Forty Worlds
Forty stories. Forty genres. None of them the same.
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A detective dog, the fall of Constantinople, a vampire in therapy, and a chicken that outsmarts God Collection · 406 pages · Forty stories, forty genres BUY FROM INGRAMSPARKAMAZONKOBOREAD A CHAPTERTABLE OF CONTENTS Paperback ISBN 978-1-972810-30-9 · ebook ISBN 978-1-972810-31-6 |
| 406Pages | 40Stories | 40Genres | 12Age I joined the book club |
A bad paragraph in a novel is a speed bump. A bad paragraph in a short story is a wall.
from the preface
Forty stories covering more territory than most bookstores have sections. Science fiction, horror, historical fiction, comedy, magical realism, fantasy, satire, romance, mythology, and suspense, back to back, with no apology for the whiplash.
Each story comes with a short note on where it came from, so you get the story and the reason it exists. Read them in order or don’t. Start with the title that interests you, skip what doesn’t, come back later.
For readers who grew up on the Science Fiction Hall of Fame volumes and the Arbor House treasuries.
How does Forty Worlds open?
Detective Biscuit: The Neighborhood Sleuth
Humorous Fiction
I’ve always loved the idea of an unreliable narrator who doesn’t know they’re unreliable. One afternoon I was watching my neighbor’s cat stalk a squirrel with this intense, methodical focus, like a tiny furry detective working a case, and I thought: what if a cat believed it was solving crimes? The noir detective voice came naturally after that. Every cat already thinks it’s the smartest one in the room. Biscuit just happens to narrate like he’s in a Raymond Chandler novel, which, if you’ve ever watched a cat assess a situation from a windowsill, isn’t that far off.
THUD.
A perfectly ripe tomato exploded against my head, seeds and juice coating my left ear. I looked up to see Fluffball perched on Mrs. Kowalski’s garden trellis, yellow eyes gleaming with satisfaction, tail twitching in that special way that meant she’d been planning this attack for hours.
That’s it. You’re dead, Furrball.
I launched myself toward the trellis with the focused fury of a heat-seeking missile. Fluffball waited until I was exactly two feet away, the precise distance for maximum dramatic effect, before leaping to the garden shed roof.
The chase was on.
I scrambled up Mrs. Kowalski’s compost bin, using it as a launching pad to reach the shed. Fluffball was already moving, dancing along the peak like a furry tightrope walker, clearly enjoying every second of my undignified pursuit.
She leaped to the fence, then to the Hendersons’ bird feeder (sending sparrows scattering in twelve directions), then made an impossible bound to their deck railing. I followed, crashing through Mrs. Henderson’s prize marigolds and taking out a garden gnome in the process.
Come back here, you overgrown hairball!
Fluffball paused on the deck railing just long enough to knock over Mrs. Henderson’s watering can, sending water cascading directly onto my head as I bounded up the deck stairs. Then she was off again, leaping from deck to picnic table to fence post to the Rodriguez family’s swing set.
I vaulted over the picnic table (sending lawn chairs flying), caught my back paw on the swing set’s chains (very dignified), and nearly face-planted in the Rodriguez sandbox. Fluffball, meanwhile, had somehow teleported to the top of their basketball hoop, where she sat washing her paw with the casual air of someone who hadn’t just committed an act of vegetable warfare.
You can’t stay up there forever, Princess.
But even as I circled the basketball pole, plotting my next move, I’d to admit there was something almost professional about her escape route. She’d led me on a path that avoided every major obstacle while maximizing my humiliation. The water timing had been perfect. The marigold destruction was an artistic touch.
Still going to murder you, though.
From her perch fifteen feet above my head, Fluffball looked down with what I could only describe as smug amusement. “Mrow,” she said, which obviously meant something insulting about my athletic abilities.
Then she did the thing that made my blood boil: she started grooming herself. Right there. On the basketball hoop. Like she’d all day.
That’s it. War is declared.
Frank’s voice echoed across three backyards: “BISCUIT! What are you doing over there? Get back here!”
This isn’t over, Fluffball.
“Mrow mrow,” she replied, which clearly meant “Bring it on, Dog-breath.”
As I trotted back toward Frank’s yard, tomato seeds still decorating my ears, I was already planning my retaliation. Fluffball thought she was clever with her high perches and perfect timing. But she’d never faced a Golden Retriever with a strategic mind and access to Frank’s garden hose.
