Strange Ladies — Lisa Mason

As Lisa Mason mulled over her short fiction, she found seven wildly different stories with one thing in common -- a heroine totally unlike her. Mason is the girl next door. She has no idea where these Strange Ladies came from.

In “The Oniomancer” (Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine), a Chinese-American punk bicycle messenger finds an artifact on the street. In “Guardian” (Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine), an African-American gallerist resorts to voodoo to confront a criminal. In “Felicitas” (Desire Burn: Women Writing from the Dark Side of Passion [Carroll and Graf]), an illegal Mexican immigrant faces life as a cat shapeshifter. In “Stripper” (Unique Magazine), an exotic dancer battles the Mob. In Triad (Universe 2 [Bantam]), Dana Anad lives half the time as a woman, half as a man, and falls in love with a very strange lady. In “Destination” (Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction), a driver takes three strangers from a ride board on a cross-country trip as the radio reports that a serial killer is on the loose. In “Transformation and the Postmodern Identity Crisis” (Fantastic Alice [Ace]), Alice considers life after Wonderland.
“One of the joys of reading collections is getting a better sense of an author's range. In this instance, Strange Ladies offers everything you could possibly want, from more traditional science fiction and fantasy tropes to thought-provoking explorations of gender issues and pleasing postmodern humor. In each of the stories, we meet a very different woman….This is a must-read collection.” The San Francisco Review of Books

Lisa Mason has published ten novels, including Summer of Love, a Philip K. Dick Award Finalist and San Francisco Chronicle Recommended Book, The Gilded Age, a New York Times Notable Book and New York Public Library Recommended Book, a collection of previously published fiction, Strange Ladies: 7 Stories, and thirty-one stories and novellas in magazines and anthologies worldwide. Her Omni story, “Tomorrow's Child,” sold outright as a feature film to Universal Studios.

Her latest novel is One Day in the Life of Alexa.