Fireflood

Book excerpt: A collection of eleven stories from the New York Times–bestselling author, including Nebula Award winner “Of Mist, and Grass, and Sand.” This brilliant collection of short fiction showcases renowned author Vonda N. McIntyre’s sparkling lyricism, captivating vision, and advocacy of the different. The titular story is one of alienation and discrimination, as a woman transformed into an “ugly” lifeform—a clumsy “digger”—seeks to escape her servitude to humans, but is denied sanctuary by the beautiful and graceful “flyers.” Also included is the acclaimed story “Of Mist, and Grass, and Sand,” which became the first section of McIntyre’s Hugo and Nebula Award–winning novel, Dreamsnake. In it, a woman who harnesses the power of snakes’ venom to heal saves the life of a nomad boy in the desert—but the price she pays may be too much to bear. In “Aztecs,” later expanded into the novel Superluminal, a woman undergoes biological modifications in order to pilot ships during faster-than-light travel. “A quality selection . . . Zoning in on McIntyre’s penchant for intense, dark stories with human pain and transcendence at their core . . . Fireflood, as with all of McIntyre’s fiction, is written in a brooding, pulsing prose that drops the reader into a setting with little to orient themselves save the words on the page.” —Speculiction “Eleven stories by one of the most widely admired of the younger science-fiction writers . . . From awkward to wonderful—an interesting record of an up-and-coming talent’s present whereabouts.” —Kirkus Reviews