Plural Stories

"We are two very different men, with different needs and desires. Yet we share the same cell and tonight we shall leave it together. Tonight we make the break for freedom."

Blurb: Two convicts plan a jailbreak. They don't like each other, but seeing as they share a body, they have to escape together...

Why is it worth your time?: This is an interesting story of two people who don't like each other, aren't kind to each other, and yet still plan and pull off a heist together. If that's of interest, give it a shot!

Plural/1+ Tags: abuse not mentioned, cofronting, fusion/integration, teamwork, visions

Content Warnings: Contain spoilers; see comments

Accessibility Notes: This short story has been collected in New Worlds 7, New Worlds #6, Jackbird: Tales of Illusion & Identity, and the New Bruce Boston Omnibus. All are/were paper only releases, and we haven't found any bootleg digital versions or audio versions; sorry!

Submitted by acorn_squash! Thank you, acorn_squash!

[Titus] is anywhere I am. He is inside me, and my brain closes around him like hands around a warm drink. [...] And oh, I am so glad of him.

Even though no one else in the world can reach me now, he is never out of reach. Even though Time is a one-way street and it's not taking me anywhere I want to go, with Titus I can travel to and fro through Time—to the Boer War, the Indian raj, the Curragh Races, Gestingthrope in high summer, Hut Point....There was an Otes at the Battle of Hastings in 1066, you know? (I wonder if he was scared too.) From the windows of Glasstown I can see into the future as well—as far forward as my fifteenth birthday, when Titus has promised to take me to the top of the Eiffel Tower! I can't express how glad I am of him.

American Library Association blurb: Fourteen-year-old Symone's exciting vacation to Antarctica turns into a desperate struggle for survival when her uncle's obsessive quest leads them across the frozen wilderness into danger.

Why is it worth your time?: Symone, who goes by Sym, is accompanied by Titus Oates, an explorer who died in the Antarctic and now lives in her head. He and Sym are in love and he plays a critical role in her survival. Despite several close calls, he is still with Sym at the end of the story.

Plural/1+ Tags: abuse: high-focus (there's no connection between the plurality and the abuse), people: imaginary friends, people: the dead, otherworld (Glasstown), relationships: romantic, type: nonswitching

Content Warnings: Life-threatening danger. Kidnapping by manipulative adults. Murder. Emotional, financial, and occasionally physical abuse. Deeply creepy matchmaking of Sym and another teenager, Siguard. Pseudoscience. Bullying (emotional, not physical). Sym's father, now deceased, was addicted to alcohol and was violent towards Sym and her mother while not in his right mind; this is discussed occasionally. One of Sym's teenage classmates says she is dating an adult man she met on the Internet, which is also discussed occasionally. Graphic description of animal death. Illness and vomit. Drugging of side characters. Imperialist attitudes. Suicidal self-sacrifice, with some associated ableism. Misogynist character. Transmisogyny, p. 254 (American first edition).

More specific content warnings that include spoilers can be found in the comments.

Accessibility Notes: Can be found at libraries. Available in hardcover, in paperback, as an ebook, and as an audiobook on CD and cassette. Translated into Chinese, Spanish, German, French, Swedish, Catalan, and Persian.

The two editions have different subtitles. The 1996 edition is Nearly Roadkill: An Infobahn Erotic Adventure and marketed as cyberpunk, while the 2025 edition is Nearly Roadkill: Queer Love on the Run, and marketed as romance.

Karn: Question: ... ::drumroll:: Online, what *is* your "self"?
Leilia: Oh, christ, there's the question of a lifetime.
Karn: Uh huh. Why so for you?
Leilia: I really become that person online. That's the scary thing. i really believe my fiction. Used to feel bad about it, but obviously there's truth in those fictions.

Blurb: Genderfucking netizens Scratch and Winc splatter across self and identity in this cyberpunk epistolary novel, accidentally starting a global Internet strike, getting accused of high treason, and falling in love.

Why is it worth your time?: Sullivan and Bornstein are queers who used lots of their own chatlogs for this book, which depending on your feeling will be either a good thing or a bad thing. The 1996 edition especially has a lot of pontificating on the nature of self and personality on the Internet, including an exchange where the hero/ines email with a self-declared MPD multi going by "StLouis7." (They decide that they aren't that kind of multiple, but they DO have multiple genders and are exploring interesting expansions of self!) Scratch's persona of Razorfun is ESPECIALLY separate, to the point that Razorfun outright says that "it is my most primitive persona. It is where I go when in danger" and when Winc has to ask Scratch to break out of the Razorfun persona, it's stated to be both difficult and painful. If you're interested in queer cyberspace of the '90s, check it out!

