Try our Advanced SearchShort stories by Seanan McGuire
Seanan McGuire was born in Martinez, California, and raised in a wide variety of locations, most of which boasted some sort of dangerous native wildlife. Despite her almost magnetic attraction to anything venomous, she somehow managed to survive long enough to acquire a typewriter, a reasonable grasp of the English language, and the desire to combine the two. The fact that she wasn't killed for using her typewriter at three o'clock in the morning is probably more impressive than her lack of death by spider-bite. Often described as a vortex of the surreal, many of Seanan's anecdotes end with things like "and then we got the anti-venom" or "but it's okay, because it turned out the water wasn't that deep." She has yet to be defeated in a game of "Who here was bitten by the strangest thing?," and can be amused for hours by almost anything. "Almost anything" includes swamps, long walks, long walks in swamps, things that live in swamps, horror movies, strange noises, musical theater, reality TV, comic books, finding pennies on the street, and venomous reptiles. Seanan may be the only person on the planet who admits to using Kenneth Muir's Horror Films of the 1980s as a checklist. Seanan is the author of the October Daye urban fantasies, the InCryptid urban fantasies, and several other works both stand-alone and in trilogies or duologies. In case that wasn't enough, she also writes under the pseudonym "Mira Grant." For details on her work as Mira, check out MiraGrant.com. In her spare time, Seanan records CDs of her original filk music (see the Albums page for details). She is also a cartoonist, and draws an irregularly posted autobiographical web comic, "With Friends Like These...", as well as generating a truly ridiculous number of art cards. Surprisingly enough, she finds time to take multi-hour walks, blog regularly, watch a sickening amount of television, maintain her website, and go to pretty much any movie with the words "blood," "night," "terror," or "attack" in the title. Most people believe she doesn't sleep. Seanan lives in an idiosyncratically designed labyrinth in the Pacific Northwest, which she shares with her cats, Alice and Thomas, a vast collection of creepy dolls and horror movies, and sufficient books to qualify her as a fire hazard. She has strongly-held and oft-expressed beliefs about the origins of the Black Death, the X-Men, and the need for chainsaws in daily life. Years of writing blurbs for convention program books have fixed Seanan in the habit of writing all her bios in the third person, so as to sound marginally less dorky. Stress is on the "marginally." It probably doesn't help that she has so many hobbies. Seanan was the winner of the 2010 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and her novel Feed (as Mira Grant) was named as one of Publishers Weekly's Best Books of 2010. In 2013 she became the first person ever to appear five times on the same Hugo Ballot.
Listing 7 stories.
A pair of royal dragon siblings, one of whom is a general and the other a prophet, reflect on their lives and prepare to fight the humans who come to kill them.
In a future decimated by rising tides and extreme weather, the people of Earth have been displaced from their land and look to the sea to establish new civilizations. In order to survey the ocean and explore its resources, the U.S. Navy enlists an all-female cohort of “military mermaids,” whose human limbs and organs are genetically modified into fins and gills.
A scientist who specializes in neurolinguistic computing built an ASL translation system to more easily video-call with her deaf sister, who is an avian conservationist. When one of her birds accidentally gets online with the scientist's children, the scientist discovers that her translation software can give a voice to animals too.
Cursed to passively watch others rise before her, a woman finds love as she awaits to be chosen for her family's magical inheritance. When the moment arrives, she must choose between a life with her mysterious lover or abandon her love and finally accept her most coveted desire.
An overweight teenage girl stumbles upon a mermaid and thinks her dreams of taking mermaid lessons have come true. But when her hypercritical mother takes her mermaid tail away, the girl has to decide whether to accept her restrictive life, or try something new.
A marine biologist raises the offspring of a giant creature known as The Beast which destroyed Seattle fifteen years prior. A marine biologist discovers the motives of a giant creature known as The Beast, which destroyed Seattle and was nuked to death fifteen years prior. A marine biologist goes to extraordinary lengths to set the record straight on a giant creature known as The Beast, which destroyed Seattle and was nuked to death fifteen years prior.
A group of teens break into an abandoned haunted mansion on Halloween, and when the prank goes awry one member sacrifices herself to save the others.