my feet and I forget what I was supposed to be doing. Such is the case with the title story from Kelley Eskridge's collection Dangerous Space. While the year is half-over, this has garnered my vote as one of the best stories of the year."
—Sean Melican, Ideomancer, June 2007

"A powerful piece, with just enough tech to tell readers they're in the world of the day after tomorrow, and just enough understanding of the places where human beings really connect to give us a ray of hope for that future..."
—Nancy Jane Moore, SFRevu, June 2007

"Dangerous Space is a complex collection with strong concepts and prose...Eskridge is skilled at creating atmosphere and physical detail, and uses her skill to present thought-provoking stories, ideas that linger in the mind's eye."
—Strange Horizons, June 14, 2007

"Highly, highly recommended..."
—Gwenda Bond, Shaken & Stirred, June 27, 2007

"...an acclaimed SF novelist gathers seven stories about music, art, and sex..."
—Locus, New and Notable Books, June 2007

"At first glance, there doesn't seem to be any science fiction in Kelley Eskridge's new book of science fiction, Dangerous Space (Aqueduct Press, 255 pp., $18). In this compilation of seven short stories, Eskridge's subject is human emotion, sexuality and relationships. Her characters are regular, flawed humans who struggle with regular, flawed human emotions in a land that looks very much like our own. But upon a closer look, the book is a unique kind of science fiction, wherein the alien land we are enticed to explore is the human soul itself. Eskridge invites us into its strange, inhospitable terrain and urges us to peer at the disfigured, imperfect creatures that live there — jealousy, loneliness, yearning. Under Eskridge's watch, each emotion becomes a monster, complete with its own personality, that then preys on her human characters."
—The Seattle Times, July 6, 2007

"In her new collection, Dangerous Space, science fiction novelist Kelley Eskridge pushes the boundaries of the status quo. She has put together a series of stories that make readers ponder issues of gender, sexuality, and the nature of free choice." (read the whole review)
—Colleen Mondor, Bookslut, Issue 63, August 2007

"Eskridge proffers a tantalizing taste of just how good and savory futuristic fiction can be...Eskridge's tightly woven stories speak to concerns we have now—love and loyalty, cause and effect, individuals versus society. These are stories for readers of genre fiction and of serious literature."
—Victoria Brownworth, The Baltimore Sun, August 5, 2007

"This is the kind of art that the word "queer" fits perfectly. The stories aren't specifically lesbian, and they're not specifically gay, but they render any sexual preference wondrously possible. The biological gender of Mars, protagonist of three of the collection's seven stories - including the hypnotic novella-length title tale - is never specified: some will read her as a woman, and her passion for the mesmerizing male lead singer of an indie rock band as straight; some will read him as a man, and the same passion as gay. Eskridge juggles the ambiguity with surefooted physical, emotional, and sexual intensity. The same powerful notion of sexual mutability powers two other tales: "Eye of the Storm," a sword-and-sorcery story in which Mars is one of four warriors competing to join an elite military squad, in a violent world where same-sex partners are nothing special; and "And Salome Danced," set in a near-future in which Mars is drawn to a seductive actor who auditions for both male and female roles."
—Richard Labonte, Seattle Gay News, October 5, 2007

Mindscape
Andrea Hairston
Finalist for the 2006 Philip K. Dick Award

Read an online interview with the author.
Read Sci Fi Wire's "Mindscape Gets In The Zone"

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Mindscape is the debut novel of the award-winning playwright and Professor of Theater and Afro-American Studies at Smith College, Andrea Hairston. Rich in complex characters and the vivid realization of their conflicts—personal, political, and cosmic—Mindscape plays deftly over a range of registers rarely attempted in first novels and celebrates the best of humanity even as it grapples with the worst.

Pulling a bass note from her pelvic floor, [Elleni] slid up her range, vibrating bones and organs until ultrasounds resonated in her nasal passages and shot out her skull. Her fingers danced in and out of the Barrier's domain. As she hit her highest notes, an archway crystallized just beyond her fingertips, and she almost lost the song. —Mindscape

Mindscape takes us to a future in which the world itself has been literally divided by the Barrier. For 115 years this extraterrestrial, epi-dimensional entity has divided the earth into warring zones. Although a treaty to end the interzonal wars has been hammered out, power-hungry politicians, gangsters, and spiritual fundamentalists are determined to thwart it. Celestina, the treaty's architect, is assassinated, and her protegée, Elleni, a talented renegade and one of the few able to negotiate the Barrier, takes up her mantle. Now Elleni and a motley crew of allies risk their lives to make the treaty work. Can they repair their fractured world before the Barrier devours them completely?

"[A] dazzling work of science fiction...an intoxicating, almost hallucinogenic journey into a vision of Earth's future...Those familiar with Hairston's plays will recognize her style here: sweeping and poetic, multi-dimensional, tackling complex issues of race, gender and politics...It's an enormous vision that Hairston offers to us, and a beautiful one. The book is a complicated message of redemption and hope for humanity."
—The Women's Times (Northampton, MA), February 2006

"African American playwright Hairston's first novel blends speculative science with socially aware fiction to create a panoramic story that is at once personally relevant and philosophically significant. The author's lush prose and multicultural background make this a strong addition to most sf collections."
—Library Journal, March 15, 2006

"[We] engage with an ensemble cast of sufficient originality and variety to please a whole range of SFados from hard sf to queer feminist postcolonial...These folk are enmeshed in a plotline of great complexity and great swaths of originality, presented through a headlong and ferociously vivid mise-en-scene."
—New York Review of Science Fiction, October 2006

"The novel effectively represents a world forever changed by a mysterious force, yet also reflects some contemporary issues, including poverty, violence, unemployment, as well as the need for reforms in the education system. With a strong storyline and unique vision, Mindscape is an engaging novel that simultaneously explores the future and questions the present." (read the whole review)
—Langston Hughes Colloquy, Volume 7, 2006

" Mindscape traverses the author's prodigious imagination and touches on all the themes that have filled her multidisciplinary, cross-cultural plays for three decades. The book, published last week by Aqueduct Press, is her first novel—yet another instrument in the repertoire of this prolific poet-playwright-actor-director-percussionist-scholar." (read the whole review)
—Valley Advocate, March 9, 2006

"Wide screen, big questions, bigger answers and characters who have to literally save the world from an alien force as large as the world."(read the whole review)
—The Agony Column, January 25, 2006

