There is a sense of heightened reality to these stories; the giant octopus that threatens a small island town in the opening story assumes mythical proportions, and an advertising executive makes an oil spill miraculously disappear in ‘Slick’. Many stories are set in a disturbingly recognisable future.

Low deals with issues of real moral substance: the effects of mining, global warming, drone strikes. He has a knack of approaching these sobering subjects with humour and whimsy. His characters can laugh, even in the face of their demise; on the brink of an apocalypse, one character quips, ‘Life kept getting worse, and we kept adjusting.’

The standout stories are the two longer outings. In ‘Arms Race’, a disillusioned journalist travels into the heart of darkness in a war zone to find that the world has been profoundly misled in an unexpected way. Two London IT workers in ‘Data Furnace’ keep warm using hard-drives powered by a social media experiment involving a frog in a terrarium, which mimics the environmental disaster that caused the city to freeze.

Low’s stories prompt us to re-examine urgent questions about the way we live our lives. If the endings occasionally left me wanting a deeper emotional resolution, it was never long before the next story delivered me to a beguiling new world.