The Female Factory

by Lisa L Hannett, Angela Slatter

Overview

In The Female Factory, procreation is big business. Children are a commodity few women can afford.

Hopeful mothers-to-be try everything. Fertility clinics. Pills. Wombs for hire. Babies are no longer made in bedrooms, but engineered in boardrooms. A quirk of genetics allows lucky surrogates to carry multiple eggs, to control when they are fertilised, and by whom—but corporations market and sell the offspring. The souls of lost embryos are never wasted; captured in software, they give electronics their voice. Spirits born into the wrong bodies can brave the charged waters of a hidden billabong, and change their fate. Industrious orphans learn to manipulate scientific advances, creating mothers of their own choosing.

From Australia’s near-future all the way back in time to its convict past, these stories spin and sever the ties between parents and children.

Table of Contents

Introduction by Amal El-Mohtar
Vox
Baggage
All the Other Revivals
The Female Factory

Product Details

BN ID:	2940152477276
Publisher:	Twelfth Planet Press
Publication date:	10/29/2015
Series:	Twelve Planets
Sold by:	Smashwords
Format:	eBook
File size:	432 KB

About the Author

Angela Slatter is a Brisbane-based writer of speculative fiction (that’s in Australia, by the way). Over the years she’s done many things in order to avoid being a writer, including administering an MBA program and studying law – it’s hard to say which was worse. But now she’s given all that up and embraced the writerly and all it entails (poverty, depression, rejection, talking to herself, living on two-minute noodles and generally being an inveterate liar).

For some reason, she has a Masters (Research) in Creative Writing, which produced Black-Winged Angels, a short story collection of reloaded fairytales. In order to further avoid reality, she is now studying (very slowly) for a PhD in Creative Writing. During her daylight hours, she works at a writers’ centre. She has been known to occasionally teach creative writing at Queensland University of Technology. At night, she stalks the darker recesses of her (and other people’s) minds, flensing knives in hand. Except, you know, when she’s not.

Her short stories have appeared in anthologies such as Jack Dann’s Dreaming Again, Tartarus Press’ Strange Tales II, Twelfth Planet Press’ 2012, Dirk Flinthart’s Canterbury 2100, and in journals such as Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Shimmer, ONSPEC and Doorways Magazine. Her work has had several Honourable Mentions in the Datlow, Link, Grant Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror anthologies #20 and #21; and three of her stories have been shortlisted for the Aurealis Awards in the Best Fantasy Short Story category.

She is working on various short stories and two novels at the moment. Novel the First: an historical fantasy set in the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem. Novel the Second: Finbar’s Mother, a mix of Irish and Norse mythology. She is also working on ways to find more time to write and is trying to stop referring to herself in the third person because it’s just weird. She is also a graduate of Clarion South 2009 http://www.clarionsouth.org/ and the Tin House Summer Writers Workshop 2006 http://www.tinhouse.com/workshop/index.htm. In 2010, she will have two short story collections published, Sourdough & Other Stories with Tartarus Press (UK) and The Girl with No Hands & Other Tales (Ticonderoga Publications). This makes her happy.