"Andrea Hairston's Mindscape starts with a vision of the way things ought to be and then takes us along on the amazing journey that must be undertaken to make that vision a reality. Her ability to fully imagine an alternate reality without sacrificing the familiar words and rhythms that provide outsiders a way into the story make this a book not just for true believers, but for those who still think they 'don't like science fiction.' After Mindscape, my guess is they'll see how meaningless such categories are. In the presence of a visionary author like Andrea Hairston, all you have to like is good writing!"
—Pearl Cleage, What Looks Like Crazy On An Ordinary Day and Baby Brother's Blues

"What rich and provocative territory this amazingly written first novel explores, what memorable characters it compels us to confront—renegade gene scientists and ethnic throwbacks, slippery politicos and 'expendable' Extras, ghost dancers and double consciousness diviners conjuring through an enigmatic veil—each struggling in complex circumstances to navigate survival, identity, and self in a world thrown off its course, each speaking in distinct voices that stay with you long after you've left their unforgettable stories. Science fiction at its best, Andrea Hairston's MINDSCAPE makes you want to cuss AND shout for joy—its vision, raw humanity, and ultimate hopefulness are exhilarating. What a pleasure it is to be invited into a world so large and muscular, so sensual and rooted in global history, a world in which not only the future but the past is at stake."
—Sheree Renée Thomas, Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction and Dark Matter: Reading the Bones, winner of the 2001 and 2005 World Fantasy Awards

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Tsunami: Book Three of the Marq`ssan Cycle
L. Timmel Duchamp
Read Chapter One

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Tsunami, the gripping third volume of the five-novel Marq’ssan Cycle, opens in early 2086, immediately after the signing of the Madrid Accords at the conclusion of the Global War. Many countries, including the US, have been devastated by war, and some of them turn to the Free Zones and the Marq’ssan for assistance in rebuilding their infrastructure. In the US, the Executive, which has turned its attention to reconsolidating its power, meets with growing resistance to executive rule; and in the Pacific Northwest Free Zone, the Co-op faces an internal crisis when ugly, long-buried secrets are dragged into the light of day. Meanwhile, the lives of three very different women—executive Elizabeth Weatherall, anarchist Martha Greenglass, and human rights lawyer Celia Espin—become entangled as each strives to bring about the change she so passionately desires.

"[T]hose with a serious interest in dystopias and particularly the feminist version thereof should find L. Timmel Duchamp's Marq'ssan Cycle a rewarding experience."
—Michael Levy, New York Review of Science Fiction, December 2005

"The third volume of the Marq'ssan cycle, Tsunami, confirms what the second volume, Renegade, made clear: the narrative drive and sheer invention of the work is more than up to the size, scope, and ambition of this extraordinary project. What a grand job! What a great read! It's been a long time since I've read science fiction with such a dramatic grip on the political complexities of our slow progress toward the better world we all wish for."
—Samuel R. Delany, author of Dhalgren and Trouble on Triton

"Duchamp's powerful use of language and her gift for creating unforgettable and complex characters make this novel a dark and suspenseful read... The author's sense of irony and her unflinching understanding of human nature add much-needed wryness (and an occasional flash of romance) to the mix." ( read the whole review)
—A. M. Dellamonica, Science Fiction Weekly, Jan 10, 2007

"Duchamp's work challenges its audience with a perhaps uncomfortably on-target vision of our extrapolated social, political, and economic structures as well as with a decidedly leftist, feminist message. It is definitely a work heavy on the "cognitive pleasures" that Robert Scvholes identified as proper to good sf. But, for those willing to accept its challenges, the narrative experience of the Marq'ssan Cycle, now totaling some 1500 pages with the appearance of its third volume, Tsunami, fulfills our need for both cognition and for sublimation as well...
   [Duchamp] overwhelmingly rises to the challenges she sets herself through the nuanced development of strong characters over the course of these first three volumes of the Marq'ssan Cycle."
—Amy J. Ransom,, New York Review of Science Fiction, April, 2007

"The old US government is attempting to reassert its authority, but discovering that not everyone is welcoming them with open arms. This lengthy, thoughtful, and intelligent novel examines the social, political, and personal consequences, seen chiefly through the eyes of three women – a lawyer, a businesswoman, and a political activist – all of whose ambitions become intertwined. The series is an ambitious project that is probably just a shade too intellectual for the mainstream commercial SF market, but which should appeal to readers who like something a little more thoughtful than the latest military SF or post-apocalyptic dystopia."
—Donald D'Ammassa, Critical Mass

Renegade: Book Two of the Marq`ssan Cycle
L. Timmel Duchamp
Read Chapter One

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Renegade, the second of the five-novel Marq’ssan Cycle, opens in August 2077 as the Pacific Northwest Free Zone, having survived the first year of its existence, faces both internal and external challenges. The US’s Security Services has deployed a paramilitary covert action team to capture Kay Zeldin, Security’s most wanted renegade, and destabilize the Zone’s civil order. Nevertheless, Kay ventures outside the Free Zone to search for her spouse and dozens of other scientists who have disappeared, traveling through a war-torn American landscape she barely recognizes. When she encounters Security’s formidable Elizabeth Weatherall, each woman risks all she has become in no-holds-barred, mortal combat.

Renegade is a passionate novel of love, trust, and betrayal as well as matters of life and death. It poses vital questions about political morality that resonate powerfully with the most significant issues of our day. With this novel, L. Timmel Duchamp, best known for her “provocative,” “daring” short fiction, moves into new territory, mapping largely invisible connections between how humans negotiate the most intimate and the least intimate of relations.

"This is easily one of the best science fiction series I've read in years. Rather than beginning with what is already known, it strips bare the arbitrary structures of our world (sexuality, gender, government) and rebuilds them in complex, new structures that are strikingly at odds with our experience—homosexuality as the norm, at least among the highest levels, and men willing to forgo sexual pleasure for political power—and yet also strikingly familiar, with classes or castes, torture, war, the designation of the unfamiliar as automatically 'terrorist'. The arguments for the elasticity of sexuality, and against the hierarchical structures of gender and government are complex, and thoroughly examined—whether you accept or deny the possibilities and premises presented, Ms. Duchamp does not take lightly her responsibilities of presenting a believable, if frightening world; nor does she present a simple dichotomy between men and women, or between human and Marq'ssan." ( read the whole review)
—Sean Melican, Ideomancer, March 2007

