Product Description
In her luminous collection of short stories, Maureen F. McHugh wryly and delicately examines the impacts of social and technological shifts on families. Using beautiful, deceptively simple prose, she illuminates the relationship between parents and children and the expected and unexpected chasms that open between generations. A woman has to introduce her new lover to her late brother. A teenager is interviewed about her peer group’s attitude to sex . . . and baby boomers. A missing stepson sets a marriage on edge. McHugh’s characters, her Alzheimersafflicted parents or her smart, rebellious teenagers are always recognizable: stubborn, sharp, human, and heartbreakingly real. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

Necessary Stuff
Constructing plausible families is hard enough in prose-and rare enough-that this collection is a must-read. That these families teeter on the razor blade of dysfunction only makes the collection more thrilling. That these families struggle with technologies and mysticisms either familiar or unknown-clones and location chips versus jessing and nomadic settlers of distant planets-enhances the pressure-cookers exacerbating the human emotions of the moment, providing an artistic counterpoint to the themes of the story. The girl with the locator chip on her arm runs away from home, paints pictures of girls getting hit by cars presumably while they were crossing streets without looking. Excellent stories of our world and others, and a must-own collection for anyone interested in top-notch writing, regardless of genre.

Mothers Aren't the Only Monsters

The "Mothers" of the title occupy only the most recent stories in this, Maureen F. McHugh's first collection, which ranges over most of her career--the earliest story dates from 1992, while the latest is original to the volume--but is strongest in those published since 2001, stories that abjure future or alternate-history settings for a here-and-now (sometimes problematically so) in which women, most of them mothers (though again often problematically) seek to negotiate landscapes for which their lives thus far have left them unprepared.

The protagonist in "Eight-Legged Story" obsessively sees herself as a wicked stepmother, though she has in no way wronged the troubled, maddening boy who came with her marriage, which his problems are now unraveling.The mother in "Frankenstein's Daughter" has indeed done a great wrong, though she was driven to it by unbearable bereavement and with good intentions, which do nothing to prevent its awful consequences.Rachel, in "Ancestor Money," is long dead; she is impelled to travel across space and time because of a dubious gift made to her by a descendent--meaning that she too was once a mother, though the descendant appears to be an in-law.And the middle-aged narrator of "Presence," who must watch her slightly older husband descend into the abyss of Alzheimer's and then, following a radical treatment, climb a different path partway back, becomes something like a mother to her spouse.

Only in the most recent story, the two-page "Wicked" (McHugh now sticks the bad-stepmother theme on a pike and waves it before us), are we offered an outright Bad Mom, with a comic forthrightness that puts the reader squarely on her side.Do you think it's easy, McHugh seems to be saying, to be merely like this and not worse?

The motifs of mother and monster are sounded together and separately, then played through variations.The narrator of "Oversite" ("Renata paints pictures of girls hit by cars") is both mother and daughter, meaning she gets it in both directions, like the girls caught in traffic in her teenager's disturbing paintings.Grasping to hold onto her loved ones--her mother is slipping away into dementia, her daughter into something less easily defined--she has implanted both with a global tracking chip, an electronic trail of breadcrumbs.Does this make her bad?Her mother wanders, teenagers do reckless things, and the woman in the middle is responsible for both.The brave and plainly correct course of action, so confidently sought out in genre fiction, is in McHugh's work simply not available.

The older stories include her best-known, such as "The Cost to be Wise" and "Nekropolis," which became in time the opening sections of her most recent novels, and "The Lincoln Train," a Hugo winner.It would have been nice to see these stories in their own volume, filled out with other memorable early work such as "Protection" and "Whispers" (omitted here, presumably for reasons of space), and the more recent stories--shorter and even better, showing their own sibling resemblances, and less likely to have been nominated for awards--given a separate collection.

As it is, the thirteen stories here show their own unity--"We blinked in the darkness, holding our gifts," the devastating final line to "The Cost to be Wise," hovers like an epigraph over all of them--as well as a greater range than many Hugo laureates evince over an entire career.The earlier stories tend to be about daughters, and while their powerless state does not absolve them of moral responsibility--McHugh knows too much to suggest that--their moral choices and dilemmas are finally less anguished than those facing the older women in the later work."Interview: On Any Given Day," published in 2001 and the last of the stories told from a youth's point of view, pointedly raises the issue in its final pages, where the relative moral culpability of an adolescent and an adult is presented with almost unbearable intensity.Reportedly the opening section of McHugh's current novel in progress (the practice of developing novels from the seeds of shorter works, common in commercial science fiction, is a sign of McHugh's genre origins), it make one look forward to the novel, and to more stories.

