S = k log W: and other stories

Benjamin C. Kostival
Wed, 29 Apr 2026 13:46:40 PDT

The short stories in this collection explore how work and ideas affect human freedom. This exploration takes place in some context of collapse - economic, philosophical, and sociological. Conflict arises from the protagonists' struggles to extricate themselves from feelings of entrapment and powerlessness. The collection also claims science as legitimate literary subject matter. The text directly includes mathematics in an attempt to employ western literature's last unused language for its metaphorical import. Structurally, the two sections are composed of equal numbers of stories of virtually equal length, suggesting parity between the scientific stories of the first section and the more traditional stories of the second. Moreover, the order of the stories is determined by a 'mirrored resolution' aesthetic in that each story of the second section resolves its conflict similarly to its pair in the first.