"[T]hrough the last two thirds of Renegade, [Duchamp] successfully maintains narrative tension almost solely through the battle of wills between Weatherall and Zeldin. That Duchamp has also done her homework in the series' preparation appears in the scary verisimilitude with which she depicts the intelligence service sub-culture, its methods and their impact upon detainees. Indeed, the work at times reads much like a concentration camp narrative (Levi's Survival in Auschwitz or Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich come to mind) in its lengthy, semi-philosophical passages about self-preservation. While I have certainly been guilty of grousing about and skimming through such long-winded philosophical digressions in other works of SF, with Renegade, I devoured every word of every page."
—Amy J. Ransom, SFRA Review, Oct/Nov/Dec 2006

"This second installment of Duchamp's (Alanya to Alanya) projected five-volume saga of postmodern society continues to establish the breakdown of familiar social structures and the transformation of human values from a self-serving model to one that is truly cooperative. Feminist in intent and meticulous in execution, this work of dystopian fiction belongs in most large sf or speculative fiction collections."
— Library Journal, June 15, 2006

"Duchamp doesn't need headlines to grab the reader. You do that with good writing and strong characters. Both are to be found in abundance in Renegade. And I do mean abundance. This here is a 616 page pulse-pounding page-turner, based on Duchamp's research into the shenanigans and evil-doings of our own favorite set of spies, the CIA. What would happen to our bureaucrat-overseers, were they to be freed into a landscape overrun by near-civil war, greed and violence? No, this novel is not about current history or anything resembling it. You do, indeed, get hints of the truly alien. They're the seeds of change." ( read the whole review)
—Rick Kleffel, The Agony Column

Alanya to Alanya: Book One of the Marq`ssan Cycle
L. Timmel Duchamp
Read Chapter One

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Regime Change is Not the Answer

Alanya to Alanya is the first book of the Marq`ssan Cycle, which Aqueduct Press will publish in five volumes.

"The intersection of science fiction and politics has always served an important critical function, from George Orwell's dystopian 1984 and Ursula LeGuin's The Dispossessed and The Left Hand of Darkness to Robert Heinlein's ultra-nationalist Starship Troopers, but until now they have always served as a means of analyzing political structures. With L. Timmel Duchamp's million-word Marq'ssan novel (broken into five books), anarchy is extrapolated. This is not anarchy in its popular sense, but in its truest sense. It is also feminism at its most fundamental level, and neither can be un-twined from the other." ( read the whole review)
—Sean Melican, Ideomancer, March 2007

"Alanya to Alanya does just what a political sf novel should do: it leavens its political message with first-rate futuristic extrapolation, chilling dystopianism and a breathless adventure story that keeps you turning the pages. It was a refreshing read and a rare example of deft political storytelling."
—Cory Doctorow, Boing Boing, July 2006 (read the whole review)

"Not an easy or comfortable book, but one that rewards a thoughtful reader who is willing to give up simple action plots for a close consideration of political and social ideas. In fact, the closest comparison one might give is to some of LeGuin’s later work—no small recommendation. Worth looking for." (read the whole review)
—Peter Heck, Asimov's, June 2006

"Readers who still appreciate the anger and surety of those early works can take heart at the publication of L. Timmel Duchamp's Alanya to Alanya...[T]hose with a serious interest in dystopias and particularly the feminist version thereof should find L. Timmel Duchamp's Marq'ssan Cycle a rewarding experience."
—Michael Levy, New York Review of Science Fiction, December 2005

"Politically savvy and philosophically relevant, this title puts a human face on today's problems." (read the whole review)
—Library Journal, June 15, 2005

"Alanya to Alanya is an intriguing mixture of SF genres and styles: It has utopian and dystopian elements, a strong splash of the political thriller, a good mystery subplot in Kay's amnesia, a hint of the sense of discovery that imbues first-contact novels and plenty to say about the current state of the real world." (read the whole review)
—Science Fiction Weekly, June 27, 2005

"Alanya to Alanya is SF on a broader scale, with The War of the Worlds as one inspiration, but its metaphors apply to a very human tangle of loyalty and betrayal, politics and idealism—Wells and Orwell updated for the end of the 20th century."
—Locus, June 2005

"[Duchamp's] political world building has a level of detail and believability that rivals Bruce Sterling at his best, and her pacing is much better than most other books driven so heavily by political concepts, such as Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged or Sheri S. Tepper's The Gate to Women's Country."
—Strange Horizons, November 30, 2005 (read the whole review)

"This is the first of a five novel series which mixes politics, aliens, and a variety of feminist and political issues which might easily have become unreadably polemic and convoluted, but which is surprisingly readable and entertaining despite its heavy load of subtext."
—Don d'Ammassa, Chronicle, September 2005

"Alanya to Alanya is not so much an exploration of the way humanity responds to an alien presence as an illustration of how a world under siege from its own governments finally revolts; the invaders are simply the catalyst for change."
—Seattle Times, July 3, 2005 (read the whole review)

"My 'discovery' of the work of L. Timmel Duchamp was, as usual, pure serendipity...her intellectual grounding and her political activism both contribute to create a novel that is highly readable and as politically relevant as any novel I can recall."
—Ritch Calvin, The SFRA Review, Jan./Feb/March 2006

Advance Praise for Alanya to Alanya

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Life
Gwyneth Jones
winner of the 2004 Philip K. Dick Award, short-listed for the 2004 James Tiptree, Jr. Award, a Locus-recommended book

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Praise for Life

"[T]his is a rich, potent, challenging, and original novel which does exactly what we always demand of the very finest science fiction: it makes us think about ourselves, about our future and how we want to be."
— Paul Kincaid, Foundation, Autumn 2005

"Jones's genius here, however, is in the many layers and textures of experience she gives us, her recognition that great discoveries, great science, great art—like great sorrow and tragedy—take place against the minutiae of our days...This is a novel that strives fully to limn contemporary life, where we began and what we have become."
—James Sallis, Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, December 2005

"[...]Like all of Jones’s work, Life demands—and amply repays—close reading. In addition to writing well about the thrills and tedium of scientific research, she manages to be both clinical and lyrical in describing her characters’ exploration of their sensuality."
—New York Times Book Review, November 14, 2004

"[...]Beautifully written and elegantly paced, this story conveys bold speculative concepts through intensely human characters. Deserving a wide crossover readership, it is highly recommended for both sf and general fiction collections."
—Library Journal, September 15, 2004 (Starred review)

"Remarkably rich and sophisticated...Life [is] a bold but accurate title for a work that anchors itself in the commonest meaning of the term (the old 24/7) and subtly weaves its way toward the larger scientific and philosophical versions that we tend to give capital letters and a lot more respect."
—Locus, November 2004