Game on.
Morning sun streamed through the kitchen window as I plotted my revenge, highlighting approximately seventeen thousand dust particles (clearly Frank’s fault for not dusting). Frank sat at the kitchen table, aggressively stabbing his cereal while glaring at a crossword puzzle.
“Seven letters for ‘household detective,’“ he muttered. “Sherlock? No, that’s eight.”
The answer is ‘Biscuit,’ Frank. But do you listen to helpful suggestions? No.
Also, I need to focus on more important matters. Like psychological warfare against a certain Persian cat.
That’s when I heard it: Mrs. Patterson’s voice reaching frequencies that could summon dolphins.
Perfect. A case to solve. And maybe an opportunity for strategic cat harassment.
“I CAN’T FIND MY READING GLASSES ANYWHERE!”
I looked through the window to see Fluffball perched on the fence post like a furry gargoyle, tail twitching with barely contained malice. She’d obviously heard Mrs. Patterson’s crisis and was probably planning to sabotage my investigation.
Two can play this game, Furball.
But as I headed for the door, Fluffball’s tail flicked in what I’d learned was her “incoming projectile” signal. I ducked just as a pine cone (strategically positioned earlier, no doubt) crashed into the spot where my head had been.
Oh, it’s ON.
I bounded toward the fence with murder in my eyes. Fluffball waited until I was mid-leap before hopping down to the opposite side, where she’d apparently pre-positioned Mrs. Kowalski’s garden hose.
One perfectly timed paw swipe later, I was soaked and she was perched on Mrs. Patterson’s bird bath, looking like she’d just won an Olympic medal for Advanced Canine Torment.
You want a war? I’ll give you a war. Right after I solve this case and show you how real detectives work.
I abandoned my breakfast and executed my patented “I need to go outside for totally normal dog reasons” routine. Frank, being human, required the full performance: sitting by the door, intense staring, and a small, dignified whine.
“Oh, you need to go out?” Frank shuffled over in his ridiculous slippers, the ones with holes that I’d been trying to destroy for months as a public service. “Why didn’t you just say so?”
The chapter keeps going.
Who should read Forty Worlds?
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► Behind the Book: Forty Worlds
How this one got written, what went wrong, and what got cut.
How did Forty Worlds come about?
Richard Lowe, the Writing King
When I was twelve I joined the Science Fiction Book Club, because the ad in the back of a magazine offered four books for a dollar. The first shipment was the Science Fiction Hall of Fame, volumes one through three. I read them in my bedroom in San Bernardino with a flashlight after my parents thought I was asleep.
Then I got greedy and bought everything. Westerns, romance, historical, horror. If it was a collection of short stories I wanted it. The back issues came from Art’s Book Store, a cramped place that smelled like old paper and pipe smoke and had more science fiction per square foot than most libraries. Art let you read for an hour as long as you bought something on the way out. I always bought something.
Short stories are where I started writing, and they taught me what novels couldn’t. A novel lets a weak paragraph slide because the reader is invested. A short story has no such luxury. So I decided to write forty of them, all different genres, because it looked fun. It was.
What do people ask about Forty Worlds?
Also in Collections
Forty genres, no apologies
Start with the title that interests you.
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The Chicken Who Outsmarted God
Forty Worlds
Comedy / Absurdist
This started as a joke. I was telling someone about a chicken that kept escaping its coop no matter what the farmer did. New fence, new lock, new coop entirely. The chicken found a way out every single time. I said “that chicken thinks it’s smarter than God.” Then I stopped laughing and thought: what if it was? What if there was a chicken that had somehow, through some cosmic glitch or divine oversight, been given the capacity to outthink the universe itself? The story wrote itself in one sitting, which is usually a sign that something wanted to be written and was just waiting for me to sit down and get out of the way.
On the eighth day, God rested. On the ninth day, a chicken named Bernadette escaped from a farm in rural Picardy and initiated a theological crisis that would occupy the Almighty for the next six months.
Bernadette wasn’t an exceptional chicken by any standard metric. She was a Faverolles, a French breed known for feathered feet, a mild temperament, and egg production that hovered in the “adequate” range. She lived at the Ferme de la Vielle Croix with forty-seven other chickens, two goats, a dog named Franck who was afraid of thunder, and a farmer named Gustave Dourdin who’d been raising poultry for thirty years and had never once had a chicken outsmart him.
