Fluctuation in Disorder 2023

An encounter with an alien enemy. A strange epiphany in a fog-bound park. A collector of the names of the dead faces their own death. Rebel divinities respond to the prayers of des-pairing creation for deliverance. Bureaucrats find their grip on reality dissolving in odd ways. In these ten finely crafted and unsettling stories, Maxwell's slipstream style interweaves strands of naturalism, science fantasy, and the experimental irreal, illuminated by sharp flashes of wit and language of lyrical precision. Many of the characters exist in a state of slippage, alienated from a world they thought they knew by an encounter with something that is indifferent to them, but to which they cannot remain indifferent. More than twenty years separate the earliest and the most recent of the stories in this collection, but certain persistent preoccupations provide loose thematic links-environmental crime and retribution; the ways, both overt and insidious, in which institutions can corrupt or sacrifice those within them; the interpretations and recording of past events by unreliable narrators; and the pervasive, irreducible weirdness of existence.