The Stories of Denizens of Distant Realms
Denizens of Distant Realms is a brief collection, with only six short stories. All of these stories have stuck with me over the years, though, and I’ve even recently been writing another story that fits into the same tangentially shared world of these six stories.
If these stories were placed in chronological order, I think they’d be something like this:
“We Have Not Always Been Small” is definitely the first chronologically, as it references a time when cats didn’t exist. It also spans a large chunk of time, as there’s a frame story that happens long after the events of the story itself.
“Dry Spell” is probably the next story in chronological order, though it also takes place in a colony of an older place, and that distance and remove from the mainland impact its culture and technology.
After that, “Catch,” “Stormbringer,” and “The Cobbler’s Daughter” could all be vaguely contemporaneous with one another. I think at one point, I had the idea that “Catch” took place much earlier than “Stormbringer,” but that’s not necessarily the case. They could just as easily be contemporaneous on different landforms.
The last of the stories, chronologically within this shared world, though, is definitely “A Dark Place,” which has vestiges of science and technology that don’t exist in the chronologically earlier stories.
Of course, this isn’t the story order in the book, and they can really be read in whatever order you prefer!
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