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Tiptree nominated short story that first appeared in the collection of the same name. Later anthologized in Jonathan Strahan's The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year Volume Six, Gardner Dozois's The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Ninth Annual Collection, Paula Guran's The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror: 2012 Edition and John Joseph Adams' Wastelands 2: More Stories of the Apocalypse (2015).

In her new collection, Story Prize finalist Maureen F. McHugh delves into the dark heart of contemporary life and life five minutes from now and how easy it is to mix up one with the other. Her stories are post-bird flu, in the middle of medical trials, wondering if our computers are smarter than us, wondering when our jobs are going to be outsourced overseas, wondering if we are who we say we are, and not sure what we'd do to survive the coming zombie plague.

Contents:

• The Naturalist
• Special Economics
• Useless Things
• The Lost Boy: A Reporter at Large
• The Kingdom of the Blind
• Going to France
• Honeymoon
• The Effect of Centrifugal Forces
• After the Apocalypse

WFA nominated short story. It originally appeared on Sci Fiction, October 1, 2003. The story can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror: Seventeenth Annual Collection (2004), edited by Ellen Datlow, Gavin J. Grant and Kelly Link, The Secret History of Fantasy (2010), edited by Peter S. Beagle, and Ghosts: Recent Hauntings (2012), edited by Paula Guran. It is included in the collection Mothers & Other Monsters: Stories (2005).

Read the full story for free at Small Beer Press.

This short story originally appeared in the anthology Global Dystopias (2017), edited by Junot Díaz. It can also be found in the anthology The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2018, edited by N.K. Jemisin and John Joseph Adams.

'I am Zhang, alone with my light, and in that light I think for a moment that I am free.' Imagine a world: a sinocentric world where Chinese Marxism has vanquished the values of capitalism and Lenin is the prophet of choice. A cybernetic world where the new charioteers are flyers, human-powered kites dancing in the skies over New York in a brief grab at glory. A world where the opulence of Beijing marks a new cultural imperialism, as wealthy urbanites flirt with interactive death in illegal speakeasies, and where Arctic research stations and communes on Mars are haunted by their own fragile dangers.

A world of fear and hope, of global disaster and slow healing, where progress can only be found in the cracks of a crumbling hegemony. The world of Zhang. An anti-hero who's still finding his way, treading a path through a totalitarian order - a path that just might make a difference.

This short story was originally published in the Readercon 24 Souvenir Book and was reprinted in Lightspeed, December 2013.

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

David Dai has taken an assignment in Caribe, an underwater nation in the Caribbean where he will be bodyguard to an heiress. But when her home is blown up by a Catholic revolutionary organization, suspicion falls on David. Escape is difficult, however, in a high-security underwater nation.

Sturgeon Award nominated short story. It orginally appeared in the anthology Starlight 3 (2001), edited by Patrick Nielsen Hayden. It was later reprinted in Lightspeed, May 2013. The story can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Nineteenth Annual Collection (200), edited by Gardner Dozois. It is included in the collection Mothers & Other Monsters: Stories.

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

This short story originally appeared in the anthology Polyphony (2002), edited by Deborah Layne and Jay Lake, and was reprinted in Lightspeed, August 2016. It is included in the collection Mothers & Other Monsters: Stories (2005).

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

An engineer who frequently travels for her job, suddenly finds herself in airports other than the one she arrived in...

Originally published on Tor Reactor Mag on 17 January 2024, read it for free at Tor.com

Humanity once boldly pushed outward from the Earth to establish colonies throughout the galaxy. But humankind reached too far - overextending, faltering, and ultimately failing - leaving its distant, unremembered settlements to fend for themselves. Now, after many centuries, the progenitors have returned to reclaim their lost territories.

A stunning and provocative spiritual odyssey, THE MISSION CHILD is a powerful fable, a stirring adventure and a profoundly moving portrait of a lost woman in search of an identity.

