Spells of Mortal Weaving (New York: Avon Books, 1986).Mustapha and His Wise Dog (New York: Avon Books, 1985).

See also: Pulphouse: The Hardback Magazine Skylark Award. The Sherwood Game ( 1995), on the other hand, is genuine sf, an early exercise in Virtual Reality: the eponymous programmer creates a Computer Role Playing Game which becomes sentient and invades the real world, to the eventual profit of all concerned. Yesterday We Saw Mermaids ( 1991) is a tale of Thinning set in 1492 a ship – separate from those under Columbus, and full of figures from the backstory of Western civilization – travels west, finds Prester John, and witnesses the departure of the magic folk from our ken. Of her singletons, Druid's Blood ( 1988) is a Gaslight Romance set in an Alternate-World Victorian England, with Recursive references galore, and a plot centring on investigations by analogues of Sherlock Holmes and Watson.

The plucky young protagonist escapes this rural hell, only to find that in the City of her dreams it is hard to find a decent man, though a possible cure for the Sex plague may dissolve unjust patriarchy. The more ambitious Psalms of Herod sequence comprising The Psalms of Herod ( 1995) and The Sword of Mary ( 1996) is set in a profoundly polluted Ruined Earth version of America, where women have become chattels, their Pandemic-afflicted fertility seen as a marker of sin by the ruling fundamentalist Christians (see Feminism Religion Women in SF). She is of more direct (but not significant) sf interest for two Ties to the Star Trek universe: Warchild ( 1994), which is connected to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and To Storm Heaven ( 1997) connected to Star Trek: The Next Generation. Almost all of her work is fantasy or Supernatural Fiction, much of it incorporated into series, like The Chronicles of the Twelve Kingdoms beginning with Mustapha and His Wise Dog ( 1985), the Demons series beginning with Here Be Demons ( 1988) and (among others) the Princesses of Myth series beginning with Nobody's Princess ( 2007).Ĭloser to sf modes are the geographically linked New York novels comprising New York by Knight ( 1986), Elf Defense ( 1988) and Sphynxes Wild ( 1989), which utilizes New York as an effective backdrop for otherwise unconnected stories in which creatures of Faerie intersect clashingly with our world, though rarely with sufficient intensity to generate a sense of full-scale Urban Fantasy. Working name of US author Esther Mona Friesner-Stutzman (1951- ), who began publishing stories of genre interest with 'The Stuff of Heroes' in Asimov's for September 1982, and who has remained prolific in shorter forms, with around 200 stories by the end of 2012 'Death and the Librarian' (December 1994 Asimov's) and 'A Birthday' (August 1995 F&SF) both won Nebulas for best short story.

Nobody's Prize by Esther M. Friesner