Maureen F McHugh Books In Order

Novels

China Mountain Zhang (1992)
Half the Day Is Night (1994)
Mission Child (1998)
Nekropolis (2001)

Collections

Mothers and Other Monsters (2005)
Plugged In (2008)
After the Apocalypse (2011)
Future Tense (2019)

Novellas

The Cost to Be Wise (2007)

Novels Book Covers

Collections Book Covers

Novellas Book Covers

The Cost to Be Wise
(2007)

Maureen F McHugh Books Overview

China Mountain Zhang

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.

Half the Day Is Night

In a twenty first century undersea city, terrorists threaten old money banker Mayla Ling, potentially plunging her and her bodyguard, war veteran David Dai, back into the nightmare of David’s violent past. By the author of China Mountain Zhang.

Nekropolis

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.

Mothers and Other Monsters

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.

The Cost to Be Wise

Set on a distant planet, this is a gripping tale about Sckarline, a colony that believes in appropriate 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’s Great Science Fiction Stories series. It is an unabridged reading by Vanessas Hart, 135 minutes, on two audio CDs.