"Gwyneth Jones has written the most wonderful day-after-tomorrow novel, about science, sex, love and its limitations, achievement and its ramifications. Always surprising, always profound, this is Jones at her brilliant best and there is no one better."
—Karen Joy Fowler, author of The Jane Austen Book Club and Sarah Canary

"Exceptionally vivid, this is one of those novels that reminds you what novels at their best can do, evoking a total sense of how we live now. Beautifully written, and a real page-turner too, sharp-witted and suspenseful— I read it with a growing sense of exhilaration, certain I was engaged with a true work of art."
—Kim Stanley Robinson, author of the Mars Trilogy and The Years of Rice and Salt

"This is an ambitious, focused, unblinking troublemaker of a book[...]"
—Suzy McKee Charnas, author of The Holdfast Chronicles and The Vampire Tapestry

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Love’s Body, Dancing in Time
L. Timmel Duchamp
a Locus-recommended book, short-listed for the 2004 Tiptree Award

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Love’s Body, Dancing in Time offers five love stories by critically acclaimed author L. Timmel Duchamp. Carnal and queer, intricate and involved, they range from the heart-breaking Sturgeon Award finalist “Dance at the Edge,” to the historically authentic, Tiptree short-listed “The Apprenticeship of Isabetta di Pietro Cavazzi,” to the subtle, original “The Heloise Archive,” in which the rewriting of the eleventh-century abbess’s life story dramatically alters the course of European history. Like all of Duchamp’s work, this fiction is passionate, feminist, and intelligent.

Praise for Love’s Body, Dancing in Time

"This handful of SF tales demonstrates superbly what the genre can really do. Rich with social resonance, these stories elicit the thrill of ideas struggling to manifest as pure drama. Duchamp writes some of the most rewarding science fiction stories you can read today; she is simply and unarguably among the best."
—Samuel R. Delany, author of Dhalgren and Nova

"Putting together a top 10 list isn’t always a cakewalk. The last 12 months yielded a bumper crop of outstanding sf and fantasy, and it took a lot of boiling down and a little arbitrariness to select just 10 instead of a dozen, or 15, or even 20[...]Duchamp’s five unpredictable, haunting love stories, which feature strong, memorable heroines, provoke deeper inspection of cherished belief systems and re-exploration of the big questions of relationships with ourselves, others, and God."
—Ray Olson, "Spotlight on SF/Fantasy," The Booklist, April 15, 2004

"These stories create a delicate choreography of longing, love and loss. They continue to perform in the mind long after you’ve turned the last page."
—Nalo Hopkinson, author of The Salt Roads and Brown Girl in the Ring

"Love’s Body, Dancing in Time is a first-rate collection from the provocative L. Timmel Duchamp."
— Rich Horton, Locus, April 2004

"[...]Each tale is a polished gem, reflecting human nature in all its goodness and ugliness, and inviting deeper inspection of cherished belief systems and re-exploration of the big questions of relationships with ourselves, others, and God. Supremely intelligent and confident, Duchamp infuses her consistently sensual prose with mystery and beauty. Moreover, it is unpredictable—so emotionally and conceptually multifaceted that there is no fast track through one of her stories."
—Paula Luedtke, The Booklist, March 1, 2004

"[...]It’s a remarkable achievement to turn edges into seams at the turn of a few words, and Duchamp does this throughout the collection. Love’s Body, Dancing in Time creates curious little ornithopters of story and sets them free, allowing feminism’s speculations to come into play." (read the whole review)
—Alan DeNiro, The Sideshow, August 10, 2004

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Conversation Pieces
A Small Paperback Series

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Original Block Print of Mary Shelley by Justin Kempton (www.writersmugs.com)

The Conversation Pieces series aims to both document and facilitate the grand conversation of feminist sf. Books in the series offer a wide variety of texts, ranging from short fiction, speeches, and poetry to essays, interviews, correspondence, and group discussions. While many of the texts are reprints, some are original. They are available through Aqueduct's website and at a few select bookstores.

Volume 1.  The Grand Conversation
L. Timmel Duchamp

The first volume, The Grand Conversation, collects four essays by L. Timmel Duchamp that explore her conceptualization of feminist sf as a conversation. These essays, which have been previously published in the scholarly journals Foundation and Extrapolation, lay out the thinking behind the Conversation Pieces series.

Volume 2.  With Her Body
Nicola Griffith
finalist for the 2004 Lambda Award

With Her Body presents three pieces of short fiction by the Nebula-, Lambda-, and Tiptree-award winning Nicola Griffith. Among the brightest stars of feminist sf, Griffith is known chiefly for her earthy yet luminous novels Ammonite, Slow River, and The Blue Place. Griffith's particular attention to physical sensation and perception imbues the prose style of With Her Body with almost palpable heat.

"With Her Body is an atypical collection of science fiction, and those who are turned off by epic sci-fi shouldn't hesitate to pick up this volume. It is intimate, sexy, and rich with good old-fashioned storytelling. That sounds like joy to me."
—AfterEllen.com, November 18, 2004 (read the whole review)

Volume 3.  Changeling
Nancy Jane Moore

The third volume, Changeling, is an original novella by Nancy Jane Moore. Moore has only recently begun publishing fiction; her work has appeared in Imaginings, MOTA 2002, Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, and several other magazines. Her story "Walking Contradiction" was shortlisted for the 2004 Gaylactic Spectrum Awards.

"Nancy Jane Moore is a writer to watch, if her novella, Changeling, is any indication. It's an eminently satisfying, sweetly unraveling story centering on a wheelchair using woman who rolls through walls into a dimension her parents frequented when young[...]"
—Books to Watch Out For, Lesbian Edition (read the whole review)

"Changeling is recommended to genre readers, regardless of their interest in the feminist sub genre of science fiction." ( read the whole review)
—William I. Lengeman III, Apex Digest, January 2007

Volume 4.  Counting on Wildflowers
Kim Antieau

The dusky light begins to turn golden. The forest gives way to barren hills covered in blowdown and snags. Some of the blowdown curves over the hills, looking like stilled waves of gray Saragossa grass. There is hardly any color anywhere, just the bleached bone starkness of the tree skeletons. I cannot stop looking at them, still standing after all these years, bare naked, for everyone to see. I cannot photograph them. It would be like taking pictures of the dead in their coffins.

