My short stories allow me to explore ideas outside the world I built in the House Next Door Trilogy and the Recoverist Quartet. They are, perhaps, darker in tone overall and touch on themes such as the neural internet, life extension technologies, the impact of technology on democracy, the increasing digitisation of medicine, and climate change.

‘An Object Misplaced in Time’ explores a future where humans have evolved into fully digital beings to such an extent that they are questioning whether they are human any more.

Routledge published this story at the end of 2023 in Mapping the Posthuman. This book works to delineate some of the major routes by which science and art intersect. Structured according to the origin myths of the posthuman that continue to shape the idea of the human in our technological modernity, this volume gives space to narratives of alter-modernity that resonate with Ursula K. Le Guin’s call for a new kind of story which exposes the violence and exploitation driven by a sustained belief in human exceptionalism, anthropocentrism, and cultural superiority. In this context, the posthuman myths of multispecies flourishing given in this collection, which are situated across a range of historical times and locations, and media and modalities, are to be thought of as kernels of possible futures that can only be realized through collective endeavour.

I regularly contributed to the Virtual Futures Future Fiction Salon for a while. The idea was to bring together writers and scientists to explore the implications of scientific and technological innovation for human lives. The stories were short and written for performance. A number of the events were filmed.

Three of my stories were published in Virtual Futures collections.

Versions of the Future is a collection of short stories inspired by a collaboration between science fiction authors and scientists from the Human Brain Project and the Bristol Robotics Lab. The authors were me, Stephen Oram and Allen Ashley and the scientists included Professor Allen Winfield, Marta Palau Franco and Dr Antonia Tzemanaki. We spent a day with the scientists, discussing their work and touring the lab. The authors then went away and wrote stories based on what we saw. Marta’s involvement particularly inspired me in ERL Emergency Robots  – a civilian, outdoor robotics competition focusing on realistic, multi-domain emergency response scenarios. Rescue robots. My story imagines a near future scenario where robots may be used to good effect to rescue people after a terrorist attack. After the authors had written their stories, we got together again at the Bristol Literary Festival to read out what we’d written and discuss in front of a live audience

‘Doggerland’ in Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction 60: Volume 60 is a story set in the far future in a world where people live apart from nature for their own protection.

‘Castle Under the Water’ in Another Place, a collection of sci-fi stories, with all profits going to the Alf Dubs Children’s Fund. A boy orphaned by war discovers a consoling dream in a picture book, which leads him to adventure and to discover that his world is not quite that it seems.

‘Drunk God’ imagines a planet controlled by an ancient space station, an alcoholic astronaut and a frustrated AI.