Plural/1+ Tags: abuse not mentioned, creator speaks from experience, otherworld (cyberspace), fictioneers (Lt. Yar and Jadzia Dax from Star Trek), nonhumans (Dax is a Trill, Scratch mentions multiple times wishing ze was a wolf with a tail), switching, on purpose

Content Warnings: include spoilers; see comments

Accessibility Notes: Okay, so heads up, the 1996 edition and the 2025 editions of this book differ subtly but significantly! The 2025 edition just came out, and it's available in paperback, ebook, and audiobook; it's much easier to find and removed a fair bit, including stuff that really needed removal... but also a lot of the most interesting (to us) ponderings of the nature of self! It also simplified the typefaces and style, but in our opinion to the book's detriment; with all the chats, web diaries, emails, news stories, and announcements flying around, it can be easy to get lost! So the 2025 edition is smoother and simpler.

Meanwhile, the 1996 edition is rough and crunchy in a very '90s way; while the 2025 edition focuses more on gender and romance, the '96 edition pays more attention to self in general. The older edition is expensive and difficult to find these days, though it's been scanned and bootlegged online, and the first chapter is available in clean screenreadable PDF on the Wayback Machine. Take a look, compare and contrast the formatting, and pick the edition you prefer! We are grateful for reading both simultaneously, comparing the drafts side-by-side.

Submitted by quailfence! Thank you, quailfence!

Something—not a thought, but almost—flickered across her gray matter. The Smoulder, walking; looking at the faded wallpaper; feeling the flexion in her feet. And then it was a thought:

[This again?]

(Wait, were costumes supposed to remember—)

Blurb: In the future, sex worker Evie uses a technological 'costume' to help her with her job, and in particular a client of hers known as 'the company man'. But the costume has been starting to act strange recently...

Why is it worth your time?: It's good! I like how sex work is presented as just A Job in the story - not something uniquely awful but not exactly Great either. I also found the high-tech costumes to be an interesting piece of tech, and the story uses them very well

Plural/1+ Tags: bodyhopping, type:setting-specific, type:switching. Not really sure how to rate the abuse in this one??

Content Warnings: include spoilers; see comments

Accessibility Notes: Online, free, screenreadable here: https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/the-girlfriend-experience/ Back-up link here: https://web.archive.org/web/20250922133223/https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/the-girlfriend-experience/

"You, too, are tainted with the Vampire strain
The same blood surges through us both, like wine.
No wonder that our thoughts and moods combine
And merge beyond the common, earthly plane."

Blurb: One vampire joins with another to walk together through ebon nights.

Why is it worth your time?: It's an old vampire poem from a prominent lesbian about embracing difference together. It's short and free; give it a shot! The lesbianism is all subtextual, due to the time period (and Tigrina herself was closeted at the time), but if you're looking for it, it's there!

Plural/1+ Tags: abuse not mentioned, identityblending, nonhumans (vampires), intimate relationships

Content Warnings: None.

Accessibility Notes: Unless you can track down an old copy of Acolyte #10, the only place to get this poem in print is in the anthology Sisters of Tomorrow: The First Women of Science Fiction, edited by Yaszek and Sharp and published by Wesleyan University Press. Some kindly soul has digitized it on archive.org, but the OCR is so poor that I'm just posting the poem in its entirety in the comments for accessibility's sake. Back-up link (with flawed but better OCR) at fanac.com.

Misc. Notes (if any): Tigrina was one of the pseudonyms of prominent lesbian Edythe Eyde, AKA Lisa Ben, who created Vice Versa, the first queer magazine (that we know of) in the USA in the '40s. If you want the outright lesbian stuff (though nothing relevant for this catalog), check Vice Versa out here!

We dream of us. Complete and secure within ourself, requiring nothing, but desiring everything.

Blurb: A dream of merging into a greater hivemind.

Why is it worth your time?: It's short, beautiful, and surreal. Plus it's free!

Plural Tags: abuse not mentioned, dreamfolk, creator speaks from experience, identityblending, intimate relationships

Content Warnings: loss of identity

Access Notes: free to read, screenreadable, online

Misc Notes: Read online here! Back-up link here.

I come to myself and say:
I am here for you, little sister.

Blurb: A poem where a Buddhist nun reaches out to comfort her tormented younger self, embrace her pain, and transform it.

Why is it worth your time?: This poem is powerful, and one of the best, most succinct descriptions of what it feels like to descend into the abyss of youthful pain and transforming it in the present. Recommended!

