Smaller Than Most is a startling blend of bizarre sci-fi, abstract surrealism and twisted fairytales.
Excerpt:
Jack’s House
In Jack’s house, every thing could happen. The old fashioned tub once contained an ocean which bled through the edges of the continents. Racing against the time elements, Jack tried to delay the Ice Age, only to be disappointed by a malfunctioning thermostat in the living room. He put in a lot of quirky creatures inside his house to see if they could last the whole night through. He hung a moon and a couple of stars in the ceiling, made some adjustments with the orbit to simulate the tides in the planet-size Jacuzzi, and gave a blessing to his creatures to have a great night out. One thing led to another and Jack was not disappointed that they helped themselves to doing the whole reproduction thingy.
The volcanoes in the kitchen were messy and killed a lot of his creatures. He had to plant strange-looking plants which the wooly mammoths ate. The human species ate the mammoths, the ever-reliable bacteria ate the humans, and the newborn humans ate the bacteria. He had himself a grand conversion cycle running only from his refrigerator engine. So far, the humans only figured out as far as the indestructible nature of matter and energy. He unconsciously sighed. Such indestructibility was one of the hardest facts of life. That meant if you jogged two miles every day for the rest of your life, you might burn some fat here and there, but the fat would always come back to haunt you in one form or another.
In the guest room, every one evolved into something else. Jack always beamed on top of the stairs while watching the spectacle he once conceived from a series of permutations he had run from the computer in the den. The only sad part was that some of the poor creatures could not catch up with the changes in the temperature of the air-conditioner, the radiation from the light fixtures, and the impact of meteorites passing through the roof that they became extinct.
The creatures all died from a plague, a disease concocted artificially by the most dominant creatures in the house. The last time he peeked through the keyhole from the roof, he saw that nothing was left alive except some viable spores of bacteria.
Jack’s house was built as a part of a trial run. Undaunted, he swore that next time it would be different. He would start with some dark matter here and there, puff enough hydrogen for the glow-in-the-dark sun, and patch the black holes in the ceiling with cosmic glue.
