Fantastical

Fantastical: a short story collection.

I'm known for science fiction and, generally, that work is what ends up as a book or in some story collection. But as over the years I scrabbled around to find my opening I also wrote fantasy, contemporary and stuff that doesn't comfortably take any label. This stuff has been mouldering on my hard drive for years and I thought it time to scrub up the stories and put them out there.

However, it concerned me that some of those stories were a bit duff. Publish them anyway, cried the readers, either out of genuine interest or eager to see me fall flat on my face. Some stories were duff, but I have rewritten and edited them into functionality, I think – there are a few here about which I have my doubts. The one about a twenty-something wannabe artist running away with elves still makes me cringe.

I also said I would write waffly introduction to each. Do more waffle, the readers cried, so I did. I have here included the three Mason's Rats stories mainly because the booklet on Amazon is too small to print and only available on Kindle. The first of these, along with a bit of the second, are what some of you saw in Love, Death & Robots on Netflix. Bad Travelling is here too, along with two further stories from that world.

I've called this collection Fantastical because thought you'll find fantasy here, there's other stuff. I mean, what is Mason's Rats? Is it fantasy or simple extrapolated science fiction? What is Bad Travelling for that matter, with its harpoons of ship metal and modified sea life about the islands?

Enjoy. . .