Colliding Galaxies

When galaxies collide in outer space, nothing much happens for a very long time. That’s because galaxies are mostly empty space.
Yet when galaxies collide, and dust gets stirred up, strange and violent things do occur, given enough time. Dust clouds collapse. Gravity builds up. Matter gets compressed. Before you know it, the thing ignites. A star is born. And it burns hot and bright for billions of years.
Words are like that too…whether on a piece of paper or arrayed as bits on a disk. When put together the right way, words get compressed. They ignite. Light and heat follow. Readers exposed to all this find new ideas, like new elements, bubbling to the surface. Illumination follows.
My hope is that something like this will happen while you’re reading the stories gathered in this collection. Something sparks. Boom! A new idea…something you never thought of before pops into your head. I’m not content just to entertain or divert you from your troubles for a few hours, though there’s nothing wrong with that. I want to start a fire in your head. I want to slam atoms together, compress them and create something new…a whole new world.
I’m leery of themes in story collections. If there’s any theme in Colliding Galaxies, it’s that they were all written by the same writer. Here, you’ll find a strange bunch of people, ostensibly normal in their backgrounds: an architect, a detective, a kid with a life-threatening disease, a physicist and a group of nursing home residents—but all of them eventually get smashed into new realities like planets pulled into a black hole. Here, you’ll find angels, aquadapts, atomgrabbers and archeologists, each drawn to their own personal event horizons, some wide-eyed and eager, some fighting all the way.
What I’m trying to say is that free will ain’t what it used to be.