Colin Harvey has sent through the table of contents for his forthcoming anthology, “Future Bristol”, due from Swimming Kangaroo Books in April next year. It looks like a good line-up, with some intriguing titles. And of course, in eighth position, there’s me…

1. Liz Williams ~ Isambard’s Kingdom
2. John Hawkes-Reed ~ The Guerilla Infrastructure HOWTO
3. Stephanie Burgis ~ After The Change
4. Joanne Hall ~ Pirates of the Cumberland Basin
5. Nick Walters ~ Trespassers
6. Christina Lake ~ A Tale of Two Cities
7. Colin Harvey ~ Thermoclines
8. Gareth L Powell ~ What Would Nicolas Cage Have Done?
9. Jim Mortimore ~ The Sun In The Bone House

Colin (who is editing the anthology) says: “The standard of fiction has been astonishingly high, and I’m really proud of the way the book is shaping up.”

Through a deal between Elastic Press and Action Audio, my short story collection The Last Reef will shortly be available as an audio book:

“Elastic Press… are three times consecutive winners of the BFS Best Anthology award. Action Audio are delighted to be working with Elastic Press in taking their outstanding anthology collections and making them available to an audio audience. More details on specific authors and works to be announced soon…”

Full details here: http://www.actionaudio.co.uk/?page_id=12

My short story collection “The Last Reef” is now available as an ebook from Fictionwise. This means that if you’re unable to get hold of a printed copy of the book, you can now purchase it as an electronic file to read on your computer or ebook reader.

The download is priced at $6.80 (around £3.50 in the UK) and can be found online here: http://www.fictionwise.com/eBooks/eBook71799.htm?cache

I am very pleased to tell you that I’ve just sold another short story to Interzone, the long-running British SF magazine

“Memory Dust” is a high octane space opera set against the same background as my earlier story “Six Lights Off Green Scar” and features the exploits of Caesar Murphy, another “random jumper”. It weighs in at just less than 5,000 words.

This is my third sale to the magazine, and I hope it is as well received as the previous two – “The Last Reef” and “Ack-Ack Macaque“. It certainly has a lot to live up to because, as regular readers will know, “Ack-Ack Macaque” came top in last year’s Interzone Reader’s Poll.

I’ve been experimenting with recording my fiction. Here are two works-in-progress for you:

• http://www.archive.org/details/ThaiCurry
• http://www.archive.org/details/GodsGift

Charles Packer reviews my short story collection on Sci-fi Online and gives it 10 out of 10:

The Last Reef and Other Stories is a new collection of science fiction short stories by Gareth L. Powell. It’s a worthy collection worth every pound of your hard earned dosh as the stories are universally well written.

One of the things that you first notice about Powell’s work is his apparent belief that it is women, rather than men, who act as the agent of change – a proposition that any resident of Troy would have agreed with. This is a refreshing idea from a male writer, who as a species have mostly put males at the centre of the action, and gives Powell’s work an individual voice.

Like the majority of good writers Powell presents a balance of ideas within each of his short stories. Some of the stories are interlinked, so the Monkey computer program which causes so much havoc in Ack-Ack Macaque is also referenced in A Neckless of Ivy, though in truth these mini tales of armageddon are really love notes to the women which appear in the stories.

Not everything is a love note to strong women as in The Long Walk Aft and Cat in a Box where Powell shows a playful and dark side to his humour. Both stories involve choices. The first is that age old problem of finding enough biological matter to restart your food replicator when all you have is a spaceship full of your sleeping shipmates. The second poses the problem of having a box which might grant immortality, though there is one catch, the box has a cat in it, if the cat’s dead then so are you, so would you open it?

One of the nice things about Powell’s writing is his ability to conjure whole worlds in a limited number of lines; his characters are not just ciphers there to push a clever idea forward. Having said that, the book isn’t short of these either. I was especially impressed with the idea of rogue computers which spin out of control, evolving past sentience used in The Reef and its companion stories Flotsam and Hot Rain. I feel there may be a novel in Powell yet.

As well as big ideas, comedy and world construction, Powell also does a nice turn at subtlety. This is especially evident in my two favourite stories in the collection Sunsets and Hamburgers and Distant Galaxies Colliding, though I think that Sunsets represents Powell at his best with a big idea – reconstructed humans at the death of the universe – played against both hope for the future and the depiction of a realistic relationship. The main pleasure with the story is that it treats its reader as intelligent. Powell paints just enough to get the reader’s imagination to fill in the blanks, thus engaged, you are able to enter further into the experience than the role of voyeur would allow.

