Women are breeders, kept as cattle, while men in this post-Hitlerian world are embittered automatons, fearful of all feelings, having abolished all history, education, creativity, books, and art. The plot centers on a “misfit” who asks, “How could this have happened?”

    She has written one of the 20th century's greatest high-fantasy series, the Chronicles of Great Alta (Sister Light, Sister Dark, White Jenna, and The One-Armed Queen). Her first collection of short fiction for adults is Sister Emily's Lightship and Other Stories. It assembles 28 stories, three of which are original to this volume, many of which take the form of folk or fairy tales, and all of which are excellent. Sometimes dark, sometimes humorous, the stories are always beautifully written, sharp, and wise. "Snow in Summer" portrays a modern, Appalachian Snow White with a fringe-Fundamentalist snake-handling stepmother. "Granny Rumple" reveals the grim origin of Rumplestiltskin. A prequel to the Chronicles of Great Alta, "Blood Sister" explores both love and the nature of narrative. In "The Gift of the Magicians, with Apologies to You Know Who," Beauty and the Beast meet with a horrifically suitable O. Henry twist. The Nebula Award winning "Lost Girls" revisits Peter Pan's Neverland with a feminist slant. "Dick W. and His Pussy; or, Tess and Her Adequate Dick" is an amusingly naughty retold fairy tale. In the Nebula Award winner "Sister Emily's Lightship," the poet Emily Dickinson finds a strange and otherworldly inspiration. --Cynthia WardContents:The Traveler and the Tale (1995)Snow in Summer (2000)Speaking to the Wind (2000)The Thirteenth Fey (1985)Granny Rumple (1994)Blood Sister (1994)Journey into the Dark (1995)The Sleep of Trees (1980)The Uncorking of Uncle Finn (1986)Dusty Loves (1988)The Gift of the Magicians, with Apologies to You Know Who (1992)Sister Death (1995)The Singer and the Song (2000)Salvage (1984)Lost Girls (1998)Belle Bloody Merciless Dame (1997)Words of Power (1987)Great Gray (1991)Under the Hill (2000)Godmother Death (1997)Creationism: An Illustrated Lecture in Two Parts (1990)Allerleirauh (1995)Sun/Flight (1982)Dick W. and His Pussy; or, Tess and Her Adequate Dick (1997)Become a Warrior (1998)Memoirs of a Bottle Djinni (1988)A Ghost of an Affair (2000)Sister Emily's Lightship (1996)

    The walled ghetto is off-limits to living humans, except for tonight, when a wild party and mysterious events will leave the fate of humanity hanging in the balance. From the author of Scissors Cut Paper Wrap Stone.

    But the near-immortal citizens of the future yearn for the good old days—when people’s bodies were susceptible to death through disease and old age. Now, they immerse themselves in virtual reality time machines to explore the life-to-death arc that defined existence so long ago. Jacob Brewer is a virtual reality engineer, overseeing the time machine’s operation aboard the starship Aspera. But on the thousand-year voyage to Beta Hydrii, the eight-hundred member crew gets more reality than they expect when people entering the machine start to die.

    With no technical skills and scant supplies, the survivors face a bleak end in an alien world. One brave woman holds the daring answer, but it is the most desperate one possible.Elegant and electric, We Who Are About To... brings us face to face with our basic assumptions about our will to live. While most of the stranded tourists decide to defy the odds and insist on colonizing the planet and creating life, the narrator decides to practice the art of dying. When she is threatened with compulsory reproduction, she defends herself with lethal force. Originally published in 1977, this is one of the most subtle, complex, and exciting science fiction novels ever written about the attempt to survive a hostile alien environment. It is characteristic of Russ's genius that such a readable novel is also one of her most intellectually intricate.

    With international relations rapidly deteriorating, Candy's father, publicly a small-town pathologist but secretly a government biowarfare expert, is called to Washington. Candy remains at home.The following day a worldwide attack, featuring a bionuclear plague, wipes out virtually all of humanity (i.e., Homo sapiens). With her pet bird Terry, she survives the attack in the shelter beneath their house. Emerging three months later, she learns of her genetic heritage and sets off to search for others of her kind.

    As Queen Amelyor's powers decline, Keiris, her son, decides he must find his long-lost twin sister, and the secret of his heritage

    Daniel, a teen runaway-turned-paparazzi out for his big break, witnesses the first shot hit Suyana, and before he can think about it, he jumps into the fray, telling himself it's not altruism, it's the scoop. Just like that, Suyana and Daniel are now in the game of Faces. And if they lose, they'll die.

    A Shaper. In a warm womb of metal, his patients dream their neuroses, while Render, intricately connected to their brains, dreams with them, makes delicate adjustments, and ultimately explains and heals. Her name is Eileen Shallot, a resident in psychiatry. She wants desperately to become a Shaper, though she has been blind from birth. Together, they will explore the depths of the human mind -- and the terrors that lurk therein

    In 2025, a Message from Capella was received! And suddenly, Robert MacDonald, Project Director, faced one of mankind's greatest challenges. He had to find a way to decipher a communication from a totally alien culture...and then persuade a reluctant world to respond.

    A ground-breaking work both of feminist SF and of world-building hard SF, it concerns the Sharers of Shora, a nation of women on a distant moon in the far future who are pacifists, highly advanced in biological sciences, and who reproduce by parthenogenesis--there are no males--and tells of the conflicts that erupt when a neighboring civilization decides to develop their ocean world, and send in an army.

    One will become our world. And Connie herself may strike the decisive blow...

    They do not know if the desert has an end, and if it does, what they might find there. Sometimes they come across perfectly-preserved cities, but without a single inhabitant, and never a drop of rain. Worse still, they have no memory of their lives before the desert. Only at night, in dreams, do they recall fragments of their past identities.But night also brings the madness of the sandstorms, which jolt them out of one body and into another in a game of metaphysical musical chairs. In their disorientation and dysfunction, they have killed each other dozens of times, but they cannot die. Where are they? How can they escape?

    This classic, now finally back in print, sweeps us--and Clay, the main character--into Earth's far-away future. It's a time when no one has heard of Shakespeare, Mozart, or Darwin, and when the planet is inhabited by beings of great intelligence, ambivalent sexuality, and extraordinary powers. Clay embarks on a panoramic journey, encompassing a billion years, and comes to understand that the era from which he came is nothing more than a minute fiber in the band of time.

    The future of humanity hangs in the balance. But a team of women are preparing to save it. Even if they’ll need to steal a spaceship to do it.Despite increasing restrictions on the freedoms of women on Earth, Valerie Black is spearheading the first all-female mission to a planet in the Goldilocks Zone, where conditions are just right for human habitation.The team is humanity's last hope for survival, and Valerie has gathered the best women for the mission: an ace pilot who is one of the only astronauts ever to have gone to Mars; a brilliant engineer tasked with keeping the ship fully operational; and an experienced doctor to keep the crew alive. And then there's Naomi Lovelace, Valerie's surrogate daughter and the ship's botanist, who has been waiting her whole life for an opportunity to step out of Valerie's shadow and make a difference. The problem is that they’re not the authorized crew, even if Valerie was the one to fully plan the voyage. When their mission is stolen from them, they steal the ship bound for the new planet.But when things start going wrong on board, Naomi begins to suspect that someone is concealing a terrible secret -- and realizes time for life on Earth may be running out faster than they feared . . .Goldilocks is a bold and thought-provoking new thriller for readers of The Martian and The Handmaid's Tale.