The ‘Spectral Futures Pentology’ title was released the other week. It contains five short, near-future speculative fiction stories that are unrelated in terms of their characters and worlds (all based on and around Earth), but they do share certain technology, ideas, and themes that are extended or modified, plus other themes that complement. This ultimately refers to the spectral aspect of the collection.
Also, I started out with the plan to write eight in total: the spectrum plus one containing ‘dark matter,’ so to speak, hence the colours on the covers. However, I’ve stopped writing fiction for the foreseeable future, so they probably won’t get written. At least, they won’t get written any time soon.
I know that readers generally don’t like short fiction, and that some would complain that each of these stories should really be novels, but that’s the style I like and the way I wanted to write them. They won’t ever get to be novels, and there was no chance of it ever happening, period.
I love short fiction (the way I wrote them here, anyway) because of the compact intensity of them and the fact that you can explore more contexts, themes and characters with the same total word count as longer works that are only of one story.