Pax Liminalis

Life changes at the edges - where certainty begins to fracture, where memory refuses to remain buried, and where the future arrives without warning.

In Pax Liminalis, Ronald McGuire explores the fragile thresholds between the ordinary and the extraordinary, the familiar and the deeply unsettling. Blending literary fiction with speculative, philosophical, and occasionally darkly satirical elements, this collection inhabits the liminal spaces where identity shifts, reality bends, and transformation becomes unavoidable.

A generation ship carries far more than its passengers across the stars. A lottery winner discovers that sudden fortune may conceal something far more dangerous than opportunity. A plane crash in the wilderness brings help from a mysterious guide who may not belong to any map. A student uncovers truths that refuse to stay buried, while survivors - of accidents, of history, of trauma, and of themselves - struggle to understand what remains after life changes irrevocably.

Influenced by the speculative imagination of Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, and Robert Heinlein, the philosophical storytelling traditions of Rod Serling and The Twilight Zone, and the satirical and existential sensibilities of Kurt Vonnegut, Douglas Adams, and Philip K. Dick, Pax Liminalis moves fluidly between science fiction, literary fiction, social commentary, and quiet horror.

These stories are not concerned solely with technology, mystery, or the unknown, but with the human beings forced to confront them. Fathers and sons, lovers, strangers, survivors, and wanderers find themselves standing at moments of transition where the boundaries between past and future, self and memory, truth and illusion begin to blur.

At times haunting, reflective, absurd, and unexpectedly hopeful, Pax Liminalis is a collection about the search for meaning in uncertain places - and about finding moments of peace in the midst of profound change.