In her luminous, long-awaited debut collection, award-winning novelist Maureen F. McHugh wryly and delicately examines the impacts of social and technological shifts on families. Using beautiful, deceptively simple prose, she illuminates the relationship between parents and children and the expected and unexpected chasms that open between generations.

-- A woman introduces her new lover to her late brother.
-- A teenager is interviewed about her peer group's attitudes toward sex and baby boomers.
-- A missing stepson sets a marriage on edge.
-- Anthropologists visiting an isolated outpost mission are threatened by nomadic raiders.

McHugh's characters--her Alzheimers-afflicted parents or her smart and rebellious teenagers--are always recognizable: stubborn, human, and heartbreakingly real.

This new trade paperback edition has added material for book clubs and reading groups, including an interview with the author, book club questions and suggestions, and a reprint of Maureen's fabulous essay, "The Evil Stepmother."

Table of Contents:

• Ancestor Money
• In the Air
• The Cost to Be Wise
• The Lincoln Train
• Interview: On Any Given Day
• Oversite
• Wicked
• Laika Comes Back Safe
• Presence
• Eight-Legged Story
• The Beast
• Nekropolis
• Frankenstein's Daughter

An extraordinary literary artist offers a powerful vision of tomorrow in a world barely touched by the passing centuries.

There is life in the Nekropolis -- but no future. Hariba spent her youth here, among the exquisite paper flower wreaths her mother meticulously constructed, playing contentedly with other children around the rows and rows of old buildings housing the crumbling bones of the dead. But when an older brother's criminal indiscretion robbed Hariba of any possibility of a husband, she agreed to have herself "jessed" -- submitting to the technoblological process designed to render her docile and subservient to whomever has purchased her service. In this way, Hariba could escape the confinement of her surroundings and hopelessness of her fate...though she could never again be truly free.

At the age of twenty-six, she enters the house of a wealthy merchant as an indentured servant. It is a new world for Hariba, filled with many wondrous objects and strange amusements that she has never before seen. But there is one thing in this place that greatly disturbs her: a harni, an intelligent, machine-bred creature of flesh and organs, a perfect replica of a man. A menial, like herself, it calls itself "Akhmim." And it unsettles Hariba with its beauty, its nave, inappropriate tenderness -- and with prying, unanswerable questions like "Why are you sad?"

But slowly, almost imperceptibly, Hariba's revulsion metamorphoses into acceptance, and then into something much more. For Akhmim, like her, is a nonentity at the very bottom of the social order -- and the harni's gentle concern for her is real. And if she shuts out the accusing voices in her head, Hariba can even forget that Akhmim is less than human.

Dangerous thoughts, however, must inevitably lead to dangerous actions -- and outlaw emotions can breed an unholy love defying the strictly enforced edicts of God and man. Soon feelings Hariba can neither control nor ignore have her contemplating the unthinkable -- escape. But the "jessed" abandon their masters at the risk of sickness, pain, imprisonment, and perhaps even death. And there is no safe haven for a rebel servant and a runaway A.I. -- not even within the shunned, technology-barren bowels of the city of the dead.

Hugo Award winner Maureen F. McHugh has written a provocative, powerfully dazzling novel of repression and reawakening -- and a unique, profoundly moving love storythat stands alongside the acclaimed works of Ursula K. Le Guin and Margaret Atwood.

Sturgeon and Nebula Award nominated novelette. It originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, April 1994. The story can be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twelth Annual Collection (1995), edited by Gardner Dozois and the collection Mothers & Other Monsters: Stories (2005). The story was later expanded to a full novel.

This short story originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, September 2004, and was reprinted in Lightspeed Magazine, Issue 102, November 2018. the story is included in the collection Mothers & Other Monsters: Stories (2005).

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

Hugo Award nominated novelette. It originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, March 2002. The story can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twentieth Annual Collection (2003), edited by Gardner Dozois. It is included in the collection Mothers & Other Monsters: Stories (2005).

