Strange Ladies: 7 Stories

As Lisa Mason mulled over her short fiction, she found seven wildly different stories with one thing in common—a heroine totally unlike her. Mason is the girl next door. She has no idea where these Strange Ladies came from.

In “The Oniomancer” (Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine), a Chinese-American punk bicycle messenger finds an artifact on the street. In “Guardian” (Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine), an African-American gallerist resorts to voodoo to confront a criminal. In “Felicitas” (Desire Burn: Women Writing from the Dark Side of Passion [Carroll and Graf]), an illegal Mexican immigrant faces life as a cat shapeshifter. In “Stripper” (Unique Magazine), an exotic dancer battles the Mob. In Triad (Universe 2 [Bantam]), Dana Anad lives half the time as a woman, half as a man, and falls in love with a very strange lady. In “Destination” (Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction), a driver takes three strangers from a ride board on a cross-country trip as the radio reports that a serial killer is on the loose. In “Transformation and the Postmodern Identity Crisis” (Fantastic Alice [Ace]), Alice considers life after Wonderland.
“One of the joys of reading collections is getting a better sense of an author’s range. In this instance, Strange Ladies offers everything you could possibly want, from more traditional science fiction and fantasy tropes to thought-provoking explorations of gender issues and pleasing postmodern humor. In each of the stories, we meet a very different woman….This is a must-read collection.” The San Francisco Review of Books

Lisa Mason has published ten novels, including Summer of Love, a Philip K. Dick Award Finalist and San Francisco Chronicle Recommended Book, The Gilded Age, a New York Times Notable Book and New York Public Library Recommended Book, a collection of previously published fiction, Strange Ladies: 7 Stories, and thirty-one stories and novellas in magazines and anthologies worldwide. Her Omni story, “Tomorrow’s Child,” sold outright as a feature film to Universal Studios.

Her latest novel is One Day in the Life of Alexa.