Free SF Reader
A pretty low-key story collection, with a 3.27 just scraping in enough to get the 3.5.

Mothers and Other Monsters : Ancestor Money - Maureen F. McHugh
Mothers and Other Monsters : In the Air - Maureen F. McHugh
Mothers and Other Monsters : The Cost to Be Wise - Maureen F. McHugh
Mothers and Other Monsters : The Lincoln Train - Maureen F. McHugh
Mothers and Other Monsters : Interview: On Any Given Day - Maureen F. McHugh
Mothers and Other Monsters : Oversite - Maureen F. McHugh
Mothers and Other Monsters : Wicked - Maureen F. McHugh
Mothers and Other Monsters : Laika Comes Back Safe - Maureen F. McHugh
Mothers and Other Monsters : Presence - Maureen F. McHugh
Mothers and Other Monsters : Eight-Legged Story - Maureen F. McHugh
Mothers and Other Monsters : The Beast - Maureen F. McHugh
Mothers and Other Monsters : Nekropolis - Maureen F. McHugh
Mothers and Other Monsters : Frankenstein's Daughter - Maureen F. McHugh


How to obtain an inheritance in the afterlife.

3.5 out of 5


Boyfriend that can see your dead twin is a bonus.

3 out of 5


Having to eat your dog will make you sad.

3 out of 5


Evil getaway.

3.5 out of 5


Adolescent lifestyle.

3.5 out of 5


Chip the kid.

3.5 out of 5


Flaming shopping.

3 out of 5


Werewolf boy lacking.

3.5 out of 5


Alzheimer's recovery.

4 out of 5


Step problems.

2.5 out of 5


Glove nicking monster.

3 out of 5


AI constraints.

3.5 out of 5


Slow clone.

3 out of 5




3.5 out of 5

A balanced and pleasing collection of short stories
Maureen McHugh has given me some really nice and thought-provoking reads in her novels over the past few years and I was pleased to see this collection of of short stories from her, most of which I had missed. I always approach short story collections with some trepidation.....when the stories are not on par with the writer's novels there is inevitable disappointment, and if the short stories are extremely good then there is still disappointment because the pleasure in reading them is so fleeting! However, every so often, there comes along a collection that does not fall into either trap and provides a haunting and lovely series of well-crafted little gems that are perfect in their own right. This is one such collection. I heartily recommend this one to anyone who has read McHugh in the past and enjoyed her works, and I invite those who haven't sampled her novels to test her writing first with these short stories. You won't be diasappointed with this one! ... Read more

Product Description
Winner of the James Tiptree, Jr. Memorial Award, the Lambda Literary Award, the Locus Award for Best First Novel, and a Hugo and Nebula Award nominee.

With this groundbreaking novel, Maureen F. McHugh established herself as one of the decade's best science fiction writers. In its pages, we enter a postrevolution America, moving from the hyperurbanized eastern seaboard to the Arctic bleakness of Baffin Island; from the new Imperial City to an agricultural commune on Mars. The overlapping lives of cyberkite fliers, lonely colonists, illicit neural-pressball players, and organic engineers blend into a powerful, taut story of a young man's journey of discovery. This is a macroscopic world of microscopic intensity, one of the most brilliant visions of modern SF.
Amazon.com Review
When talking about this book you have to list the awards it'swon--the Hugo, the Tiptree, the Lambda, the Locus, a Nebulanomination--after that you can skip the effusive praise from theNew York Times and get to the heart of things: This is a bookabout a future many don't agree with. It's set in a 22nd centurydominated by Communist China and the protagonist is a gay man. Thesearen't the usual tropes of science fiction, and they aren't written inthe usual way. But, wow, it's one heck of a story. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (35)

If you were Chinese, you'd know better, but nice try anyway.
As an American-raised Chinese engineer who is living in China, I found it hard to stomach much of what I was reading.Not only does most of the technology not jibe, but a lot of the Chinese is flat-out wrong.And even when it's not wrong, it's overwrought, because throw-away phrases are sprinkled throughout, and always with an explicit explanation, as if the reader is a slow learner.What little Chinese culture that is in here is so superficial and simplistic as to be worthless, because I never felt myself immersed in a China-dominant world.Most of the extrapolations she makes are exactly what I would expect from someone with only a superficial understanding of Chinese culture.Not even the broad picture of world government turned upside-down, with communist rule being the order of the day, is believable.

