Plural Stories

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 wa 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, 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.

Submitted by sagittaoftime! Thanks, saggitaoftime!

Blurb: The apocalypse has been cancelled, thanks to the work of scientists Hermann Gottleib and Newton Geizler (although they aren't the rockstars in the giant mecha). Then Hermann has to save Newton from bureaucracy's need to make sure he isn't going to try to get the world-destroying kaiju back, prompting them to move to a new city and start over. After everything that's happened, though, that's going to involve a lot of missteps, miscommunications, and misapprehensions.

Why is it worth your time?: Beautiful prose, accurate descriptions of the weird workings of the human brain, two friends stumbling their way through an asexual romance, it's about living through the end of the world and dealing with the mundanity of life while struggling with trauma. Its ability to pull out the raw human emotion from a summer blockbuster action movie showcases the best of what fanfiction can be. Also has so many references to various fields of science and math and philosophy such that, if you are acquainted in some depth with any of them, you will have a moment of "Hey! I know what they're referencing!"

Plural/1+ Tags: abuse: high focus, people: copies, people: the dead [i.e., copies of dead people], relationships: enmity, relationships: teamwork, type: setting-specific, type: non-switching [mostly; characters switch at two points, but it's experienced as a bug, not a feature]

Content Warnings: Per the author: "The story contains realistic depictions of neurological, physical, and bureaucratic trauma. The prose is powerful. Stop reading if it triggers you. All of that being said, like everything I write, I consider this to be a hopeful story about the ways to carry something beautiful in your heart during the darkest of times." Additionally, there's a point at which Newt goes on top of a very tall wall in an inadvisable mental state (not suicidal but like he's not Okay either), alcohol is consumed at various points, Newt can't stand the sight of the tattoos that cover most of his body, Newt and Hermann Have Issues, frequent references to past character death, horrible communication, frequent semi-graphic flashbacks but no on-screen abuse, grief, not so much ableism as being extremely frustrated with disability preventing you from climbing into a giant robot to fight kaiju, vague unhappy family relations on Newt's part... look, humanity had to fight world-destroying kaiju for twelve years, and everyone and everything is messed up from it. Newt gets nosebleeds a lot. People throw up once or twice but it's not really described. There's neurologist visits. You might think sex is about to happen but it never does and everyone's chill with that. It's life. Also Newt cuts his (and Hermann's) hand open at one point to put in a little computer chip so he can control the lights by snapping his fingers. Also Newt starts experiencing psychosis from sleep deprivation. Also coerced consent to medical procedures (off-screen), traumatic medical procedures (off-screen but the consequences make up a majority of the story). The stress of suddenly being a global superstar (mostly background, Newt's living under a rock). The AO3 tags say self-harm, I think it's in the sense of reckless behavior.

Accessibility Notes: Available on Archive of Our Own (and thus in various EPUB, HTML, and PDF formats) and on the author's website (in webpages, EPUB, and PDF; EPUB and PDF are the 2013 edition that seems to be identical to the 2025 one but I can't tell). Chapters 1 through 21 (of 28 total) are available as an audiobook here, in MP3 format. Website is mobile friendly.

Misc. Notes (if any): It also has a prequel/sequel and a prequel-sequel, which are in the process of being re-uploaded. (yes the author refers to them as that)

"I would hate it if people thought of me and Abby as one person split into two separate bodies"

"That's very human of you," Beji replied.

Blurb: Abby and Makeda were born conjoined, separated at birth by their demigod relatives at the cost of their human mother. Abby has mojo; Makeda has none, and that barrier between them has grown thicker and thicker. When their demigod father goes missing, however, Makeda will have to reconcile with her sister... and figure out her own gifts.

Why is it worth your time?: It's good! Where one self ends and another begins is a theme of this book--in Makeda and Abby's former conjoined state, in family and individual, in human and celestial. On top of all that, this story also takes place in a Caribbean culture of spirit possession!

Plural Tags: abuse low focus, identityblending, otherworld (the spirit world), nonhumans (spirits, mojo), family relationships, possession, spiritual

Content Warnings: contain spoilers; see comments

Access Notes: Available in hardback, paperback, ebook, and audiobook.