There Is Only Us: Volume 21 (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781574418804)

The eight stories of speculative fiction in There Is Only Us explore themes of loneliness, connectedness, and selfhood. Each one is an act of intimacy--an altered world shown through the lens of a close relationship. Brothers, sisters, lovers, mothers, and daughters come together in myriad constellations, often so that one character can make a body-altering choice of extreme proportions. In a variety of forms--from a satirical retelling of Noah's Ark to a sister drama revolving around naked mole rats--There Is Only Us presents a series of escalating scenarios, intimate and yet absurd, that ask, how much can you change and still be you?

Ballering's stories bring to speculative fiction a new lightness and absurdity and a commitment to contemporary experiences of loneliness, especially among Millennials: loneliness during the COVID-19 pandemic, ecological loneliness (the sense that, by the end of our lives, the earth will be barren), and the unsolvable loneliness that so many experience despite carrying around a tiny device that claims it can connect them to any human anywhere on earth.