Book picks similar to
Persephone by Seanan McGuire


short-stories
short-story
sci-fi
fantasy

New Suns: Original Speculative Fiction by People of Color


Nisi ShawlAlex Jennings - 2019
    Lily Yu, Andrea Hairston, Tobias Buckell, Hiromi Goto, Rebecca Roanhorse, Indrapramit Das, Chinelo Onwualu and Darcie Little Badger.

Men Who Wish to Drown


Elizabeth Fama - 2012
    Supposedly corroborating the mermaid story, a ship's log (in the collections of the Provincetown Historical Museum) of the schooner Hannah, which plucked Mr. Stanton from South Weepecket in 1788, indicates that the crew saw two figures on the island prior to his rescue, but failed to locate a second victim. However, regarding accuracy and reliability, this is the same crew, under Captain John Merriweather, that reported sightings of a ghost ship and not one, but two sea monsters. ~~James S. Rucker, Archivist, Family Collections, Falmouth Historical Society, 1924Companion story to Monstrous Beauty.

The End of the End of Everything


Dale Bailey - 2014
    The inhabitants of the colony indulge in suicide parties as the world teeters on the brink of extinction, worn away by some weird entropy.

The Murders of Molly Southbourne


Tade Thompson - 2017
    Experience the horror of Tade Thompson's The Murders of Molly Southbourne.The rule is simple: don't bleed.For as long as Molly Southbourne can remember, she's been watching herself die. Whenever she bleeds, another molly is born, identical to her in every way and intent on her destruction.Molly knows every way to kill herself, but she also knows that as long as she survives she'll be hunted. No matter how well she follows the rules, eventually the mollys will find her. Can Molly find a way to stop the tide of blood, or will she meet her end at the hand of a girl who looks just like her?

Her Silhouette, Drawn in Water


Vylar Kaftan - 2019
    Chela says that they’re telepaths and mass-murderers; that they belong here, too dangerous to ever be free. Bee has no reason to doubt her—until she hears the voice of another telepath, one who has answers, and can open her eyes to an entirely different truth.

Waiting on a Bright Moon


J.Y. Yang - 2017
    When a dead body comes through her portal at a time of growing rebellion, Xin is drawn deep into a station-wide conspiracy along with Ouyang Suqing, one of the station’s mysterious, high-ranking starmages.

Minority Report and Other Stories


Philip K. Dick - 2001
    Dick has written some of the most intriguing, original and thought-provoking fiction of our time. This collection includes stories that will make you laugh, cringe...and stop and think.The Minority Report: a special unit that employs those with the power of precognition to prevent crimes proves itself less than reliable...We Can Remember It For You Wholesale: an everyguy's yearning for more exciting "memories" places him in a danger he never could have imagined (basis of the feature film Total Recall)...Paycheck: a mechanic who has no memory of the previous two years of his life finds that a bag of seemingly worthless and unrelated objects can actually unlock the secret of his recent past — and insure that he has a future...Second Variety: the UN's technological advances to win a global war veer out of control, threatening to destroy all of humankind (basis of the movie Screamers)...The Eyes Have It: a whimsical, laugh-out-loud play on the words of the title.

Death and What Comes Next


Terry Pratchett - 2002
    It tells the story of a discussion between Death and a philosopher, in which the philosopher attempts to use the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics to argue death is not a certainty.

Children of the New World


Alexander Weinstein - 2016
    Many of these characters live in a utopian future of instant connection and technological gratification that belies an unbridgeable human distance, while others inhabit a post-collapse landscape made primitive by disaster, which they must work to rebuild as we once did millennia ago.In “The Cartographers,” the main character works for a company that creates and sells virtual memories, while struggling to maintain a real-world relationship sabotaged by an addiction to his own creations. In “Saying Goodbye to Yang,” the robotic brother of an adopted Chinese child malfunctions, and only in his absence does the family realize how real a son he has become.Children of the New World grapples with our unease in this modern world and how our ever-growing dependence on new technologies has changed the shape of our society. Alexander Weinstein is a visionary new voice in speculative fiction for all of us who are fascinated by and terrified of what we might find on the horizon.

I'm Starved for You


Margaret Atwood - 2012
    Outside the walls of Consilience, half the country is out of work, gangs of the drug-addicted and disaffected menace the streets, warlords disrupt the food supply, and overcrowded correctional facilities churn out offenders to make room for more.The Consilience prison, Positron, is something else altogether. The very heart of the community and its economic engine, it’s a bold experiment in voluntary incarceration. In exchange for a house, food, and what the online brochure hails as “A Meaningful Life,” residents agree to spend one month as inmates, the next as civilians, working as guards or whatever’s required.Stan and Charmaine have no complaints—until the day Stan discovers an erotic note under the fridge of the house he and Charmaine must share with another couple while they’re back inside Positron. It’s a missive of erotic longing, pressed with a vivid lipstick kiss: “I’m starved for you!” it breathes. If Stan rarely thought about the house’s other residents before—they’ve never met them and don’t know their names; it’s not allowed—now he can’t stop thinking about them, especially the note’s sex-addled author, a woman apparently named Jasmine, so unlike his girlish wife, Charmaine. He HAS to meet her, but in this highly ordered and increasingly surveilled world, disorderly thoughts are a risk, and breaking the rules has dire consequences.

Junkyard Cats


Faith Hunter - 2020
    But Shining is now something more than human. And the scrapyard is no longer just a scrapyard, but a place full of secrets that she has guarded for years.This life she has built, while empty, is predictable and safe. Until the only friend left from her previous life shows up, dead, in the back of a scrapped Tesla warplane, a note to her clutched in his fingers - a note warning her of a coming attack.Someone knows who she is. Someone knows what she is guarding. Will she be able to protect the scrapyard? Will she even survive? Or will she have to destroy everything she loves to keep her secrets out of the wrong hands?

Tear Tracks


Malka Ann Older - 2015
    She's undergone careful training and study to prepare for this moment. But what if her approach is too human?

Sleeping Beauty


Mark Lawrence - 2013
    I may have thrown another fairy tale or two into the mix...

The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion


Margaret Killjoy - 2017
    Searching for clues about her best friend’s mysterious and sudden suicide, she ventures to the squatter, utopian town of Freedom, Iowa. All is not well in Freedom, however: things went awry after the town’s residents summoned a protector spirit to serve as their judge and executioner.Danielle shows up in time to witness the spirit—a blood-red, three-antlered deer—begin to turn on its summoners. Danielle and her new friends have to act fast if they’re going to save the town—or get out alive.

For He Can Creep


Siobhan Carroll - 2019
    Luke's Hospital for Lunatics believing God has commissioned him to write The Divine Poem. But years earlier, he made a bargain with Satan and the devil has come to collect his due--a poem that will bring about the apocalypse.Saving Smart's soul, and the rest of the world, falls to Jeoffry, the poet's demon-fighting cat and a creature of cunning Satan would be a fool to underestimate...At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.