And why does the protagonist have to be gay? What possible purpose does that serve other than a crutch for lack of an interesting story?

It took trudging through 200 pages of pointlessly detailed descriptions to get to an event that actually seemed human, ironically just a side story that had very little sci-fi and even less Chinese content.And there is a character who does seem genuinely Chinese and genuinely interesting, but it is gone in a flash.

But this appears to be one of the few sci-fi stories out there that put China or at least the Chinese in any sort of prominent position.Also, it was her first novel and she's not even Chinese, having only spent a few years teaching in rural China.So her views are understandable, but I caution anyone who reads this: please do not treat this like another Maxine Kingston story; it's just a tale told from one person's angle.

I honestly don't mean for this review to sound so acerbic, but the novel really left me quite disappointed.

An Optimistic SF Read
Other reviewers have given synopsis of the story. No one has analyzed the story on the symbolic level.

What is important to recognize is that all of the side characters compete. They compete in athletics, economic, and social areas. Good and bad things happen to them, but they survive "in the cracks" of the system. It is not just the people who survive in the cracks, but the market economy itself.China Mountain is transformed from a worker within the established system into a part of a capitalist group outside the system. The long, dark Arctic night can be seen as referring to the political and economic situation in China at the time the book was written. Each of the characters is a glimpse of false arctic dawn presaging changes to the system.

As a political and economic analogy, the book is quite optimistic. That is quite rare in modern SF. A great, if subtle read.

Completely absorbing, with convincing characters
The book follows various characters, with Zhang as the main one, during revealing events in their lives. China is the world power, with the U.S. still coming to terms with a revolution ending in socialism. But the book is not about politics, or the wonders of a future revealed in interesting detail. It is not about technology, although some scenes take place on a budding Mars colony. The success of this book is the very real human characters, some with connections to one another, and some without. They struggle with life. Some succeed in their endeavors, some do not, and some simply try to figure out who they are and what is important to them. Each chapter is a windowed view of some segment of someone's life, and each chapter is captivating. We visit China, New York City, Mars, and Baffin Island in the Arctic along the way. Everywhere the struggles and issues are as timeless as ever - politics, companionship, class envy, friendship, and social status. Most of the people are good, if flawed, and although there are no neat endings, a sense of hope is faintly scattered around the edges of the pages and chapters. Just enough to care about all of these people, to be pleased when they get it right, and disappointed when they don't. Science fiction often thrives on the wonders of the universe, and here it succeeds on the equally mysterious wonders of people.

Not Free SF Reader
China Mountain Zhang explores the future when the Chinese way has taken over, and not just on earth, but other parts of the solar system, as well.

It follows one character in particular as he moves from place to place, working and living, and dealing with the fact it is a no-no to not be hetero in this society.

A great start got lost somewhere along the way
Love science fiction - always thrilled to find something out of the ordinary, like a sci-fi story with a gay protagonist. McHugh does a great job describing a future world where China has become the one and only power, with all other cultures falling in its wake. Her take on the cultural customs that would emerge from such a scenario feels right on. The themes and obstacle experienced by Zhang are recognizable as concerns alive and well today - making the story believable and relatable.

Unfortunately one can only take in-depth descriptions of surreal forms of architectural design so far and McHugh went a little past that. Still, I look forward to reading more from this author.
... Read more

Product Description
A stunning and provocative spiritual odyssey reminiscent ofthe best work of Margaret Atwood and Ursula K. Le Guin, MissionChild is a powerful fable, a stirring adventure, and a profoundlymoving portrait of a lost woman in search of an identity as she walksthe narrow fault line dividing female and male, child and adult, darkreality and illuminated dream.Amazon.com Review
Mission Child is an expansion of Maureen McHugh's "The Cost to Be Wise," a fascinating novella from the original anthology Starlight 1.

Janna's world was colonized long ago by Earth and then left on its own forcenturies. When "offworlders" return, their superior technology upsets thebalance of a developing civilization. Mission Child follows thejourneys of Janna after she and her young partner escape marauders whoattack their hometown. The girl, fast becoming mature beyond her years,sets off across the planet on an odyssey of adventure, poverty, hard work,war, famine, and rebirth. Janna uses her meager skills to eke out a livingin a changing world; she gains and loses a husband, a child, friends, jobs,and more.

