This is the way the world ends. That could’ve been the name
of this book.
Most of the stories I write start as fragmented visions and
ideas, birthed by a dream. As soon as I wake, the dreams begin to crumble and
fall apart like clouds shredded by the wind What remains is little more than a
seed, a small, fragile thing that might, with a little imagination, become a
story. That’s how the Strange Stories II collection came about.
Strange Stories II is a book of three stories, two of them about
possible climate crisis scenarios. Both are rather long for a short story. If
word count counts (and I’m not sure it does), they are almost, but not quite, long
enough to for us to call them novellas.
The climate change tales are stories of how the world ends
told by one person who lived through it all. Reading science articles about the
climate crisis, the ways it might kill the world, sparked a dream that, in turn,
became the seeds of a story.
The scenarios examined here are remote and almost certainly
will never happen. Still, the idea of very rapid global warming or an unknown
virus emerging from a frozen sleep as the permafrost thaws were just too good
to pass up.
Strange Stories II - The Empty Earth