Plural Tags: abuse high focus, creator speaks from experience, memory work, children

Content Warnings: contain spoilers; see comments

Access Notes: Available in the book, The River in Me: Collected Poems, available on paper and ebook. Sister Dang Nghiem has a lot of poems about dealing with pain in the past, embracing her past selves, and talking to them. The book itself is worth a read!

"Nicholas Paul is you, lad. This lovely lassie found you at once in her head, but she could not find you in person for a long time to come. So you became Nicholas."

Blurb: An adventure writer runs into her protagonist in real life... but how can this be? And what does it even mean to have life-or-death power over this poor bastard? Now they have to work together to figure out what happened.

Why is it worth your time?: This book is like a romance novel version of Stranger Than Fiction, and a lot of attention gets paid to the power dynamics of what it means to be author and character; it really, really sucks, turns out, and this is super relatable for anyone who's had similar concerns! This is a very traditional heterosexual romance, but the characters behave like decent, reasonable people and the idea is neat. If you're into Harlequin romances, this might be for you!

Plural Tags: abuse not mentioned, fusion/integration, identityblending, fictioneers, romantic relationships

Content Warnings: contain spoilers; see comments

Access Notes: This book is available on paperback, and some generous soul has bootlegged an OCR PDF of it on piracy websites. It also got a translation in Italian, astonishingly, under the title Stregati dalla luna!

Misc Notes: In the About the Author section: "Regan Forest has, for a long time, fantasized about creating a character--and then meeting him in real life. That spark generated Moonspell."

"How I came to see him is a more difficult question. For to see him there is required a certain quality, for which truthfulness is too cold a name and animal spirits too coarse a one, and he alone knows how this quality came to be in me."

Blurb: A young priest meets an invisible faun that nobody else can see, hears the voices of the landscape, and finds a happier life where he's more honest with himself, even if he has to be closeted in his congregation.

Why is it worth your time?: It's a short, sweet story about breaking free of one's repression and building bonds to the natural and otherordinary world. It's in the public domain, so free and easy to read; give it a shot!

Plural/1+ Tags: abuse not mentioned, closeting, nonhumans (fauns), intimate relationships, visions

Content Warnings: Closeting, because this is a story about a gay man before World War I.

Accessibility Notes: This short story was omnibused in The Celestial Omnibus and Other Stories, which is screenreadable thanks to Project Gutenberg! It's also been omnibused many other times and is available in paperback and hardback. Also has been translated into Dutch as "De vriend van de dominee," collected into De hemelse paardetram en andere verhalen.

Misc. Notes (if any): Forster was gay. This story is a gay story, though it can't outright say so due to the time period. But if you know what he's talking about, it's pretty clear.

Submitted by a kindly anonymous! Thank you, Anon!
 

Why would Teddy put his camera in my backpack? And when? Did he put it there on his way to--what? Meeting someone? But if the meeting was important, he would have wanted to take a picture.

 

He's but the one who put it there, Luke says.

I almost jump. I told him to go away, but he's come back.
I left it for you.
No! It's one thing for Luke to talk to me, but he can't just take off and do things. The very idea is terrifying. That's impossible, I try to tell him.
I told you--what happened to Teddy has changed everything.

Blurb: A gap in his memory the afternoon that his best friend disappears in a redwood forest has fifteen-year-old amateur photographer Ian Slater wondering about his own role in the mystery, and who he can turn to for help. To make things worse, his childhood imaginary friend, Luke, is back and very insistent that Ian needs to do something about his friend's disappearance.

Why is it worth your time?: This book is a young adult novel with a first-person perspective and plurality at its core. It's a relatively quick read and what caused us to realize that we are, in fact, a system. See content warning for more information.

Plural/1+ Tags: abuse:intermediate-focus, cofronting, type: medical, type: switching

Content Warnings: Ian as the POV character describes both past and present emotional abuse and physical neglect from his father, which he downplays for the first half of the book. His mother is both a fellow victim and an enabler. At the end, it's revealed Ian's father tried to kill his friend Teddy (and at the end tries to attack Luke when he fronts and reveals everything). A major aspect of the novel is Ian experiencing blackouts ("zoning out"), which might be disconcerting. Ian also thinks Luke is an imaginary friend, but over the course of the novel "he" realizes that "Ian" is a subsystem in a DID system, and that Luke is an independent headmate (though those exact terms aren't used. The text also implies but doesn't state that Luke is a Luke Skywalker fictive.) A teacher who helps Ian and Teddy is a former psychologist who was accused of abusing an 11-year-old client, but Ian believes him when he says that he's innocent and he does seem to have good intentions in the story.

Accessibility Notes: Can be found in print at libraries. Multiple screenreadable versions are also available on archive.org.