McHugh weaves together anthropology, sociology, psychology, and genderrelations in this wondrous journey. Janna assumes the guise of a boy forprotection, but eventually becomes "Jan" to herself as well as others.Reminiscent of Ursula K. Le Guin's insightful works set in the Hainish universe,Mission Child will doubtless be nominated for a Tiptree Award for itsexploration of Janna's gender identity. --Bonnie Bouman ... Read more

Customer Reviews (18)

A thoughtful story of exploration
Comparisons to Ursula Le Guin are unavoidable, it seems. After all, here is a quietly paced, thoughtful journey/adventure story about a girl whose life is changed forever when she is exiled from her homeland. "Kinless", she moves from place to place, interacting briefly with various people and searching for her identity and for companionship, in a world that is becoming foreign to her. There are frozen landscapes, an identity crisis theme, and tragedies along the way. Despite the comparisons, this is a well written novel. "Jan/Jana" is a compelling and sympathetic character, and her experiences are movingly told.

Better than expected.
I come away from this book with a firm conviction that Maureen F. McHugh is an excellent writer. Her novels aren't overbrimming with heartstopping action, but she weaves delicate stories with intricate character and world development. I opened this novel expecting a slow-moving, dense story, instead, sentence by sentence kept me reading late into the night; I absolutely had to know what happened to Janna.

Janna is a teenager on a snowy colony world, growing up on an "appropriate technology mission," where offworld technology is carefully restricted as not to threaten the natural economic development of the world. Yet as all good intentions, the half-hearted involvement of the offworlders only brings the worst of modern griefs to the natives - weapons, war, displacement, plague, without any of the modern benefits. Janna is caught in the middle of all that, from bandit raids, to war, to starvation during a long flight through the snow, to refugee camps. Through it all, her identity slowly matures, from a young naive girl into.. not quite a woman.

The ending felt rather abrupt, although not quite as jarring as in "Nekropolis," and not unsatisfying. The novel just ends, rather than wraps up, but the decisions Janna makes in the end show how far she's come. I recommend this book to those who are willing to give up some thrills & excitement in return for fine prose and simply a quality literary work. Personally, I liked it a lot and wish I'd read it sooner.

Uninteresting Character and Plot
I think very highly of Maureen F. McHugh as a short story writer: i liked almost all the stories in "Mothers and Other Monsters" and particularly admired her writing style: a bit like Ursula K. LeGuin in that respect. However, the plot of this novel - the first I've read by her - was so uninvolving I couldn't finish it. Mainly this is the fault of the main character: it took me a long time to realize that she never figures anything out. In particular, she was brought up in a primitive religion on an alien planet and will never decide there's nothing to the religion, even though she sees the benefits of modern science in frequent meetings with Earth people (or off-worlders, as they are called). She has been given three implants by her original teacher from Earth, one a distress signal to call the off-worlders, a second that allows her to hibernate if caught outside on the cold world she inhabits, and a third that will supposedly allow her to move very quickly in an emergency. I never saw the third implant used in the 60% of the book I read -- odd, that, since she was in danger of loss of life early in the plot. As for the hibernation implant, it twice saves her life, but she reacts to that by saying death vomited her out, like some food on the planet that people will vomit if they eat. The idea that someone can have their life saved by something and still think of it as a bad thing is typical. I never understood why she was doing anything. (For example, she seems to have fallen into a habit of passing as a man early in the book, and while never able to explain it, she wants to stick to it, except that she also wants to have sex as a woman. What?) For full disclosure, I should point out that I never could read past about page 100 in Rabbit Run (I tried to read it twice because I thought Updike's writing was supurb). My problem was that Rabbit didn't know what he wanted and all of the plot, as far as I got, revolved around Rabbit - a relatively young man - deciding to run away from home, driving a long distance, then without actually making any decision, returning home again. Mission Child was like that: I couldn't figure out where she was going next, but it seemed random and she seemed stupid in many ways. I just can't get interested in that kind of character involved in a plot made up of random events.

Great writer who can involve readers in any scene
A colonized world develops a unique identity and culture. Years later, one of its citizens develops a unique identity as well, adapting to her culture by taking on the identity of a man. Soon, she finds that her gender-blurring actually appeals to her in ways beyond what her situation demands of her.