Hugo and Nebula Award nominated novella. It originally appeared in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, April 1992. The story can also be found in The Year's Best Science Fiction: Tenth Annual Collection (1993), edited by Gardner Dozois.

This short story originally appeared in Omni, Winter 2017. It can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Fifth Annual Collection (2018), edited by Gardner Dozois, The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Twelve (2018), edited by Jonathan Strahan, and The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, 2018, edtied by Rich Horton.

Sturgeon Award nominated novelette. It originally appeared in the anthology The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy (2008), edited by Ellen Datlow. The story can also be found in the anthologies The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Three (2009), edited by Jonathan Strahan and The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Sixth Annual Collection (2009). The story is included in the collection After the Apocalypse: Stories (2011).

Read the full story for free at Clarkesworld.

Hugo and Nebula Award nominated novella. It originally appeared in the anthology Starlight 1 (1996), edited by Patrick Nielsen Hayden. The story can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Fourteenth Annual Collection (1997) and Best of the Best Volume 2: 20 Years of the Year's Best Short Science Fiction Novels (2007), both edited by Gardner Dozois. It has also been included in Lightspeed Magazine's special edition Women Destroy Science Fiction (2014). The story is included in the collection Mothers & Other Monsters: Stories (2005).

In "The Effect of Centrifugal Forces," a teenage girl trapped in American suburbia grimly watches one of her mothers succumb to a brain-destroying disease carried by processed chicken nuggets. Her other relatives are even worse off, creating a landscape of sorrow and self-abuse that makes normal societal functions seem completely alien.

This story originally appeared in the collection After the Apocalypse: Stories (2011).

Read the full story for free at Tor.com.

This novelette originally appeared in the anthology Plugged In (2008) edited by L. Timmel Duchamp and Maureen McHugh. It was reprinted in Lightspeed, November 2011. The story is included in the collection After the Apocalypse: Stories (2011).

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

Hugo and Locus Award winning and Sidewise and Nebula Award nominated short story. It originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Apr 1995.

The story can also be found in the anthologies:

• The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirteenth Annual Collection (1996), edited by Gardner Dozois
• Alternate Tyrants (1997), edited by Mike Resnick
• Nebula Awards 31 (1997), edited by Pamela Sargent
• The Best from Fantasy & Science Fiction: The Fiftieth Anniversary Anthology (1999), edited by Gordon Van Gelder and Edward L. Ferman
• One Lamp (2003), edited by Gordon van Gelder
• Best of the Best: 20 Years of the Year's Best Science Fiction (2005), edited by Gardner Dozios
• The Very Best of Fantasy & Science Fiction: Volume 2 (2014), edited by Gordon Van Gelder.

It is inlcuded in the collection Mothers & Other Monsters: Stories (2005).

This short story originally appeared in the anthology Queen Victoria's Book of Spells: An Anthology of Gaslamp Fantasy (2013), edited by Terri Windling and Ellen Datlow. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2014, edited by Rich Horton.

Novelette originally published in Subterranean Magazine, Spring 2010. It can also be found in the anthologies The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year Volume Five (2011), edited by Jonathan Strahan and The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror: 2011, edited by Paula Guran and the collection After the Apocalypse: Stories (2011).

Read the full story for free at Subterranean Magazine.

This short story originally appeared on Slate.com in July 2018, and was later anthologized in Future Tense Fiction: Stories of Tomorrow (2019) from Unnamed Press.

Read this story for free at Slate.com.

Tiptree nominated story. Originally published in Jonathan Strahan's Eclipse Three: New Science Fiction and Fantasy, later anthologized in Gardner Dozois's The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Seventh Annual Collection, (2010) and collected in After the Apocalypse (2011).

Nebula Award nominated short story. It originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, January 1994 and can aslo be found in the anthology Nebula Awards 30 (1996) edited by Pamela Sargent.

This novelette origianlly appreared in Asimov's Science Fiction, April 1993. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Eleventh Annual Collection (1994), edited by Gardner Dozois.