Fiction Offerings and Samples

In honor of the opening, on the site of the grocery store where I have shopped for almost a quarter of a century, the largest Kroger's Marketplace in the country, I give you my vision of what these mega-stores will soon become, in Just Bread, Milk, and Eggs.

In honor of 2012, the year that the world is supposed to end, I bring you this story I wrote in the nineteen-eighties, Fire and Ice. This story came from a dream, and marks the end of an era: that time when we thought that nuclear war would be survivable by people, even if civilization itself died. Post-apocolyptic stories were common, tales of survivors who crept from their shelters after a few tense weeks to start afresh. In the real world, our schools and churches were marked by signs telling people that this was a fall-out shelter, this was a place with stocks of processed cheese food and a slightly sturdy ceiling. True, they offered no greater protection from a nuclear bomb than the flimsy school desk we were supposed to crouch under, but we told ourselves that we would live. And then came Dr. Alverez and his announcement of the iridium layer, and we all saw that while a nuclear bomb attack might be survivable, the aftermath would be deadly.

The Rainbow Border: a classic (1988) fan fiction story where I sent Miles Vorkosigan to Oz.

The New Students: Miskatonic University has some new students, a strange English trio known as Harry, Ron, and Hermione. (Harry Potter -- H.P. Lovecraft Crossover, no slash!)

Heartmagic: A young man learns the hard way not get involved with the erong kind of magic user--one more interested in her own pleasure than other people. This early story introduces the main character of the Wizardland Stories--which will be coming out any year, any decade, now...