I love Mission Child as much as McHugh's more popular novel China Mountain Zhang, which received the James Tiptree, Jr. Memorial Award, the Lambda Literary Award, and the Locus Award for Best First Novel.

McHugh is a great writer who can involve readers in any scene, regardless of how much or how little action that scene contains. The language seems descriptive to an extreme, but she still manages to tie those descriptions into the thoughts and feelings of the characters.

Before reading her work, I read reviews that included complaints about her supposedly not focusing on plot. Readers can find countless formulaic, plot-driven science fiction and fantasy novels, but they won't find many original and evocative writers of McHugh's caliber.

McHugh's other novels include Nekropolis and Half the Day Is Night.

A science fiction odyssey
Maureen McHugh has outdone her previous two novels (Half the Day is Night, China Mountain Zhang) by a quantum leap with Mission Child.

Mission Child tells the futuristic odyssey of Janna, a young woman who undergoes many changes in her search for a role in life.From her begining as a child of the Hamra Mission, a low-tech culture on a world long-ago colonized by Earth, Janna sets forth on a journey across the planet when her clan is murdered by invaders.It is the first time Janna must come to grips with death, but certainly not the last.

As Janna travels from city to city, we see the colonization of the planet through her eyes.She encounters several different cultures, all vaguely familiar to the reader, yet altered by their adaptation to their new world.McHugh does an incredible job of presenting these cultures through Janna's eyes in a believeable way.McHugh's grasp of the narrative is amazing.

I rank this book up there with SF classics like Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness.Definitely a must-read book. ... Read more

Product Description
War veteran David Dai has come to ocean-bottom Caribe to work as bodyguard to Mayla Ling, banker and scion to the undersea city's old-money set. But as Mayla negotiates the biggest deal of her life, she draws the attention of terrorists who threaten to plunge her, and David, back into the nightmare of his violent past. HC: Tor. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (8)

insightful cyberpunk...
When French/Asian war veteran David Dai accepts a job as a security guard to a female banker in the Caribbean, he's expecting to be able to get away from the violence and trauma of fighting in Africa. However, the underwater domes of the cities of Caribe and Marincite are hardly the tropical paradise he was unconsciously expecting. Rather, they are torn by poverty and social unrest, and plagued by corrupt and incompetent authorities. The resentful former holder of his job is still at his employer's home, and to top it all off, his employer, Mayla Ling, seems to have mysteriously become a target of a terrorist group. David wants nothing more than to quit the job and go home - but underwater cities aren't always so easy to get out of, and every incident seems to get him more deeply embroiled in the local situation - and Mayla's life.
While containing a good deal of social criticism/commentary and 'humanist' insight, the story is primarily a tense, action-filled thriller. With the elements of shady business deals and takeovers, illegal drugs and colorful, dangerous underworlds, rich CEOs and shady crooks, virtual reality gaming and illicit neural stimulators, it had a very 'cyberpunk' feel - I'd highly recommend it for fans of William Gibson.

Read it in one day.... not that it's short, I just couldn't put it down!

I was really depressed when I finished this book, thinking that I'd now read all of McHugh's published work - but then I found out that she actually just had a new short-story collection released in July! Yay! (It's small press, though, so it might be a little hard to find - but it's now on my wishlist!)

Some part of the world never change
McHugh has a great knack for taking ordinary people in ordinary places, putting them in not extraordinarily stressful situations, and producing out of all that a really well-told, well-paced story with characters you care about. She did this very,very well in her first novel, _China Mountain Zhang,_ and she does it almost as well in this one, her second. She also doesn't make the mistake of stopping to explain when and where the story is set, explaining how history has created this particular future: She just does her narrative job and lets the reader figure it out, bit by bit. In this case, we're a couple of generations into the future, when an undersea colony built by the United States in the Caribbean has won its independence. But that was sixty years ago, and now Caribe is just another Third World Latin American dictatorship run by a president-for-life, with an upper class who are very rich and an underclass who are very poor. Jean-David Dai, a young French ex-soldier wounded in the South African wars, has come to try out for a security job looking after a bank officer named Mayla Ling, a naive member of the "haves" who has been targeted by a political underground. David's trying to escape his past and his nightmares, and he's not sure this job is the way to do it, but he agrees to give it a shot for six months. Then things get out of hand, naturally. Mayla's house is bombed, David disappears, the bank is sucked up by a neighboring conglomerate, and things become very uncomfortable. The setting is fascinating; think Colombia or Guatemala, but 250 meters under the seabed, with a police force that does things its own way and citizens who know better than to argue, where business is routinely done with bribes and kickbacks, where internal combustion buses operate in defiance of good sense -- this being a closed system where air has to be recycled and the lower levels of society never get enough oxygen. Mayla has never known anything different, and comparing her comfortable view of this world to David's reaction to the cold and the dark makes you really pay attention. A quiet, thoughtful, convincing novel.

