Four Tales
of Fantasy & Science Fiction

Immig's Work 
A cultured people up against a predator

The Sweet Teeth of God 
A Nepalese boy eaten up by ambition

Parasite of Choice 
An expert on fungi is brought in
by the White House to preserve world peace

 The Man who Died
A colony where death is illegal

fantasy/SF ~ 126 pages

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The individual stories are also available as ebooks:
Immig's Work
The Sweet Teeth of God
Parasite of Choice
The Man Who Died
Efen’s house is being eaten. Before long, it will be his turn.

In their mountain fastness, the Shunii despair.

What can their subtle culture do against such a predator?

When summer came again, so did our oppressors. After five years of these annual raids, we should have been expecting them, but we Shunii hope more blindly than most.
The ten score burrows of our settlement are a jumbled maze, dug into the slopes of a high gorge. To clamber up and down the steep, narrow streets is the price we pay for an inconspicuous vantage point....
Kathmandu

The swelling ambition of a boy

The gaping mouth of a black god

Whose hunger is the greater?

"You’re like your uncle. What a sorry excuse for a husband I got. He was so skinny he ended up breaking like the lead in a pencil. The girls like a good rounded man, they always have.'
I stared at my aunt’s appallingly satisfied smile and wondered if my uncle Jyoti really had died by snapping in two. It might have been his only answer to his wife’s taunting disparagement. A single-minded hunger strike whittling him down to the dryness of a stick, until one day....
When the President of the United States calls on Jack Knight to give his opinion on a threat to world peace, he is asking a man whose only expertise is slime moulds.

“Talk about a piece of slime.”
“Sweetheart, it’s the God’s honest truth.”
“You’re such a smartass, Jack, I don’t know why you didn’t think of it before. So let me read that back: you’ll be working overtime at an undisclosed location on a project that you cannot divulge without going to jail. In fact, you can’t tell me anything at all." Except you might have to go away suddenly. It’s so neat and sweet you could wrap it up and tie a ribbon on it...."
In the colony, death is a thing of the past.

So when a loaded gun turns up, Police Chief Gast orders Dr Judith Waugh to find out who could be behind it.

Before the unmentionable happens.

But for the cake, Mo Gudmundson would have died a happy man. He had reached the tidy age of three hundred, it was his birthday, and just for once he was jolliness itself. To the whooped-up music, people clapping and dancing, he had leapt up onto the table, kicking off plates and cutlery, his friends and family shouting out, laughing. Just as he was about to do something extraordinary, contentment already written in his eyes....