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Meg Elison


Big Girl

Meg Elison

Tiptree Honor Listed Short Story

This is a story about a common problem in society -- fat shaming. This is especially a problem for women, both white and of color, and for teens who lack self-confidence and easily fall prey to ads and movie portrayals. With satirical condemnation of society and media reactions, this story portrays how internalizing the perceived norms of "feminine" leads to low self-esteem.

This story was originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Nov/Dec 2017.

Endor House

Meg Elison

This short story originally appeared in Lightspeed, Issue 104, January 2019.

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

Safe Surrender

Meg Elison

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

Read this story for free at Slate.com.

The Pill

Meg Elison

Locus Award winning novelette. Also nominated for the Hugo, Nebula and Sturgeon Awards.

Big Girl

Outspoken Authors: Book 25

Meg Elison

Meg Elison is one of the fearless "bad girls" in science fiction, fantasy, and transgressive humor. She is an iconoclast, using a caustic new talent to spotlight hitherto off-limits subjects like gender roles, body shaming, female oppression, and political correctness.

Table of Contents:

  • "El Hugé" (2017) reveals how small-town, small-time teens can accomplish Big Ugly Things on their own.
  • "Big Girl" (2017) chronicles the media's fascination with the towering anxieties of a sixty-foot tall teen.
  • "The Pill" is the collection's previously unpublished centerpiece, which celebrates a "miracle cure" for obesity that sends society to a grimly delightful new utopia.
  • "With Such People in It" is also new to readers, and welcomes us to a brave new world where cowardice is a virtue.
  • "Gone with Gone with the Wind" (2018) is a nonfiction analysis of privilege, denial, literary classics, and personal honesty.
  • "Afterimage" is a one-way trip into a VR world that's more "real" than our own.
  • "Guts" is about just what its title suggests: this volume's characteristically frank and thought-provoking Outspoken Interview.

The Book of the Unnamed Midwife

The Road to Nowhere: Book 1

Meg Elison

The apocalypse will be asymmetrical.

In the aftermath of a plague that has decimated the world population, the unnamed midwife confronts a new reality in which there may be no place for her. Indeed, there may be no place for any woman except at the end of a chain. A radical rearrangement is underway. With one woman left for every ten men, the landscape that the midwife travels is fraught with danger. She must reach safety -- but is it safer to go it alone or take a chance on humanity? The friends she makes along the way will force her to choose what's more important. Civilization stirs from the ruins, taking new and experimental forms. The midwife must help a new world come into being, but birth is always dangerous... and what comes of it is beyond anyone's control.

The Book of Etta

The Road to Nowhere: Book 2

Meg Elison

In the gripping sequel to the Philip K. Dick Award-winning novel The Book of the Unnamed Midwife, one woman undertakes a desperate journey to rescue the future.

Etta comes from Nowhere, a village of survivors of the great plague that wiped away the world that was. In the world that is, women are scarce and childbearing is dangerous... yet desperately necessary for humankind's future. Mothers and midwives are sacred, but Etta has a different calling. As a scavenger. Loyal to the village but living on her own terms, Etta roams the desolate territory beyond: salvaging useful relics of the ruined past and braving the threat of brutal slave traders, who are seeking women and girls to sell and subjugate.

When slavers seize those she loves, Etta vows to release and avenge them. But her mission will lead her to the stronghold of the Lion--a tyrant who dominates the innocent with terror and violence. There, with no allies and few weapons besides her wits and will, she will risk both body and spirit not only to save lives but also to liberate a new world's destiny.

The Book of Flora

The Road to Nowhere: Book 3

Meg Elison

In this Philip K. Dick Award-winning series, one woman's unknowable destiny depends on a bold new step in human evolution.

In the wake of the apocalypse, Flora has come of age in a highly gendered post-plague society where females have become a precious, coveted, hunted, and endangered commodity. But Flora does not participate in the economy that trades in bodies. An anathema in a world that prizes procreation above all else, she is an outsider everywhere she goes, including the thriving all-female city of Shy.

Now navigating a blighted landscape, Flora, her friends, and a sullen young slave she adopts as her own child leave their oppressive pasts behind to find their place in the world. They seek refuge aboard a ship where gender is fluid, where the dynamic is uneasy, and where rumors flow of a bold new reproductive strategy.

When the promise of a miraculous hope for humanity's future tears Flora's makeshift family asunder, she must choose: protect the safe haven she's built or risk everything to defy oppression, whatever its provenance.

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