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Lonely and Precocious
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Book 1 of 3 in the "If The World Ended" series:
Lonely and Precocious - Loving and Precarious - Logical and Preposterous
Lonely and Precocious: A Short Story Collection
("The really autistic and science-fictiony one.")
People grow on trees. Diplomats from another planet negotiate through sculpture. An angel screws up, and a sixteen-year-old mutant runs away.
This was originally a collection called If the World Ended, Would I Notice? and Other Stories.
It was published in 2013. The name comes from one of the stories in the original version, a story that I wrote during a time when I lived very much in my own little world. So much that, if the outside world had ended during those years, I just might have failed to notice right away.
I've grown as a writer, branching out into many genres. My first published book, in 2003, was a memoir about my childhood. My second was a collection of strips from my webcomic, and my third was a science fiction novel co-authored with my partner.
And through it all, I have come to realize that I'd like my short stories to be more people's introduction to my work.
So I'm republishing If the World Ended, Would I Notice? and Other Stories as three books: Lonely and Precocious, Loving and Precarious, and Logical and Preposterous.
They are a nebulous pool of stories, tied together only by the weirdness that seems to define my life. They all have some element of the strange and outlandish. Science fiction mingles with fantasy. Some stories blur the lines between the two, and their borders with realism.
But I have made a gentle effort to separate them into three thematically distinct volumes.
The book you're reading now is called Lonely and Precocious. It explores the lives of various beings who are kindred spirits to my long-ago self, uncertain to notice the end of the world. They live in their own worlds: failing to notice, struggling to notice, noticing in unique ways, or sometimes just choosing not to notice, what the World Outside is up to.
These stories do not all deal with the end of a world, but they all feature worlds that are deeply transformed from the one we know. And each one faces the specter of an end, to be faced or averted, whether it's the end of the story's world or just the end of a character's worldview.
The second volume is Loving and Precarious. Please take a look, if you're interested, after you've read this one.
After all, every work of fiction is an alternate-universe story. Not just the science fiction, and the fantasy, and the histories where major wars went differently. Even the most believable of realistic fiction tells of events that never actually happened in this universe.
The difference is only that realism tells stories that might, as far as you know, have happened. The definition of the genre depends on your knowledge base. If you were omniscient, no story would seem like realism. If you had lived hidden in one room your whole life, any story might be realism to you.
This book isn't a world; it's many worlds, many alternate universes. Some of those worlds end with the stories. Others are larger wholes, with beginnings and ends elsewhere. Whenever a universe ends, another one begins. Welcome to my world.
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