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A subversive debut short-fiction collection from one of the hottest talents in speculative fiction: 2025 Compton Crook Award winner and Pushcart Prize nominee Samantha Mills (The Wings Upon Her Back). These riveting stories range effortlessly from fantasy and science fiction to literary fiction, from the here and now all the way into the farthest reaches of space. The central tale of the collection is Mills' pivotal Nebula, Locus, and Sturgeon Award-winning story "Rabbit Test," which interrogates the past, present, and future of abortion rights.
A time-traveling fisherwoman keeps landing on the right shore, but at the wrong time. A pair of witches fight over the gate between life and death. A new consciousness, intent upon seeing all the wonders of the universe, visits a floating library. A rock-and-roll legend squares off against a town full of devils. Humanity makes first contact, but falters when put in charge of selecting the world's representatives.
In her strange and emotional worlds, with stakes ranging from the epic to the personal, Mills creates ample room for humor and hope amidst tragedy and struggle.
"[B]rilliant...Even the shortest of these tales packs a powerful punch." ―Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Mills examines the human spirit with a sharp eye and a gentle heart. Her characters dare to love, hope and fight within systems that try to keep them in place." ―Eugenia Triantafyllou, author of Loneliness Universe
"Mills has crafted, diamond-like, a deft compression of worlds and time, multifaceted in its insights around power, systemic injustice, motherhood, trauma, bodily autonomy, and revolution." ―P. H. Low, author of These Deathless Shores
This information about Rabbit Test and Other Stories was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
© Samantha Mills, 2023
Samantha Mills is a multiple award-winning author of science fiction and fantasy. Her critically acclaimed first novel, The Wings Upon Her Back, won the Compton Crook Award for year's best SFF debut. In 2023, she received the Nebula, Locus, and Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Awards for her short story, "Rabbit Test." Her short fiction has appeared in Uncanny Magazine, Strange Horizons, Escape Pod, and others, and was included in the best-of anthologies The New Voices of Science Fiction from Tachyon Publications and The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2023.
A graduate of the University of Santa Cruz with a BA in Pre- and Early Modern Literature, Mills also received a Master's in Information and Library Science from San José State University. In the other half of her life, she ...
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