The day after tomorrow
This was my 1st experience with McHugh's writing.It left me with a big smile on my face & wanting more.
The setting in the near future underwater state of Caribe is not crucial to the plot.The same story could have been placed anywhere from the 1960s to a future where interstellar travel is common.So don't expect any new ideas about future technology, sociology, etc.
I have almost no direct experience with dysfunctional 3rd world countries.That said, Caribe is right on the mark from what I have heard & read from people who do.The 2 protagonists are well depicted & their responses to events are entirely believeable.It was easy for me to imagine myself feeling & doing the same things in the same situation.

Big disappointment
The book starts well but after 170 pages I completely lost interest. The underwater scenario is very promising but the whole atomoshpere is destroyed by boring politics and all too sudden events. After a while I stopped caring for the main characters because their aimless wandering (very realistic, no doubt) was simply boring. I don't want to give any spoiler, anyone who still considers reading this book will soon know what I mean.

This is not a real SF book and it doesn't come close to the great "China Mountain Zhang" or the moving "Nekropolis". Considering the hazzle to get this book in Germany it was a big disappointment.

How many ways can you spell B-O-R-I-N-G?
Apparently Maureen McHugh knows dozens for she manages to keep the reader on the edge of their seat.Not through anticipation of events but because they have fallen asleep and can't help but try to escape.It's the future and there are underwater cities and there are problems and crises.At least there are in the boring lives of the boring characters.Sorry, this is one for insomniacs. ... Read more

Product Description
This digital document, covering the life and work of Maureen F. McHugh, is an entry from Contemporary Authors, a reference volume published by Thompson Gale. The length of the entry is 1303 words. The page length listed above is based on a typical 300-word page. Although the exact content of each entry from this volume can vary, typical entries include the following information:

• Place and date of birth and death (if deceased)
• Family members
• Education
• Professional associations and honors
• Employment
• Writings, including books and periodicals
• A description of the author's work
• References to further readings about the author

Product Description
Set on a distant planet, this is a gripping tale about Sckarline, a colony that believes inappropriate technology adoption.A heavily armed clan arrives at the colony while it is being visited by off-world anthropologists. Sckarline's technological beliefs are put to the test when events spiral out of control. Told from the viewpoint of a young woman, she soon learns just how high the price of wisdom can be. This production is part of the publisher'sGreat Science Fiction Stories series. It is an unabridged reading by Vanessas Hart, 135 minutes, on two audio CDs. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

good story, bad CD
This is a great story and Maureen McHugh is a fairly new writer, so this is a chance to know a author from her beginning, before she gets real famous, which I believe she will be.
My problem with this purchase is that Amazon is not real clear on what you are getting.The title is Great Science Fiction stories and so I thought I was getting more then one story and I had no idea how many stories or CD's I was getting until it arrived in the mail.It was two CD's one story.This I could have lived with, but the CD was of a low quality.My CD player in my vehicle does get hot, sitting above my heater, this heat caused all kinds of problems with the CD itself.
I drive a truck for a living and play lots of books on CD, and this has never been a problem before, but with this Cd it caused lots of problems with the audio. ... Read more

Product Description

Fleeing an empty future in the Nekropolis, twenty-one-year-old Hariba has agreed to have herself "jessed," the technobiological process that will render her subservient to whomever has purchased her service. Indentured in the house of a wealthy merchant, she encounters many wondrous things. Yet nothing there is as remarkable and disturbing to her as the harni, Akhmim. A perfect replica of a man, this intelligent, machine-bred creature unsettles Hariba with its beauty, its naive, inappropriate tenderness ... and with prying, unanswerable questions, like "Why are you sad?" And slowly, revulsion metamorphoses into acceptance, and then into something much more. But these outlaw emotions defy the strict edicts of God and Man -- feelings that must never be explored, since no master would tolerate them. And the "jessed" defy their master's will at the risk of sickness, pain, imprisonment ... and death.

