It’s astonishing sometimes what happens at conferences and conventions. Last year at When Words Collide, Derryl Murphy and Five Rivers’ Editor-in-Chief, Robert Runte, sat down over beverages and convivial company. The result of that meeting is a rebirth for Derryl Murphy’s first collection of short stories, Wasps at the Speed of Sound.

There are eleven stories in this collection, ten of them gathered together for the first time and one making its début  All of them examine our experience with the worlds around us, anticipating dread and disaster with every turn, even while hope is sometimes allowed to win out. Come witness: the destruction of the Earth; an alien tourist and the death of a species; Earth at the end of time, coming back from a very long trip; a man and his father, lost in time; sailing on seas of garbage; an insect rebellion; a virtual future that creates an unrealistic past; water, politics, and a big machine; monkey-wrenching taken to a new level; lessons in photography; and rebellion on a distant world. Eleven stories that take you into the future even as you wrestle with the present.

Derryl Murphy is the author of the Aurora-nominated urban fantasy/hard science fiction novel Napier’s Bones, the collection Over the Darkened Landscape, and the novella (with William Shunn) Cast a Cold Eye. It is often cold where he lives with his wife and sons and dog.