Four Tales
of Fantasy & Science Fiction

Immig's Work 
The cultured Shunii must resist a terrible enemy.

The Sweet Teeth of God 
In Kathmandu, young Raghu is consumed by ambition.

Parasite of Choice
An expert on slime mould is called on to preserve world peace.

The Man Who Died
In a colony where death is illegal, there is a rebel.

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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?

fantasy
full-length story ~ 30 pages

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....
Raghu, a youth in tourist Kathmandu, hungers for love and success.
 
Too lightweight to win the girl of his dreams, he resolves to fatten himself up.

Not a morsel will he share, not even with the divine black Bhairab.
 
a gentle Nepalese horror story
15 pages

"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 a wife’s taunting disparagement. A single-minded hunger strike whittling him down to the dryness of a stick, until one day....
Government of the people, by the people: it might not turn out as you'd hoped.

When a reckless US president hands power to voters, they enforce religious law and launch an attack on Chinese oil fields.

While newscaster Karen Ferreira relates the alarming news on TV, her husband Jack is called in to a despairing White House.

But all Jack knows about is fungi.

near future thriller
full-length story ~ 45 pages
“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.

For client-citizens paying to be Well Forever, dying isn't just unthinkable: it's illegal.

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.

SF thriller
full-length story ~ 35 pages

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....