Shards is an Anthology of collected works that define a decades-long career of a South African Speculative Fiction author, where each short story originates in a different decade and collected side-by-side serves to track the development of the author's hallmark Voice. Shards reflect the earliest works in these four decades.This collection includes the Short Stories: The Tale of Arc1 and Core 3: Is the Tale of an Advanced Civilization following their science through to a startling conclusion; that their Universe is not alone. All the Bright Children: In all the worlds of humanity, greed, cruelty and excess seem to be a constant. On the verge of manhood, a boy relates his experience with these human constants. Shards: War is hell. Sometimes when you think you are done with it, it has not done with you. How do you return from a war that everyone else is done with? The Garden Sea: A familiar Tale delivered with a slice of oddness and a twist of whimsy. Who knows where some of our most enduring myths actually come from? Swan and Song: A Novella about a quest to find a Black Swan, and what this means to two staff members of the Numinous Constraint Agency. Shards represents the best of Caldon Mull's short works at the beginning of each new decade and is the first volume in the 'Smithereens' format series for this type of work. Caldon Mull is the pen name of a veteran storyteller with African continent-spanning work experience consulting for the financial and military sectors. His work includes his primary series the 'Sol Senate Cycle' and his time-tripping fantastika series 'Agency Tales'. His fiction work has received 'honorable mention' over the years beginning with the 1986 Writers of the Future contest and from the SFSA Nova Award over later decades. He has been published in Omenana, RPGA Network, the SFSA Probe and several other, now-defunct local publications. He has been a shortlist nominee for the Nommo Award by the African Speculative Fiction Society on occasion. He is most comfortable writing Genre-bending work that follows the form of his african storytelling heritage. He currently is resident in Finland with his wife and many cats. The Smithereens are Collections of Short Fiction and Novellas spanning four decades of work, one from each decade through the compilation volumes. The range of Caldon Mull's work through his Genre-hopping career spans Speculative Fiction, Science Fiction, Literary Fiction, New Weird, Urban Fantasy, Transgressive Fiction and any number of slipstream works.