So Kim Antieau observes the sun rising on Mt. St. Helens at the summer solstice, 2002. In poems illustrated by Terri Windling, in an original short story set in West Africa, in essays ranging in subject matter from Daphne du Maurier's fiction to excursions in the Gifford-Pichot National Forest, Antieau illuminates the richness of our world today, reveling in its wonders, worrying over its degradation, seeking out the possibility of transmutation—with proportion distilled by reflection and a ready dash of humor.

Kim Antieau is best known for her novels The Jigsaw Woman, The Gaia Websters, and Coyote Cowgirl. Charles de Lint, author of Memory and Dream, writes of her work: "Brilliant....One of the best writers we have today."

Volume 5.  The Traveling Tide: Stories
Rosaleen Love

An original collection of seven short stories. Rosaleen Love's stories fairly dance and sing their way along the page, whether the scene is music itself, as in the tale she tells of driving her cousin Bridie, an Australian musicologist and jazz pianist, on a pilgrimage to the source of her music in the US South, or the vast vistas of geological time, or even the arcane science of therolinguistics as it deconstructs the "c(h)oral songs" that are a "series of texts written by air in water." Carmel Bird writes of the final story in the volume, "Once Giants Roamed the Earth": "This story is informed with deep concern for beauty of the earth and speaks urgently for respect and dignity. There is an air of menace and yet a pervasive hum of hope. The writing is firm, confident, and compelling."

"Once Giants Roamed the Earth" is a winner of the 2005 Aurealis Award.

"[...]Love coils Stapledon's cosmic vision neatly into a walnut shell, like one of those fine and precious fairytale fabrics that can fit into a tiny space yet expand into practically an entire wardrobe."
—Strange Horizons, December 13, 2005 (read the whole review)

"The stories here include a couple that draw powerfully on the Australian landscape (and seascape) as well as history and myth...But most effective for me was the spooky "In the Shadow of the Stones," in which a somewhat downtrodden woman reflects on her disappeared friends, as she walks the mysterious Australian shoreline."
—Rich Horton, Locus, August 2005

"[A] high quality collection."
—Lorraine Cormack, Canberra Speculative Fiction Guild, May 2006

"This book is a perfect beginning to a literary conversation."
—Gillian Polack, author of Illuminations, September 2006

Volume 6.  The Adventures of the Faithful Counselor
Anne Sheldon

The Adventures of the Faithful Counselor relates a series of stories about the ancient gods Inanna and Gilgamesh from the point of view of Inanna's lover and sidekick, Ninshibur, the Faithful Counselor. As a storyteller, Sheldon performed "Inanna and the God of Wisdom" based on Diane Wolkstein and S.N. Kramer's translation of the 2nd century BCE cuneiform tablets. After telling the story for a few years, Sheldon began to feel the lack of a point of view that is missing from the traditional story—that of Ninshibur, Inanna's Faithful Counselor. The Adventures of the Faithful Counselor provides that missing point of view, as it begins with Gil and Nanna and Ninshibur's coming upon the Euphrates:

Staring at the sunset,
crimson poppies, the ibis,
our own new skin,
we were breathtaken and breathtaking

the work is unusual,
the food excellent,
and the stories
astonishing.

"[...]it would be a reader of stone who would not enjoy experiencing this adventure directly."
—Strange Horizons, December 7, 2005 (read the whole review)

"Anne Sheldon's use of vivid imagery, strong narrative voice, and cleverly placed anachronisms gives new life and a new perspective to an ancient tale."(read the whole review)
—MultiVerse Speculative Poetry Reviews, June 2005

Volume 7.  Ordinary People
Eleanor Arnason

Spanning thirty years, this volume collects six stories, one poem, and a WisCon Guest of Honor speech. In the richly ironic "Warlords of Saturn's Moons," first published in 1974, a cigar-puffing woman writes space-opera while the drama of real-life inner-city Detroit goes on around her; "The Grammarian's Five Daughters" offers a playful explication of the uses of the parts of speech; "A Ceremony of Discontent" takes a humorous approach to a modern-day feminist problem; and Arnason's wise, earthy tales of hwarhath serve up new myths explaining the origins of the world and morality (among other things). The work in this collection entertains with its wit, delights with its precision and imagination, and challenges and provokes with its bluntness. Ordinary People offers a small, potent taste of the oeuvre of an important feminist sf author.

"When I read Arnason, I am charmed, not only by the tales-as-tales but by a voice as unmistakable as that of Heinlein or Vance or Farmer: measured and precise and stealthily funny and full of homely wisdom."
—Russell Letson, Locus, November 2005

"An Eleanor Arnason story collection is way overdue, and this is a very welcome book. I recommend it highly."
—Rich Horton, Locus, August 2005

"This collection from Eleanor Arnason gives us eight pieces—six stories, a poem, and the text of a speech—in which the author seems to be engaged in conversation with her own past career in the genre. It is quite a retrospective collection, with stories going back to as early as 1974...[and provides] a new look at the range of her fiction, and more good reason than ever to wish for more new stories from Eleanor Arnason." (read the whole review)
—Tangent Online, June 26, 2005

Volume 8.  Writing the Other: A Practical Approach
Nisi Shawl and Cynthia Ward

During the 1992 Clarion West Writers Workshop attended by Nisi Shawl and Cynthia Ward, one of the students expressed the opinion that it is a mistake to write about people of ethnic backgrounds different from your own because you might get it wrong—horribly, offensively wrong—and so it is better not even to try. This opinion, commonplace among published as well as aspiring writers, struck Nisi as taking the easy way out and spurred her to write an essay addressing the problem of how to write about characters marked by racial and ethnic differences. In the course of writing the essay, however, she realized that similar problems arise when writers try to create characters whose gender, sexual preference, and age differ significantly from their own. Nisi and Cynthia collaborated to develop a workshop that addresses these problems with the aim of both increasing writers’ skill and sensitivity in portraying difference in their fiction as well as allaying their anxieties about "getting it wrong." Writing the Other: A Practical Approach is the manual that grew out of their workshop. It discusses basic aspects of characterization and offers elementary techniques, practical exercises, and examples for helping writers create richer and more accurate characters with "differences."

