Incremental - Nelder Geoff

These twenty-five tales from Geoff Nelder have increment as a theme.

INCREMENT:
Noun – an increase or addition, especially one of a series on a fixed scale.
Synonyms: increase, addition, gain, augmentation, step up, supplement, addendum, adjunct, accretion, boost, enhancement.
Verb – cause a discrete increase in.
Mathematically the difference can be negative – decremental.

For example a pothole doubles in size every day, a meteorite hits the same house daily at the same time, or a heavy leather-bound book on the top shelf teeters closer to toppling at each library visit. A sound is heard all over the Earth, but more worrying, it gets louder each day. A couple of astronauts crash land on an ocean planet (apparently) and incrementally sink.

A few stories are more mental than incremental, you’ll see.

Some of the stories have won awards and have been published before, but most of the wordage is new and drawn together for a common theme. I do not apologise for the mix of genres in this collection. I write as the muse takes me and only afterwards am I asked, is it hard SF, bizarre, horror? You have a smorgasbord of fantasy, science fiction and speculative in your hands.