Lisa Tuttle

L. Timmel Duchamp

A Novella

My Death

The Forbidden Words of Margaret A.

The WisCon Chronicles

David Pringle

Richard Calder

Stepan Chapman

Rhys H. Hughes

The Legacy of Boccacio

Leviathan

The Red Rose Rages

Love's Body Dancing in Time

They named the planet La Femme and called it a paradise and refused to leave it. Now Julia 9561 is heading up the mission to retrieve the errant crew and establish meaningful Contact with the inhabitants. Are the inhabitants really all female, as the first crew claimed? Why don't the men want to return to Earth? What happened to the women on the crew? And why did Paul 22423 warn the First Council to send only male crew members? Chercher La Femme, which unfolds in a strange, complex, alien future, effectively explores several themes: of personal identity and how it holds itself together but is also porous to experience; of communication with alien life forms and how amorphous and challenging that might be; and of the visceral power of alien forms of beauty and art, giving the story compelling depths. The tense stretch between the Pax and the Outsiders offers an interesting representation of the real-world tension we now live with, between low-tech societies and those racing to colonize outer (and inner, personal) space in all sorts of ways. There's some interesting tidal stirring going on at the more cerebral levels of modern SF, which I think began with books like A Voyage to Arcturus and Solaris. It's now manifesting itself in, for example, Jeff Vandermeer's Southern Reach books and in this book, Chercher La Femme, as well as in films like Arrival, They Remain, and of course Annihilation. Human bafflement and consternation characterize these stories in the face of the most alien kind of alien-ness we can imagine at this point, and a necessary softening and yielding of our age-old infatuation with a propulsive, often violent drive to control (or kill) whatever is ineffable and strange to us. Suzy McKee Charnas, author of The Vampire Tapestry and the Holdfast Chronicles

Chercher La Femme

Never at Home

Eileen Gunne

This volume explores some of the issues of interest at WisCon 2007: gender, race, culture, revolution, and the future of thinking about those matters. It offers a selection of scholarly essays, comments, arguments, emotive yelps, appeals to reason, scathing replies, and fears and hopes for the future collected from participantswriters, academics, bloggers, activists, and fans, some of them WisCon veterans and some attending for the first timeincluding Kelly Link, Laurie Marks, Nicola Griffith, Catherynne M. Valente, Wendy Walker, and others.

Provocative Essays on Feminism, Race, Revolution, and the Future

The Wiscon Chronicles

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 Scholes identified as proper to good sf. But, for those willing to accept its challenges, the narrative experience of the Marq'ssan Cycle, fulfills our need for both cognition and for sublimation as well.

Tsunami

Seattle, February 2076. The Marq'ssan bring business as usual to a screeching halt all over the world, and Professor Kay Zeldin joins Robert Sedgewick, US Chief of Security Services, in his war against the invaders. But as she goes head-to-head against the Marq'ssan, the long-buried secrets of her past resurface, and her conflicts with Sedgewick and Security Services multiply. Whose side is she really on? And how far will she go in serving that side?

Alanya to Alanya

Humans have been struggling to live on Frogmore for almost five centuries, adapting themselves to punishing gravity and the deadly mistflowers that dominate its ecology. Financier Inez Gauthier, patron of the arts and daughter of the general commanding the planet's occupation forces, dreams of eliminating the mistflowers that make exploitation of the planet's natural wealth so difficult and impede her father's efforts to crush the native insurgency. Fascinated by the new art-form of waterdancing created by Solstice Balalzalar celebrating the planet's indigenous lifeforms, Inez assumes that her patronage will be enough to sustain Solstice's art even as she ruthlessly pursues windfall profits at the expense of all that has made waterdancing possible.

The Waterdancer's World

L. Timmel Duchamp

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