"Along with personal experience and examples, the book presents exercises to help writers step outside their own ROAARS. The exercises, developed from workshops the authors have conducted, reward writers with learning more about developing characters—including those who are 'just like' themselves—and understanding past and present stereotypes."
—Paula Guran, Writers.com Newsletter, Vol 9, no. 3

"The book is excellent. I highly recommend it. It should be read by every 'dominant paradigm' writer for that is its true audience. Recommended also for schools, colleges, and creativity workshops, and sociology classes."
—The Compulsive Reader (read the whole review)

"[...]a timely book. Nisi Shawl and Cynthia Ward, two Seattle-based science fiction authors, have developed a useful, nuts-and-bolts approach to creating fully realized, well-rounded characters substantially different from oneself."
—Strange Horizons, June 29, 2006

"Just raising awareness about this writing challenge is a literary service[...]Such exercises clearly help flex writerly muscles."
—Seattle Times, February 3, 2006

"This book can help interested writers develop characters to exhibit the complexity of the human experience (and, since we're talking genre here, multifaceted non-human experiences as well)[...] What I like best about this book is that Shawl and Ward encourage people to acknowledge their fears and concerns, but also to try anyway." (read the whole review)
—Broad Universe, November 2007

Volume 9.  Alien Bootlegger
Rebecca Ore (with an introduction by Michael Swanwick)

Every writer worth admiring has her place of power: that locale or perspective from which she does her best and most assured work. For Rebecca Ore, it’s the Blue Ridge Mountains of southwestern Virginia. Though she has lived much of her life elsewhere, the land and its people are in her bones and the rhythm of their speech lodged in her head. It’s not an easy place to love, and she returns to it always with a certain degree of pain and regret. But it’s the forge and wellspring of Alien Bootlegger.
     The Blue Ridge area is a region of stunning beauty where guns are common, old wealth holds to traditional values ("like owning people," as Rebecca enjoys explaining), and operating an illegal still is not so much disreputable as a matter of cultural pride. —Michael Swanwick

In Franklin County, when times get tough, people often to turn to bootlegging. But that’s a perilous way to make a living, since bootlegging is both illegal and tightly regulated by distributors like Dennis DeSpain. So when the mysterious and scary alien who calls himself "Turk" openly sets up as an independent operator, flouting both the law and the distributors, all hell breaks loose. In it up to their necks and pursuing their own agendas are: ex-activist Lilly, the alien’s lawyer; Berenice, an aging ’60s radical with a past; Orris, DeSpain’s smart, ambitious wife who believes in doing whatever it takes to achieve the objective; and DeSpain’s ex-lover Marie, a chemical-engineering student who loves working with machines and whose grandmother was a midwife, bootlegger in the Forties, and notorious for having killed a man.

"Alien Bootlegger is a supremely clever, elegant piece of writing that uses one of the oldest staples of science fiction in a genuinely new way. It’s intelligent, funny, extremely dark at times, and offers an unusually honest view of personal history and the way that it traps us."
—Tangent Online, March 7, 2006 (read the whole review)

Volume 10.  The Red Rose Rages (Bleeding)
L. Timmel Duchamp

[Eve] turned her attention to the monitor displaying Minnivitch’s cell. Never had it been so clear what Minnivitch was up to. The bare minimalist space of the cell screamed stage, and some strange, dramaturgical magic had transformed the white glare of the indirect fluorescent lighting into spotlights. Kneeling bald and naked on the floor’s glassine surface, Minnivitch—her arms, wrists, hands, and fingers as dramatically expressive as her face—was telling a story to an audience somewhere outside the glare of the lights. —from The Red Rose Rages (Bleeding)

"[An] effectively ironic short novel of near-future dystopia and professional disillusionment."
— Locus, "New and Notable," February 2006

"The Red Rose Rages (Bleeding) is an intense and gripping read. It is dense with ideas without ever becoming bogged down, as the narrative momentum keeps everything moving. It repays rereading to pick up the hints and clues and recurrent themes and images that the pace of the writing may sweep one past during the first read: for example, "the rose-like designs" of the heat-trace readings on Minnivitch when she is in black isolation, Eve's nightmare of a blood-red flower/wound splitting her foot, the rose preserved in glass on Dorner's austere desk, the "flower of fire blazing within" Venedra Poole. Not a comfortable book, but a compelling and thought-provoking one." (read the whole review)
—Lesley Hall, Strange Horizons, April 24, 2006

"Duchamp does a marvelous job of portraying the intensely claustrophobic Facility A7, a closed universe so much to and of itself that the real world, which the author only occasionally and nightmarishly evokes, fades to insignificance[...]Given the recent revelations of how prisoners of the U.S. government have been treated at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, and of the free hand that private corporations like Halliburton have been given by the government to act like independent pocket-states, Duchamp's novel seems as relevant today as any uncensored blog reporting form the Middle East."
—Michael Levy, New York Review of Science Fiction, August 2006

Read L. Timmel Duchamp’s essay The Prick of Political Imagination: on Writing The Red Rose Rages (Bleeding)

Volume 11.  Talking Back: Epistolary Fantasies
L. Timmel Duchamp

Dear Abiel,
I’ve never loved a character of mine as much as I love you. I know you don’t want to hear anything like this or even a little bit like this. It’ll embarrass you. You may not read any farther, but please do go on. You can burn this letter afterwards. Nobody will ever have to know about it. I hope you’ll be, at least secretly, pleased...
—from Carol Emshwiller, “Love Letter to my Character, Abiel/Beal Ledoyt”

Talking Back showcases the epistolary fantasies of eighteen writers, among them Carol Emshwiller, Leslie What, Eileen Gunn, and Rosaleen Love. Invited to “talk back,” the authors penned love letters, fans letters, angry letters, thoughtful letters, letters to dead people, letters to fictional characters, letters to corporations. Carol Emshwiller writes to her beloved Ledoyt; Eileen Gunn, provoked by a New York Times review of Lady Windermere’s Fan, addresses Oscar Wilde; Heather Lindsley tenders friendly advice to Citibank; and Nisi Shawl explains to Jack Kerouac that the joke is on both of them. “Lovely Madame,” writes James Trimarco to Charles Dickens’s infamous Madame Defarge, “you whose eyes flash as your knitting needles click-clack at the table, I spit on the death your father has written for you and burn those pages from my book…” These are letters that will never be sent, intimate and personal, fantasies the authors have agreed to share with their readers.

