Plugged In

by L. Timmel Duchamp, Maureen McHugh

''Need a quick dose of weird, brainy science fiction but don't have time to commit to an entire short story collection?''asks critic Annalee Newitz in her June 4 post to the io9 blog. ''Then consider a new kind of book, from Aqueduct Press, which you might call a short story single, with an A-Side and a B-Side (though both stories get an A from this reader). Plugged In contains 'The Man Who Plugged In,' by L. Timmel Duchamp and 'Kingdom of the Blind' by Maureen McHugh....Highly recommended.'' Plugged In features two stories of feminist science fiction by WisCon 32 Guests of Honor L. Timmel Duchamp and Maureen McHugh. In ''Kingdom of the Blind,'' Sydney, one of the codemonekys who maintain DMS, the software system that keeps the physical plants of the Benevola Health Network running, suspects the recent outages in the system may be a sign of the system's sentience rather than due to simple corruption of its code. Her fellow geeks view the reset button as a possible if drastic solution for restoring the system's integrity, but Sydney fears it might be a much too Final Solution. In L. Timmel Duchamp's ''The Man Who Plugged In,''Howard Nies becomes the first male to plug into a Siemens Carapace. And as an ad in the February 2013 issue of The American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology notes, the Siemens Carapace is ''a prenatal cradle of caring'' at the cutting edge of technology, ''made of the finest, strongest, most lightweight materials ever produced. Its clean, round lines and soft, silvery matte finish can t fail to reassure both the parents and the gestational carrier who wears it that the child within is getting better care and protection than any naturally gestated child.''

94 pages, Paperback

First published May 15, 2008

About the author

L. Timmel Duchamp was born in 1950, the first child of three. Duchamp first began writing fiction in a library carrel at the University of Illinois in 1979, for a joke. But the joke took on a life of its own and soon turned into a satirical roman a clef in the form of a murder mystery titled "The Reality Principle." When she finished it, she allowed the novel to circulate via photocopies, and it was a great hit in the academic circles in which she then moved. One night in the fall of 1984 she sat down at her mammoth Sanyo computer with its green phosphorescent screen and began writing Alanya to Alanya.

Duchamp spent the next two years in a fever, writing the Marq'ssan Cycle. When she finshed it, she realized she didn't know how to market it to publishers and decided that publishing some short fiction (which she had never tried to write before) would be helpful for getting her novels taken seriously. Her first effort at a short story was "Welcome, Kid, to the Real World," which she wrote in the summer of 1986. Her next effort, however, turned into a novel. (Getting the hang of the shorter narrative form was a lot harder than she'd anticipated.) So she decided to stick with novels for a while. When in fall 1987 a part-time job disrupted her novel-writing, she took the short stories of Isak Dinesen for her model, tried again, and wrote "Negative Event at Wardell Station, Planet Arriga" and "O's Story." And in 1989 she sold "O's Story" to Susanna J. Sturgis for Memories and Visions, "The Forbidden Words of Margaret A." to Kristine Kathryn Rusch for Pulphouse: The Hardback Magazine, and "Transcendence" to the shortlived Starshore. Her first pro sale, though, was "Motherhood, Etc." to Bantam for the Full Spectrum anthology series.

After that she wrote a lot of short fiction (mostly at novelette and novella lengths), a good deal of which she sold to Asimov's SF. In the late 1990s Nicola Griffith convinced her to try her hand at writing criticism and reviews. In 2004, Duchamp founded Aqueduct Press; since then editing and publishing books (her own as well as other writers') has claimed the lion's share of her time and effort.

She lives in Seattle.