Bernadette outsmarted him on a Tuesday.
The escape was elegant in its simplicity. Gustave had installed an automated coop door that opened at dawn and closed at dusk, worked by a light sensor. Bernadette spent three days studying the sensor, then spent the fourth day standing in front of it at 4 a.m., blocking the light from the east with her body, which delayed the door’s opening by forty-five seconds, which was long enough for her to position herself in the gap between the door and the frame at exactly the moment the mechanism engaged. She squeezed through, crossed the farmyard, and vanished into a hedgerow before Franck the dog even woke up.
Gustave discovered the escape at 6 a.m., counted his flock, came up one short, and shrugged. Chickens escaped sometimes. They were usually back by nightfall, hungry and confused. He didn’t pursue.
Bernadette was neither hungry nor confused. She was, for the first time in her life, free, and she intended to stay that way.
God noticed on the third day.
This requires some explanation. God, in the cosmology relevant to this story, wasn’t the bearded patriarch of Renaissance ceilings or the abstract principle of process theology. God was a middle-management deity in a department that handled livestock, a sub-office within the larger Bureau of Animate Creation, which itself was a division of the Ministry of Everything. God’s proper title was Assistant Coordinator for Domestic Poultry, Western Europe, and his name was Sheldon.
Sheldon had been managing chickens for approximately four thousand years, and in that time, no chicken had ever, to his knowledge, showed problem-solving behavior sophisticated enough to defeat an automated door mechanism. Chickens weren’t supposed to solve problems. Chickens were supposed to eat, lay eggs, avoid foxes (with mixed success), and provide humanity with a reliable source of protein. They were designed for function, not intelligence. Sheldon had written the specs himself.
“Something’s wrong with Chicken 117-Picardy-F,” he said to his supervisor, a seraph named Constance who handled all of Western European agriculture.
“What’s wrong with it?”
“It escaped a mechanized containment system using observational learning and spatial reasoning.”
“Chickens don’t have spatial reasoning.”
“I know. That’s the problem.”
Constance pulled up Bernadette’s file. Standard Faverolles. Hatched March 2023. No anomalies in the genetic template. No unauthorized modifications. The chicken was, on paper, identical to every other Faverolles ever produced.
“Could be a mutation,” Constance said. “Random neural development. It happens. Remember the dolphin in the Azores that taught itself calculus?”
“That was a whale. And we contained it.”
“Same principle. Find the chicken, scan its neural architecture, and if there’s an anomaly, correct it.”
“I can’t find it. It’s gone.”
“It’s a chicken. In rural France. How far could it have gone?”
Seventeen kilometers, as it turned out. Bernadette had crossed two farms, a national road, a canal, and a stretch of forest that would have been challenging for a human hiker, and was now living in the attic of an abandoned mill on the outskirts of Compiègne. She’d found a source of grain (a poorly secured feed store behind a pet shop), a source of water (the canal), and a roost that was warm, dry, and invisible from ground level.
Table of contents
Forty Worlds
- Detective Biscuit: The Neighborhood Sleuth
- The Last Candle in Constantinople
- The Quantum Widow
- Autumn at the End of Time
- AI Alzheimer
- Claude the Alien AI from Kepler-442b
- The House That Cared Too Much
- The Crimson Cleanse
- Emotional Overflow: When Androids Feel Too Much
- Murder at the Monastery Gate
- The Pianist of Titan
- Dead Letter Office, 1923 (Version 1)
- Dead Letter Office, 1923 (Version 2)
- The Girl Who Hated Miracles
- A Bullet for the President’s Ghost
- Love in the Algorithm Age
- The Fisherman’s War
- Blood on the Snow, Fire on the Ice
- The Boy Who Owned the Wind
- Dinner With the Devil’s Lawyer
- The Ballad of Route 66
- The Zero-gravity Circus
- Ashes of a Saint
- The Robot Who Couldn’t Lie (Version 1)
- The Robot Who Couldn’t Lie (Version 2)
- A Garden in Hiroshima
- Cassandra’s Last Vision
- The Dentist of Mars
- Tango in a War Zone
- The Prophet of Broken Clocks
- Silence in the Vatican Library
- The Cab Driver of Oz
- Children Under the Volcano
- The Corpse Collector’s Son
- When Atlantis Drowned Again
- A Cat Called Eternity
- Crimson Hunger
- Starlight Armada
- The Chicken Who Outsmarted God