Like Maureen F. McHugh's previous novels, Nekropolis is beautifully written, thoughtful, and powerful, with complex, sensitively delineated, always believable characters. McHugh portrays human behavior with a rare and sometimes heartbreaking honesty and with an exceptional insight into the interplay of male-female relationships and the dilemma of the stranger in a strange land. Like McHugh's debut novel, China Mountain Zhang (winner of the Hugo, Tiptree, Lambda, and Locus awards), the chapters are narrated in alternating first-person viewpoints that offer fresh and contrasting angles and understanding of the characters and their world. --Cynthia Ward ... Read more

Customer Reviews (26)

Brilliant, moving, and beautiful story of love and power
Maureen McHugh has written some of the best short stories of the 21st century. The first chapter of this book, Nekropolis, was first published as a short story, and you should also look out for "The Cost to Be Wise," which you can read in Gardner Dozois's collection The Best of the Best: 20 Years of the Year's Best Science Fiction.

In my opinion, her previous efforts to expand stories into novels haven't always worked. But in Nekropolis there are enough strong, powerful characters that McHugh can advance the plot while also exploring radically different points of view. As others have written, the story concerns a poor woman who must agree to a form of indenture in order to make a living as a housekeeper. The twist is that her contract is enforced by making her love her employers. This device echoes the poignant truth that bonds of affection form even between people who oppress each other. In this respect, McHugh's Nekropolis explores some of the same ground as Octavia Butler's novel Kindred. While the Butler is in some ways more powerful, Nekropolis is more subtle and more beautifully written. It's a haunting book that will make you think differently about why you joke with your boss--or with your employees, if you're the boss.

Very Disappointing.
This book started out ok and might have been bearable if either left in the main characters point of view, but in the second chapter she gives us a much better more worthy main character the AI (harni) and then rips him away shifting then to the points of view of secondary characters who we care little for and gives us very little of the favored character for the rest of the book.Neither him or the weak main character gets any resolution.

She expects us to feel for the main character who has basically made herself a slave but ignores the fact that this "slave" then basically makes her AI a slave to him caring only for her need of him and nothing of what he wants.She is aware he is made to please humans especially the one he bonds to.She is even aware he has to do what she wants and uses that to force him into a terrible life.

The only real issue I feel this book displays is selfishness regardless of class and that is obvious in the first two chapters you needn't read any further because it isn't worth the hour or two you'll spend on it.The only redeeming character is an AI, what is she saying about human kind?

Interesting, but Depressing
Nekropolis is well written, contains complex characters, and deals with interesting issues. If you are looking for something thought provoking and do not mind getting a little depressed, you will find it here.
However, I personally prefer books with likable characters, happy endings, and one point of view (or at most 2). This book needs a warning - "I'm a downer!"

It's good, but I would've liked a stronger ending...
One of the quotes for the book is plastered on the cover: "A literary novel in sci-fi clothing!" (Cleveland Plain Dealer), and that's just about accurate. To clarify my own definition of "literary": it does not mean literature. It may be work aspiring to become literature one day, but what is literature is not necessarily literary, and what is literary is not necessarily literature. Too many people think that "literary" means GREAT FICTION, but that's not true. There's lots of great literary work out there, but there's lots of crap literary work out there too.

Just want to clarify that.

This is indeed a literary focused novel, in that characters and symbols (and writing style) are more important than the setting or the plot, the latter two being hallmarks of the science fiction and fantasy genres. But it works, here: I never had a problem grasping the setting (and being set in a futuristic Morocco, particularly Nekropolis, where futuristic technology is only available to the wealthy), and the science fictional aspects of were very well described and not so technically ambled about that a non-sci-fi reader would get bored.

Like most soft science fiction, it focuses on the human reaction to technology, and pushes us to define what exactly in means to live in our society with our ideals, etc. The harni (chimera) are particularly interesting, especially when we see Akhmim's point of view for ourselves. And the concept of jessing is wonderfully eerie. Both the harni and the jessing raise a lot of questions about ethics, morality, and society. There's a lot of meat in this story.

Yet, the strongest section was the first part, told from Hariba's point of view. The second part, Akhmim's, is also very good, but it's in that part that the reader recognizes this book will not have a happy ending. We three other parts: one from Hariba's mother, one from Hariba's best friend, and then lastly, from Hariba once more. My one complaint about the structure is that we're left to figure out who's speaking to us when there's a new part. And that's rough, since each part is told from the first person, present-tense point of view. McHugh handles it well, but a little header with the character's name wouldn't have hurt either.

