If you’re attending Fantasycon this weekend, keep an eye out for the Pendragon Press stall, where you may be able to pick up a free sampler CD featuring – among other things – an excerpt from my forthcoming novel, SILVERSANDS.

Word comes from Andrew Hook that one of the short stories from my collection, The Last Reef, will appear in a short Elastic Press booklet which is going to be produced by the British Science Fiction Association as a freebie for their members.

A little while ago, I was interviewed for Interzone by Paul F Cockburn. That interview will appear alongside a review of my book The Last Reef in issue 218, which will be out on 11th September.

For more details, see: http://ttapress.com/517/interzone-218-out-on-september-11th/

HOT RATS
By Gareth L Powell

The four rats appeared high in the upper atmosphere. For a few seconds, they burned like meteors. Then they were back in the lab, smoking and smelling and setting off every alarm we had.

You see, we tried to send them into the past but we forgot: the Earth is rotating at around 1,000 miles per hour, and moving around the Sun at about 67,000 miles per hour. Plus the sun itself is rotating around the centre of the galaxy.

We sent them a couple of minutes into the past. They travelled in time but they stayed in the same physical location – a location the Earth hadn’t reached when they arrived. It hadn’t got there yet. It was still spinning around the sun, a few minutes behind.

But it was coming.

The rats were tumbling through space at 67,000 miles per hour when the Earth’s gravity caught them. There were four of them in the cage. They hit the upper atmosphere at many times the speed of sound.

It’s amazing we got anything back at all.

I’m sorry to hear that Jetse de Vries is resigning as co-editor of Interzone due to “musical differences“. It was Jetse who picked my short story “The Last Reef” from the slush pile and later, wrote the introduction to my short story collection of the same name.

Full story here: link

I have just been sent a copy of the latest issue of Phantastes magazine, containing a Portuguese translation of my short story “Sunsets and Hamburgers“. The translation is by Luís Guerra and there is an accompanying illustration by Woon Bing.

The translation begins:

“O meu primeiro pensamento é de que não me lembro de morrer. Dizem-me que ninguém se lembra. É como tentar apanhar o momento exacto em que adormeces; quando acordas, desapareceu. Podes lembrar-te de estar cansado, podes até lembrar-te de começar a adormecer; mas não te lembras da transição, o momento preciso em que passas de um estado para o outro.”