Fiction
Novellas
Miranda in Milan
Winner of the Golden Crown Literary Society Award for Science Fiction and Fantasy
On Locus Magazine's 2019 Recommended Reading List and the Nebula Award Suggested Reading List
One of Fantasy Literature's Favorite Books of 2019
Finalist for the Golden Crown Literary Society Awards in two categories: Debut Novel and Science Fiction/Fantasy
“Intriguing, adept, inventive and sexy.” ―NPR
“This luxurious tale gives Miranda a path to self-discovery, wrapped in the dark magic and manipulations on display in the original play. Duckett turns this secondary character into a heroine on her own journey for truth.”
―Library Journal, starred review
“Picking up where Shakespeare's The Tempest left off, this brief, potent gem paints a complete portrait of Prospero's daughter―her past, her future, and her love―as it explores the full range of her voice. A glittering fantasy-romance that delves into the dark corners of human nature.” ―Booklist
Guest Editing
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Guest Fiction Editor for the Disabled People Destroy Fantasy issue of Uncanny Magazine
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Two stories from the issue were selected as favorite reads of the year in the Uncanny Magazine 2019 Favorite Fiction Poll. Sarah Gailey's "Away With the Wolves," which is also nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Novelette, was the #1 favorite story of the year, and Karlo Yeager Rodríguez's "This is Not My Adventure" was ranked #5.
I wish I could spend all my time as a wolf. But my mother always told me that I mustn’t indulge myself too often. She taught me that escaping into my other self is lazy. It’s selfish, she said, and there’s always a price to pay for selfishness. —"Away With the Wolves" by Sarah Gailey
Novelettes
"The Potential Man"
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Appeared in Greater Than His Nature: Twenty Tales of Mad Science, edited by Eirik Gumeny, published by Atomic Carnival Books, October 2023
In every laboratory, every experiment, there are two diametrical energies at play: chaos and control. The raw pandemonium of what is, and the diamond-sheen of what could be. And in between? Blood, bones, and broken hearts. Because no equation, no solution, will ever be able to contain the wild entropy of the human soul.
"Nothing But Flowers"
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Appeared in the Rebuilding Tomorrow anthology published by Twelfth Planet Press and edited by Tsana Dolichva, November 2020
What if the apocalypse isn't the end of the world? In this follow-up to Defying Doomsday, disabled and chronically ill protagonists build new worlds from the remains of the old. In "Nothing But Flowers," a community of disabled survivors must defend the thriving community on the Lower East Side of New York City they've built after disaster from the forces of greed and the lawyers who have emerged from beneath the earth to claim their hard-won home.
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Published July 2020 on Tor.com
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Featured in Some of the Best from Tor.com 2020
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On SFWA's Nebula Award Suggested Reading List
Zoe had met Henri at the office. Of course she had. It wasn’t like she went anywhere else. She’d thought Paris would be different than Arlington, Virginia, that she’d get out more, eat fabulous meals and meet fabulous people. But it was the same life against a different backdrop. She still spent most of her time hunched before a screen, combing through the sordid details of other people’s lives and tallying points to enter into the endless Ethical Empire database.
Short Stories
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Winner of CRAFT's 2022 Amelia Gray 2K Contest
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Published in April 2023 with Author's Note
“Birds x Bees” is a sharply rendered story of a teenager’s speculative curiosity at sixteen, the most painful of ages, not dissimilar to a hundred bee stings down one’s forearm. I love a story which doubles as a bit of a science experiment, backing up claims with evidence as this does, while moving deftly through a good story. But experiments aside, the protagonist’s earnest attention to the world around her is what kept my attention and stuck in my memory—that, and an ending which would absolutely meet the qualifications for Esther’s carnal taxonomy. —Amelia Gray
"The Choking Pearls"
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Appeared in the NecronomiCon Providence 2022 memento book, edited by Jordan Douglas Smith, August 2022
Here below the surface of the earth, all is tar and bone.
It’s what they’ve left us. Or it is the last of what we’ve kept: our ruined legacy, the reward for our slew of failed civilizations and a reminder of the eras when our bodies were considered more than resources to be harvested. We were people, back then: at least at times. At least to one another, in our enlightened moments. Now, to the drifting scavenge-ships that patrol the skies, sinking down to probe the layers of vitrea and aquea beneath the terra, we are only fodder.
"Gimme Sugar"
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Appeared in Sharp & Sugar Tooth: Women Up to No Good, edited by Octavia Cade and available from Upper Rubber Boot Press (March 2019)
“I don’t know what made me go. I think it was the smell. It smelled like — like cinnamon. And
oranges. And honey — like honey warmed in the sun, somehow? Fresh. And like...like Jesse. I realized it smelled...like Jesse. Not how she smelled in bed, or when she came back from the gym, but how she would have smelled if I’d tried to bake her into a cake. Essence of Jesse.” She laughed, a strangled sound. “Does that sound insane? I don’t know anymore. But that’s what it was.”
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Appeared in Issue #24 of Uncanny Magazine in September/October 2018
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Part of Uncanny's Disabled People Destroy Science Fiction double issue
Under cover of night, our village moves across the steppe.
Aliya leads the way. Her whistle is high and in harmony with the wind, so an untrained ear would ignore the sound. But we, the hushed and listening herd, heed the falconer’s call for what it is. Aliya trained golden eagles long before the invaders came, and her flock travels with us still.
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Episode 610 of PseudoPod (August 2018), narrated by Larissa Thompson
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PseudoPod Listeners' Fan Favorite Story of the Year
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Translated into Chinese in Science Fiction World: Translations
We go to Grandmère’s house to ride the unicorns.
We only go once or twice a year, and it’s never enough. Riding the unicorns is the most fun a person could have, and I don’t know why we can’t do it every day.
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Appeared in Issue #22 of Uncanny Magazine in May/June 2018
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Read an interview with Caroline M. Yoachim about this story
Call me lamia, call me lilith, call me nightmare, slattern, slut. I don’t subscribe to labels. I’ve moved around, through many lives, and they’ve always invented new names for me.
When I care to name myself, “succubus” does just fine. It started out as a joke among our little group, the girls who have been doing this job for eons, and it stuck. When I tell you my name, the first time we meet, it’s always one I’ve cherry-picked for you.
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Appeared in Issue #103 of Apex Magazine in December 2017
The problem, of course, is that the world ended.
She’s lying in her bed, staring at the sloping scribbles on the ceiling. Downstairs, the party continues as ever. Voices rise from the parlor at all hours of the night, beckoning her with wild words she can’t quite make out. She needs to sleep, because tomorrow, she’s decided, is the day she’ll leave. Well rested, free of obstacles, she’ll walk out the front door: back into the world. Tomorrow. Tomorrow she’ll see things clearly.
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First appeared in Interzone 252 in May 2014
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Reprint in Wilde Stories 2015: The Year's Best Gay Speculative Fiction, Lethe Press
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Reviewed in Publisher's Weekly
Tem loved the mortuaries, though no one he knew was dead. Still he would beg to go, to grasp the hand of any adult willing to wind down those plush-carpeted stairways, past the sleek vaults, inviting and bright.
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2012 Story of the Year, Apex Magazine
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First appeared in Issue #40 of Apex Magazine in September 2012
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Available in The Book of Apex: Volume 4 of Apex Magazine, edited by Lynne M. Thomas and The Best of Apex: Volume I, edited by Jason Sizemore and Lesley Connor
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Recommended by Lois Tilton in Locus Online Reviews
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Adapted for the stage by Daniel Flores Dance, New York City
To be trapped in one life–even a good one–suddenly seemed a horrible thing.