In total the book contains fifteen of his short stories and there is not a dud amongst them. Buy this book and do your brain a favour; you know it will love you for it.

10/10

Full review: http://www.sci-fi-online.com/2008_reviews/book/08-08-01_last-reef.htm

Just for fun, I’ve been toying with ideas for a sequel to “Ack-Ack Macaque“. These are the titles I’ve come up with so far:

• Ack-Ack’s Back and He’s On Crack!
• Ack-Ack Macaque and the Terror of Monster Island!
• Ack-Ack Macaque and the Space Vampires!
• Ack-Ack Macaque versus the Surf Nazis!

ROSWELL
By Gareth L Powell

So there we were – me and this kid – sitting beneath a fizzing neon sign in an otherwise empty bar in New Mexico. We were both in uniform, and it was one of those clear desert nights where the moon’s a pickled egg and the air’s sharp enough to cut you.

We’d borrowed a jeep from the base and it was parked out front. I had five dollars and a harmonica in my back pocket. The kid – whose name was Eric – had a comb, a pack of cards, and a picture of his high school sweetheart. He sat looking at it, smoothing it out on the table.

“Where are you from, anyway?” I asked him.

“Banner County, Nebraska, sir.”

“Who’s the girl?”

He touched the face in the picture and his shoulders slumped. It was the first time since we’d left the base that I’d seen him relax.

“Her name’s Luanne. I’ve known her since we were eight years old.”

There were hub caps and discarded licence plates tacked to the walls. The seats were upholstered in green vinyl. I said: “Is she waiting for you?”

He shook his head and the light caught the scars on his face.

“We haven’t spoken in five years. The last letter she sent me, she’d met this guy from Harrisburg – a meat packer, I think – and they were talking about getting married.”

A song came on the jukebox – blues on guitar and piano. He picked up his glass and the ice cubes clinked.

“I still think about her, though.”

He closed his eyes. A car passed on the highway. The stars were bright and hard. I looked at my reflection in the window, counted the stripes on my sleeve.

I said: “Yeah, life’s kind of like that.”

I’ve just sold a short story called “What Would Nicolas Cage Have Done?” to Colin Harvey‘s forthcoming anthology Future Bristol, due from Swimming Kangaroo Books in April next year.

On Saturday, we drove up to London for the launch of my new short story collection, The Last Reef.

The event took place from 2pm in the front bar of the Citte of Yorke Inn in Holborn – an olde worlde pub a few short steps from Chancery Lane tube station.

I don’t know how many people were there, but the room was packed and many copies of the book were being sold.

As it was a joint launch with Chris Beckett’s new collection, The Turing Test, both Chris and I read passages from our respective books (I read my short story “Sunsets and Hamburgers”) and answered questions from the audience. Then, the formal part of the event over, the rest of the afternoon was spent signing books and socialising.

The audience were very enthusiastic and I’m extremely grateful to everyone who made the effort to come along and show their support – especially those who travelled a long way in order to be there. You all made me feel like a celebrity for the day.

For me, the major highlights of the day (from a day packed with highlights) were:

1) Meeting writers Eric Brown and Chris Beckett and editor Ian Whates.

2) Seeing a large turnout from the Friday Flash Fiction posse, including: Paul Raven, Shaun Green, Justin Pickard and Neil Beynon (and Gemma)

3) Spending time with so many friends and relatives, including: the publisher Andrew Hook, my brother Huw and his partner Beata (our hosts for the night), my wife Becky (the first time we’ve both been away from the kids overnight), Liz and Pete (travelled up from Bristol), Trish and Simon, Will (stopping off en route from Edinburgh to Devon), Duncan, Conrad and Dijana, Lindsey, Rick and Dawn, Joanne and Chris from the BFSFA, Caroline and Simon (and their baby), Christian, Mr Higgins, Gary Couzens, and many, many others…

4) The reading and the Q&A session that followed. I wasn’t nearly as nervous as I expected to be, and the audience seemed to respond very well to the story I read. The questions they asked afterward were interesting and I managed to answer most of them intelligently.

The event wound up around 6pm and a few of us went for dinner at an All Bar One near St Paul’s Cathedral, and then on to a party in Fleet Street, where I met one of the writers of The Chap magazine.