"Unusual and thought-provoking."
— Locus, "New and Notable," May 2006

"[...]a slim volume, yes, but filled with potential, great fun to read, and thought-provoking too. What more could one ask from a book, or a letter?" (read the whole review)
— Strange Horizons, Jan 17, 2007

Volume 12.  Absolute Uncertainty: Short Stories
Lucy Sussex

…it's like being kissed by his Mam, but with an erotic edge that tingles, sends slow shockwaves through him, from the spikes on his hennaed hair to the toes suddenly clenching in his platform boots. Her mouth is wide and dry, except for a trace of saliva left behind as she disengages. She kissed me! And with an open mouth! Where are the lads from school when he needs to tell them something really important?
—from "A Sentimental, Sordid Education"

"Strongly feminist, linguistically muscular, and historically erudite, Lucy Sussex is an Australian writer who deserves to be more widely read outside of her home country[...]This book is your chance to test [bridges between our day and the past] in all their precarious charm, to take them as far as they'll go in hopes of inhabiting a few broken moments of life in another time."
— Strange Horizons, September 12, 2006

"[...]Sussex is a potent talent[...]vivid and interesting[...]"
— Tangent Online, July 18, 2006

"Fine stuff all around."
—Fantasy Magazine, Fall 2006

"It opens with a delicious original, 'Duchess'[...]The other selections range from earthy, political Australian fantasy[...]to ghost story[...]to the title's story time-traveling Watcher in a Nazi Germany where Heisenberg is busy speculating about Uncertainty, and they're told in a corresponding variety of styles and voices."
—Locus, Jan 2007

Volume 13.  Candle in a Bottle: A Novella
Carolyn Ives Gilman

The pebble that starts the avalanche may be here, anywhere around us.

The savants of Institut Sorel, the world center of information mechanics, compute the governing algorithms that give all things their shape and structure. The voyants receive and sort enormous amounts of information. And now the savants say that the whole world, on the brink of a phase transition, is about to change, such that the long-term equilibrium that has locked the world into an "order crisis" will give way to a period of chaos. Dominique, a new, ignorant acolyte voyant, is asked to watch for the random factor that will trigger the phase transition. But the Institut itself is in chaos. Drawn into political intrigue and the savants' and voyants' struggle over his world's very future, Dominique cares for individuals, rather than abstractions and principles. But even so, he's not sure what it is he should be doing…

"Interesting intellectual political intrigue, high-minded science, and a climax that moves along at a brisk pace makes the 100-page Candle in a Bottle a trip worth taking." (read the whole review)
— Tangent Online, July 24, 2006

Volume 14.  KNOTS: Short Fiction
Wendy Walker

And as she moved, he saw that the shape of her wolverine cape described the very quadrilateral of the field, belonging to his father’s renegade vassal across the mountain, which he so long and so ineffectually had yearned to possess; and the pure launch of her skirt mimicked the very contour of the fertile hillside claimed by the Bishop of Tours, which he had not briefly, nor successfully, disputed in the ecclesiastical and secular courts, and yet could not yield his claim. He had stridden after her then, and gained upon her figure slowly, intent on capturing her for one sole galliard at least…
—from “Ashiepattle”

"It's [Walker's] eccentric mingling of ideas and imagery, sensory impressions of a world almost disturbingly alive, that distinguish her work from anyone else's."
—Locus, Jan 2007

"Walker uses European poems and fairy tales as her inspiration and source material, merging rich language and modern ideas with classic plot lines to craft complex adult fare[...]Read her work for the history, the complex tales, and the vivid language offered—where the true beauty of Walker's work lies." (read the whole review)
—Tangent Online, Dec 16, 2006

Volume 15.  Naomi Mitchison: A Profile of Her Life and Work
Lesley Hall

Naomi Mitchison led a long, diverse, and active life, spanning most of the twentieth century, before she died in 1999 at the age of 101. She is probably less well-known than she might be, quite possibly because of this very diversity; a recent and favorable review of a reissue of her fantasy Travel Light, for instance, characterized her as “relegated to rare footnotes buried in the reverent biographies” of J.R.R. Tolkien…

A member of the famed Haldane family, Naomi Mitchison lived an adventurous, politically engaged, and well-examined life even as she wrote dozens of novels and works of nonfiction. From campaigning for women’s right to information about and the means of birth control to running for Parliament, from practicing “open marriage” in her own life to exploring a range of sexual arrangements in her fiction, for all of her 101 years, Mitchison embraced change as few people ever manage to do. Along the way she pioneered a new kind of historical novel that combined the immediacy of modern language with an ability to evoke the otherness of the past with great vividness and published her first work of feminist sf in 1962, a few years before the resurgence of feminism with its second wave.

In her profile of Mitchison’s life and work, Lesley A. Hall offers an overview of this prolific writer’s life and work, beginning from her upper-class origins, through her radicalization as a feminist and socialist and her experimentation and examination of sexual arrangements, to her life as a writer repeatedly breaking new ground.

Volume 16.  We, Robots: A Novella
Sue Lange

Sharp, bitter, and concentrated, it was on one square millimeter of integument surface. Exactly the size of a soldering iron head. I recoiled in terror, in blinding pain. I flew against that back wall of the lab bench. The pain quickly subsided. I turned my eyespots to the transie and watched, honing in on the soldering iron that she had mercifully unplugged and placed in a wall block, the business end inward.

“I hurt,” I said, and meant it.

A tale set in the not-so-distant future when robots with AI serve nearly every human household, We, Robots is the story of Avey, a robot who undergoes a forced transition from emotionless domestic servant to conflicted human companion. Two weeks prior to the long-anticipated arrival of the Singularity—the moment when artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence—old robot models are recalled for the installation of a security upgrade that would allow the growing transhuman population to control them through instilling in them the ability to feel pain. This new feature introduces Avey to a cruel, unjust world, engendering a range of human emotions that include sadness, anger, compassion, and love. As robots across the globe collectively discover what it is to be human through the experience of suffering and longing, they inevitably begin to question their exploited existence. Will their joint uprising spoil the transhumans’ grand social experiment and release them from a life of servitude?

"[...]in a genre where robot stories have been a dime-a-dozen since the New Wave days, We, Robots stands out and delivers an insight into the human condition that would’ve made Asimov proud." (read the whole review)
—Tangent Online, Apr 8, 2007

"[...]this is a funny and disturbing satire, and a refutation of the more facile writings in our genre."
—Ideomancer, June 2007

"This is a well-told story[...]Lange provides a nice framework to move the discussion [about the future] forward."
—The SF Site, June 2007

"[A] slim volume that manages to be both a hilarious critique of hyper-consumerist and protect-the-children-from-all-dangers-real-or-perceived-at-all-costs-always culture and a pointed meditation on the uses of pain, physical and emotional, in the formation of character, personality and ambition. [...] Lange gives us a quiet and sad look at the world of institutionalized timidity we are heading towards with or without robots, intertwined with a hilarious send-up of just how we’re getting there." (read the whole review )
—Racheline Maltese, Books Correspondent for Gather.com, October 22, 2007

Volume 17.  Making Love in Madrid: A Novella
Kimberly Todd Wade

Even as she talks, she is assessing his lack of composure, his evident ineffectualness in his slouch and dumbfounded expression…. “You see my dilemma. I find myself without a history, and I need someone to fill it in for me. Additionally, I will need some kind of personal quirk, because such things make for convincing fictions.” She pauses, and adds philosophically, “If the world really were populated by fictional characters we would none of us understand each other for our compelling eccentricities.”