Ultimately, it is a bittersweet ending. I'm sorry it ended like it did, but I see that it had to end that way. Though, the ending didn't feel complete. Like most literary fiction, it ended on a symbol, and while it's powerful, I would've liked to see more of a change within Hariba herself. In this case, the decision wasn't enough. I wanted to see the fruits of it.

It's a good book, and I'd recommend it to people who like quiet, literary, soft science fiction. Character-driven, definitely, and not for those who are more plot or setting driven in their reading. I'll definitely read some of McHugh's other work, cause I'd like to see just how diverse it is. :)

Not McHugh's Best Work
In Nekropolis, Maureen F. McHugh tackles gender issues in a way that hearkens to some of Ursula K. LeGuin's best work. Nekropolis is at it's heart the story of a forbidden love. Hariba is a Moroccan woman sometime in the future who has had some type of behavior modification (jessing) performed which transforms her into the perfect servant. In the house of her owner, she meets a Harni - a man-made organism that looks and acts much like a human but is not quite human. Hariba falls in love, and the Harni apparently falls for her too. The plot of the novel follows their struggle to find a way to make a life together in a society in which their love is taboo. Unfortunately, that's also where the novel goes astray. To me, the most interesting aspect of the story is the nature of their relationship. Harni's are created to do everything they can to please humans, indulging their every whims. It brings into question how genuine the feelings the Harni claims to have for Hariba actually are. That issue is only really explored in what turns out to be a denouement which lasts far too long after the main plot has resolved. The "action/adventure" plot involving their attempt to escape Morocco takes over the novel and pushes the more interesting relationship issues to the side, only to be resurrected in a whirlwind epilogue that feels forced and too brief to contain the story that needs telling. Additionally, the epilogue lacks the emotional punch it should have, as all the tension built up in the action/adventure plot has been resolved, leading to a very strange rhythm to the novel. This book could have been so good. Ms. McHugh has the capability to write the book I'd hoped this would be - she succeeded in China Mountain Zhang and Mission Child in raising fascinating issues regarding the human condition, but unfortunately for those of us impressed with her previous work she misses the mark with Nekropolis. ... Read more

Product Description
Includes: Novella - Elector by Charles Stross. Novelettes - The Third Party by David Moles; The Pasho by Paolo Bacigalupi. Short Stories - Oversiet by Maureen F. McHugh; Brethren by Meredith Simmons; The Biography of a Bouncing Boy Terror! by Y. S. Wilce; Sleeping Dragons by Lynette Aspey; The Hat Thing by Matthew Hughes. Poetry - Things You Can't Avoid As An Immortal by Bruce Boston; Curse of the Dryad's Husband by Bruce Boston; Old Friends by W. gregory Stewart. Etc. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Not Free SF Reader
Two excellent, standout stories to be found here, which is rather good for one magazine issue.Also a book review of Heinlein's Tunnel In the Sky, suggesting this one is still pretty good, among others.

ASIMOVS344 : Oversite - Maureen F. McHugh
ASIMOVS344 : The Third Party - David Moles
ASIMOVS344 : Brethren - Meredith Simmons
ASIMOVS344 : The Pasho - Paolo Bacigalupi
ASIMOVS344 : The Biography of a Bouncing Boy Terror! - Y. S. Wilce
ASIMOVS344 : Sleeping Dragons - Lynette Aspey
ASIMOVS344 : The Hat Thing - Matthew Hughes
ASIMOVS344 : Elector - Charles Stross

Chip the kid.

3.5 out of 5


Barbarians are smarter than they look.

4.5 out of 5


Remnant population help.

3 out of 5


Knowledge prevention.

3.5 out of 5


Springheeled Jack, but where is Triplicate Girl? Or even Duo Damsel?

2.5 out of 5


Superpowered alien egg boy happy at home.

4 out of 5


Time traveller etiquette identification.

3 out of 5


Manfred and Amber deal with resurrection, resimulation, and the ever changing and rapidly evolving galactic situation.

4.5 out of 5





4.5 out of 5 ... Read more

Product Description
Magazine of the Minnesoate Science Fiction Society. Includes stories by Tiedemann, McHugh and Jacob and an interview with Fowler. ... Read more