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Young accademic meets one of her literrary heroines in the flesh. Jane Austin's Elizabeth Bennet does not turn out to be what she imagined at all.

Read the full story for free at the author's website.

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?

Sturgeon Award nominated novelette. It originally appeared in Bending the Landscape: Science Fiction (1998), edited by Stephen Pagel and Nicola Griffith. The story is included in the collection Love's Body, Dancing in Time (2004).

Nebula Award nominated novella. It originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, February 1999. There are no other known publications available at this time.

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.

Table of Contents:

• Dance at the Edge - (1998) - novelette
• The Gift - (2004) - novella
• The Apprenticeship of Isabetta di Pietro Cavazzi - (1997) - novelette
• Lord Enoch's Revels - (2004) - shortstory
• The Héloïse Archive - (2004) - novella

Men respond to a woman with a crucial difference.

This story can be found in the following anthologies:

• Full Spectrum 4
• Flying Cups and Saucers: Gender Explorations in Science Fiction and Fantasy (1998)
• Aliens Among Us (2000)

Never At Home is L. Timmel Duchamp's second collection. It includes stories previously published in the acclaimed Bending the Landscape and Paraspheres series and in Asimov's SF, as well as one hundred pages of previously unpublished work, all of them emotionally intense explorations of the difficulties of belonging.

Karen Joy Fowler, author of The Jane Austen Book Club, writes: "L. Timmel Duchamp has become a major voice as an editor, publisher, and critic. Her new collection Never at Home confirms her importance as a writer as well. The stories within are strange and heady, original and surprising. In them, the Duchamp heroine often finds herself pulled into some fascinating new world. The Duchamp reader is in the same position, though much happier to be there. Highly recommended."

Table of Contents"

• Explanations Are Clear - (2001) - novelette
• The Tears of Niobe - (2006) - novelette
• The Nones of Quintilis, Somewhere on the Southwest Slope of Monte Albano - (2011) - novelette
• A Question of Grammar - (1998) - novella
• The World and Alice - (2006) - novelette
• Sadness Ineffable, Desire Ineluctable - (2011) - novella
• And I Must Baffle at the Hint - (1995) - novelette

This story can be found in the collection Love's Body Dancing in Time.

Read this story online for free courtesy of the author.

The protagonist of "The Nones of Quintilis, Somewhere on the Slopes of Monte Albano" is Brooke, a woman who discovers that the women in her family can only become pregnant by performing a magic ritual, which takes place in Italy on a particular day each year.

This story can be found in the collection Never at Home.

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.

This story can be found in the Spring/Summer/Fall 1996 issue of Tales of the Unanticipated.

According to the Pentagon-owned-and-operated Past-Scan Device, Leonardo da Vinci and Thomas Aquinas were both women in drag. Jane Pendler's advisor says that's impossible, that the technology must be bogus, and pulls the plug on Jane's dissertation research on Leonardo. What a feminist graduate student to do? What else, but do the research behind her advisor's back, of course...

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.

Table of Contents:

• from Victoria Elisabeth Garcia to Mrs. Sarah Winchester
• from Eileen Gunn to Oscar Wilde
• from Wendy Walker to Guy Davenport
• from Anne Sheldon to a Scribe
• from Ada Milenkovic Brown to Sofia
• from Rosaleen Love to a Dead Man, John Dalton Hooker, Written on the Occasion of a Visit to Kew Gardens, London, July 2003
• from Nisi Shawl to Jack Kerouac
• from Heather Lindsley to Citibank, R.S.V.P.
• from C.G. Furst to Chandler
• from Leslie What to Timmi Duchamp
• from James Trimarco to Madame Defarge
• from Cat Rambo to William S. Burroughs
• from Carol Emshwiller to Abiel/Beal Ledoyt
• from E.C. Myers to Superman
• from Nancy Jane Moore to Lula Mae Cravens
• from Rachel Swirsky to A Fellow Ugly Girl
• from L. Timmel Duchamp to Alice Sheldon
• from Sarah Coats to the People of the World

The Grand Conversation, the first volume of the Conversation Pieces series, 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.

Table of Contents:

• For a Genealogy of Feminist SF: Reflections on Women, Feminism, and Science Fiction, 1818-1960 - (2002) - essay
• The Cliché from Outerspace: Reflections on Reports of a Death Greatly Exaggerated - (2003) - essay
• What Can Never Be: The Ancient Dream of a Transparent--Universal--Language - (2003) - essay
• Old Pictures: The Discursive Instability of Feminist SF - (2004) - short fiction

Sarah Minnivitch, an actor sentenced to prison for acts of civil disobedience, wreaked havoc at the for-profit medium-security facility she was first sent to. When Penco transfers her to a high-security facility, the facility's director assigns Dr. Eve Escher the task of rehabilitating Minnivitch and recovering the corporation's losses. Escher believes she is on the verge of a scientific breakthrough that will not only rehabilitate the prisoner but also win the physician fame and glory. But the stakes for both Escher and Minnivitch prove to be higher than either of them imagined.

It's an old, old story: the King loses what passes for his mind and accuses his perfect trophy wife of adultery and prepares to have her put to death. Temporary insanity, right? Often in such cases, there's collateral damage, and that's the case in this story. But who, in a monarchy like Ararat, can oppose the King? Enter, Paulina, stage left, a sculptor with a hidden talent, a dea ex machina with her own ideas about how this story should end.

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. Soon Kay is making, rather than writing, history.

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. She faces terrifying choices. Her worldview — her very grip on reality — is turned inside out. Whose side is she really on? And how far will she go in serving that side?

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.

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.

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.

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 continue to play out.