Winner of the Nebula Award for Ideal Novelette

Finalist for the Hugo, Locus, Shirley Jackson, and Sturgeon Honours

The Only Harmless Great Thing is a heart-wrenching alternative history by Brooke Bolander that imagines an intersection between your Radium Young ladies and noble, sentient elephants.

In the first years of the twentieth century, several female factory workers in Newark, NJ, slowly died of radiation poisoning. Around the same time, an Indian elephant was deliberately put to death by electricity in Coney Island.

These are the reality.

Now these two tragedies are intertwined inside a dark alternative history of trend, radioactivity, and injustice crying out to become righted. Prepare yourself for any wrenching trip that crosses eras, chronicling histories of cruelty both grand and petty searching for meaning and justice.