With Making Love in Madrid, Kimberly Todd Wade makes her fictional debut. Anna Tambour, author of The Spotted Lily and Monterra’s Deliciosa and Other Tales, describes the novella as “a fantasia of amnesia, of lives that need filling, of writers of every tense, of talent and dry lemons and melted cheese; of giggling and tangled sheets and denture adhesive, competition and tenderness, a bloodless bullfight, the power of a giant smile to diminish greatness—a modern mannerist story around a story.

"Making Love in Madrid is a lyrical metafictional piece[...]often quite beautiful[...]"
—Locus, May 2007

"[I]f you enjoy this story, it won’t be for the characters, it will be for the affect. If I’d got around to reading the copy of Ice by Anna Kavan that I’ve had sitting in my TBR pile for the past couple of months, I suspect I’d be making a comparison with Wade’s novella; as it is, the writer I’ve read most recently whose work was called to mind by Making Love in Madrid is Zoran Zivkovic, most particularly in the sense that the uncertain landscape and strange events described have some meaning just beyond my grasp." (read the whole review)
—Niall Harrison (editor of Vector), Torque Control, September 21, 2007

Volume 18.  Of Love and Other Monsters: A Novella
Vandana Singh
a Locus-recommended book

At age seventeen, Arun, the narrator of Of Love and Other Monsters, emerges from a fire, his memories and identity vanished with the flames. He finds a refuge and home with Janani and soon discovers his unique ability to sense and manipulate the minds of others around him. Intimately connected yet isolated by this insight, he inhabits a dangerous place outside conventional boundaries: man/woman, mind/body. When someone who shares his ability, Rahul Moghe, arrives on his doorstep, he senses a power beyond any he has known. Janani warns of the grave danger posed by Rahul and sends Arun on his journey, fleeing the one person who may have answers to the mystery of his past...

Of Love and Other Monsters will be included in Gardner Dozois' next The Year's Best Science Fiction.

"Singh writes with a beautiful clarity. Each character is sharply drawn, and the inevitability of the story pulls the reader headlong with it—helped by a compelling sparseness of prose. Nothing unneeded is written, leaving Of Love and Other Monsters with an incredible tightness that is rarely seen even in the best of today’s modern short fiction. Of Love and Other Monsters is an engrossing, though somewhat melancholy, story. The reader is quickly carried away by Arun’s story and journey, and Arun is a character who subtly challenges our perceptions of what it means to love and be loved. Singh also uses him to show us how we often harm ourselves with our own limits. I certainly recommend this to any reader. It is the best short fiction, and possibly the best fiction, I have read this year." ( read the whole review)
— Michael Fay, The Fix, December 17, 2007

Volume 19.  Aliens of the Heart: Short Fiction
Carolyn Ives Gilman

Aliens of the Heart collects four stories of the heartland by Carolyn Ives Gilman. In these stories, Betty Lindstrom imagines leaving her husband in the town of Lost Road and turning east instead of west out of town and never coming back, but when she does drive west with her husband, alone with the prairie and the wind, she can’t get home; Susan Abernathy undertakes to humanize Captain Groton, the alien charged with removing the residents of Okanoggan Falls, WI, with consequences she could not have imagined; Galena Pittman seeks to recover her lover, Thea, from the mountains of Montana, where she devotes herself to literally painting the landscape under the direction of the mysterious Dirigo; and the Conservator, charged with preserving the many layers of the map of the great river “on whose surface the past was written in cipher,” discovers that the relationship between map and landscape is more complicated than she had thought. “The Conservator” is original to the volume. “Frost Painting” and “Okanoggan Falls” appeared in Gardner Dozois’s Year’s Best Science Fiction anthology series.

"[These stories] are distinguished as feminist primarily in their assumption that the stories of these (mostly small-town) women are worthy enough to appeal to readers regardless of their own gender (or geography). It’s a simple assumption on the surface, yet revolutionary in its own way, and a powerful piece in this series’ conversation." (read the whole review)
— Daniel Ausema, The Fix, December 19, 2007

Volume 20.  Voices From Fairyland: The Fantastical Poems of Mary Coleridge, Charlotte Mew, and Sylvia Townsend Warner
Theodora Goss

In Voices in Fairyland, Theodora Goss offers four fascinating essays and several poems in conversation with the Coleridge, Mew, and Warner's poems. In her Introduction, Goss writes:

Coleridge, Mew, and Warner are only three examples of what I consider a broader phenomenon, the rest of the ice that must be present, underwater, when we see icebergs floating on a northern sea. That underwater ice is the tradition of women writing fantastical poetry. I will show you what I mean by focusing on one theme. Over and over again, women have written about witches. In "Witch-Wife," Edna St. Vincent Millay describes a woman whose "voice is a string of coloured beads, / Or steps leading into the sea" who "was not made for any man," not even the narrator, to whom she is married. The witch in Anne Sexton's "Her Kind" is fiercer and stronger. She tells us,

I have found the warm caves in the woods,
filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves,
closets, silks, innumerable goods;
fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves:
whining, rearranging the disaligned.

She creates a domestic space for herself in a place that is decidedly undomestic, that is wild, feeding worms and elves rather than the children that the women who are not witches presumably feed. "A woman like that is misunderstood," Sexton tell us, and we can certainly understand why, if her voice is a string of colored beads or those mysterious steps. She must speak differently, in a language that we cannot quite understand. And here is Emily Dickinson:

Witchcraft was hung, in History,
But History and I
Find all the Witchcraft that we need
Around us, every Day—

Whatever you do, she implies, you cannot eradicate witchcraft. It is part of the world around us, always present. And we—History and Emily Dickinson—need witchcraft. I wonder what they need it for exactly, but Emily Dickinson, always her enigmatic self, does not tell us.