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!

(words by Martha Bonds, music by Marcia McCombe)

Do I know you?
Are you dreaming of tomorrow?
If so, it seems you're a starchild, just like me.
The night's alive,
And we travel 'cross the light years,
TV screens and books of dreams can set us free.

Blurb: A fan (filk) song about how fans find meaning, joy, and other worlds through Star Trek.

Why is it worth your time?: It's an old fandom song about finding home and new worlds in the fictional. Definitely worth a listen to, for any fiction folk around!

Plural/1+ Tags: abuse not mentioned, creator speaks from experience, otherworld, fictioneers

Content Warnings: None

Accessibility Notes: I will post the lyrics in the comments! Otherwise, it is only available in The Complete Omicron Ceti III Lyric Book (not screenreadable) and the record album Only Stars Can Last.

(full title: Weird Heroes Vol. 5: Doc Phoenix: the Oz Encounter. The much-later 2005 hardback reprint just called it the Oz Encounter, which was sensible.)

"We all have dreams and nightmares, Mr. Wentworth, and as we dream our thoughts are as starkly real to us as anything we face while awake. Your daughter is lost in what resembles an extremely deep dream, and for reasons we don't understand yet she refuses to leave her fantasy behind. Perhaps the dream is a pleasant one, something too tempting to vacate, or perhaps it's a nightmare, one which is keeping your daughter its prisoner. We don't know, but we can find out, through my special methods."

Blurb: Doc Phoenix, a superpsychologist dream-diver, enters the mind of a comatose girl and finds a strange land based on famous Oz stories. What is keeping her in her coma? And who is trying to sabotage him and his team?

Why is it worth your time?: This is a self-declared pulp novel, and it embraces that genre. Deep art it is not, but it is entertaining and well-planned out! Doc Phoenix has to adapt to the dreamworlds of the people he enters without losing himself, and the figures within the dreamworlds are shown to be surprisingly independent. (Doc Phoenix remarks on how the Tin Man in particular seems surprisingly adult, considering he resides in the mind of a ten-year-old girl, and the Tin Man even tells Doc at one point that he needs to tell the girl something that they both know but she does not, because "I think she has a right to know." Doc respects that request and does so.) The conclusions were satisfying, and the idea of a hero who works to rescue people's minds from the inside out is a pretty great premise! If you just want a fun, humble adventure, this is worth a shot.

Plural Tags: abuse low-focus, bodyhopping, identityblending, otherworld, dreamfolk, fictioneers (specifically Ozians, including the Shaggy Man and the Tin Man), realitymashing, friendship, enmity, teamwork

Content Warnings: contain spoilers; see comments

Access Notes: Got reprinted in 2005 to my surprise (in hardcover, even!), but that newer edition is harder to find. It has been digitized on archive.org though!

Misc Notes: Don't be fooled by the title; this book stands perfectly well on its own, and it was the only Doc Phoenix book. (They were clearly hoping for a series, very obviously leaving one loose thread to deal with later, but it never happened.) "Weird Heroes" was a brand imprint, and Doc Phoenix first appeared in a short story, "Doc Phoenix," in Weird Heroes vol. 2 (an anthology). I haven't read that appearance (yet) but had no trouble reading Oz Encounter on its own.

"ARTICLE III: The man going by the name Brother Francis is charged with claiming to have begun life miraculously, without father or mother, in the body of a boy about thirteen years of age."

Blurb: An epistolary short story about the fall and rise of Brother Francis/Leopold Graz, who in a post-nuclear apocalypse preached brotherhood and kindness: condemned, burned alive, and then beatified... at a cost.

Why is it worth your time?: Pangborn is a kind writer who tells the story of a boy, his invisible Companion who urges him to great things, and the major front switch that occurs when he is thirteen, which leads to his fall and rise under the pseudo-feudal fundamentalist church afterward. It's pretty good!

Plural Tags: abuse not mentioned, switching, serially singlet, spiritual voices, visions

Content Warnings: contain spoilers; see comments

Access Notes: Only officially available on paper, but anthologized multiple times; one of them, Still I Persist in Wondering, is screenreadable on archive.org. (Please ignore the pulpy cover.) Available in German and Italian.

Submitted by acorn_squash! Thank you, acorn_squash!

“Seeing is believing in the things you see
Loving is believing in the ones you love!”

Blurb: A sweet song about being friends with a unicorn, the northern star, and someone who lives inside of you.

Why is it worth your time?: It’s cute and it’s about love!

Plural Tags: abuse not mentioned, imaginary friends, nonhumans [unicorn, celestial body/northern star in English, flying elephant, moon and stars in Cantonese], friendship

Content Warnings: Discussion of facing ableism and lack of understanding, which is shrugged off immediately. This is a happy song!

Accessibility Notes: The audio and lyrics are available for free on the singer’s website. The songsheet is $5. Also, in 1984, this song got covered and adapted in Cantonese by George Lam, with the title San Ren Xing/三人行! You can listen to it and see the lyrics both in Chinese and English here!

"The woman who tells her life in the following pages is a Korean shaman [mansin], one who invokes the gods and ancestors, speaks with their voice, and claims their power to interpret dreams and visions."

Blurb: The anecdotes and life stories told by Yongsun's Mother, a mansin who lives outside Seoul.

Why is it worth your time?: Despite its academic source, this book is very readable, namely transcriptions of the stories Yongsun's Mother tells about herself in casual conversation or at work. There's a lot of possession stuff (her deceased husband has just as fractious a relationship with her while dead as he did while alive) that's very different from American norms!

Plural Tags: abuse intermediate-focus, the dead, nonhumans (gods, spirits), relationships of family and enmity, spiritual, voices, visions (dreams), possession

Content Warnings: Domestic violence in the past, and results of the Korean War--starvation, the torturing to death of a spy, and Yongsun's Mother got taken for a spy as a teenager, starved, interrogated, and marched north until she escaped. The war stuff is all in Chapter Four (aptly named "War Stories and a Meeting with the Mountain God"), the DV all over. Yongsun's Mother's familial relationships have always been complicated.

Access Notes: Paperbacks are pretty cheaply available for a few bucks secondhand; the ebook is only available for $149 for some unfathomable reason, which is highway robbery. This is a rare case where we recommend pirating it off Library Genesis instead.

Misc Notes:

"Well we all have a face
That we hide away forever
And we take them out and show ourselves
When everyone has gone
Some are satin some are steel
Some are silk and some are leather
They're the faces of the stranger
But we love to try them on"

Blurb: Five minute song about the sides of ourselves we hide from others, and being surprised by a loved one's own "stranger." Like all the other songs listed here, easy enough to interpret in a singlet way as well.

Why is it worth your time?: It's good. Moody and noir-ish, with the air of a rainy city street. Also, it's so old, you can find it near anywhere.

Plural Tags: switching