Gene Melzack reviews my short story collection The Last Reef for Strange Horizons:

The strengths of Powell’s work, as displayed in this collection, are the ideas he’s working with, the settings he chooses in which to explore those ideas, and the structures he uses to communicate those ideas, particularly the manner and point at which he chooses to end his stories. His ideas work both on the abstract philosophical level, and at the plot level, in the way those abstracts are embodied in the story. The level they don’t work on is the emotional level: the level at which the reader is invited to personally engage with the story.

This is a somewhat disappointing assessment, especially as other reviewers have praised the breadth and depth of characterisation and the realistic human relationships at the heart of the stories. See for instance, the earlier reviews published in Interzone and The Fix and Sci-Fi Online.

My short story Flotsam will be published in the November issue of Concept Sci-Fi. It originally appeared in my short story collection The Last Reef (Elastic Press 2008) and is a sequel of sorts to the collection’s title story.

Both SF Crowsnest and Strange Horizons have reviewed my book, The Last Reef. The latter review will be posted to the Strange Horizons website on Friday, while the former will be in the November issue of SF Crowsnest, which will also feature an interview with me. This interview comes hard on the heels of the two interviews I have recently given to Interzone and Concept Sci-Fi, but this one is a little longer and more in-depth than the previous two, and in it, I talk about: the future of printed SF magazines; using the web to attract new readers to the genre; and the necessity to unlearn everything you were taught at school in order to find your own voice as a writer.

Charles Stross recently wrote something on his blog that I really disagree with:

We are living in interesting times; in fact, they’re so interesting that it is not currently possible to write near-future SF.

The thrust of his argument is that the international situation is changing so rapidly that any book of near-future SF written today will be obsolete before it can be published, much as many Cold War thrillers were rendered obsolete by the sudden end of the Cold War.

That’s a fair point. But I don’t agree that you can then extrapolate from here to say that it’s now impossible to write near-future SF. Sure, times are challenging and it’s tough to make predictions about the near-future geo-political and economic landscape - but the role of SF is so much wider than that.

For me, the two purposes of any kind of fiction are:

1. To entertain
2. To say something about the human condition, about what it means to be alive, here and now.

If you’re writing about characters, about people and what makes them tick, then whether you set your story ten, twenty or fifty years into the future, you’ll still find people falling in love, trying to earn a living, screwing each other over, and hanging out with their friends… things they’ve been doing for hundreds of thousands of years. Those basic primate sex, power and death motivations will still be there.

I don’t see SF as a dry, intellectual game of prediction. I don’t feel the need to be proven right by posterity. If the immediate economic future looks a little uncertain, I’ll fudge a little. I’ll make my best guess and hope for the best. I’ll write a story about people.

After all, this kind of uncertainty is hardly new. Science fiction writers in the 1980s had to consider the fact that the futuristic stories they were writing could be rendered obsolete at any moment by a full-scale global nuclear war – but they kept on writing. They made some basic assumptions and they went for it.

For instance, William Gibson wrote Neuromancer in the early Eighties, at the height of the Cold War, when the superpowers were on the brink of a holocaust, and as far as he knew, he could have been vapourised before finishing the novel, but he finished it anyway.

Greg Bear’s novel Eon was first published in 1985, a year after Neuromancer, and assumes the tension between the USA and USSR continues until the year 2000, and then erupts into a full-scale nuclear war. Does that mean we can’t read it now, in 2008? Obviously not, or Orion Books wouldn’t be re-releasing it with an arty new cover. The fact is, Bear’s book is an epic adventure with the pace of a thriller and characters that draw the reader’s sympathy – so it doesn’t matter that he got a few details wrong, any more than it matters that Orwell’s vision of 1984 didn’t come to pass in that particular year.

I guess what I’m saying is that it’s always been difficult to make accurate predictions of the near future, but that’s no reason to stop doing it. As long as your story’s based on more than simple prediciton, and if it’s an entertaining tale with involving characters and a serious point to make, it’s worth writing. You may get some aspects of the future wrong – but so what? As long as you give it your best shot, no-one can ask more of you than that.

Today, I’ve given an interview to SF Crowsnest, where I talk about the future of printed SF, the advantages of online publication, the things I’ve learned from writing flash fiction, and the compulsion I have to keep going back and revising the stories I’ve written. It should appear in next month’s issue, and I’ll post a link when it goes live.

The Bristol Fantasy & Science Fiction Society meets once a month in the Commercial Rooms, Corn St, Bristol. Tonight at 9pm, local author Colin Harvey will be reading extracts from his story in the forthcoming Future Bristol anthology, and from two of his novels. If you’re in the area, come along; it should be a good night. 

Authors pencilled in for future readings include Joanne Hall, Nick Walters, and myself.

Tomorrow is the 39th anniversary of the death of my all-time favourite writer, Jack Kerouac, who died in St Petersberg, Florida of cirrhosis on October 21st, 1969, aged just 47 – and to mark the occasion, I’ve just completed the first draft of a new 4,000 word short story called Laptop Jack. 

THE CLOUD PRINCESS

By Gareth L. Powell

 

He came in fast, aerobraking hard, scrawling a fiery trail across Jupiter’s pristine clouds. And then, when he’d shed enough velocity, he dropped, spreading black carbon fibre wings to catch the pummelling jet stream.

 

Ahead lay a dark whorl of cloud – a raging storm the size of Earth’s moon. And before it, dwarfed by the fury of the maelstrom, he saw the Cloud Princess.

 

The old airship was labouring at a depth far deeper than the one she’d been designed for, her vast impellers spinning furiously as the storm dragged her in.

 

She’d seen better days. As he got closer, he could see where some of her docking spines had been torn off. There were panels and aerials missing. Whole vanes had been ripped from their mounts.

    

He pulled in his wings, falling in a swooping arc that carried him under her rudder, into the shadow of her gas bag. He was aiming for the promenade deck at the rear of the gondola, and the airlock that accessed the main ballroom.

 

Once there, if he could get to her bridge, there was a chance he could save her.

 

I notice with some surprise that this blog’s currently ranked #7 on 42Blips, the social bookmarking site for the SF community.

Things have been a bit quiet on the writing front since the release of The Last Reef, so I thought I’d better give you an update as to what’s in the pipeline:

1. I’m working on a “secret project” with another author, and I’m very excited about it - details to be announced shortly…
2. I’m a 1000 words into writing a new short story about stock trading, skateboards, and shopping malls
3. I have a 5000 word story called Memory Dust pending publication in Interzone
4. There’s another short of the same length called What Would Nicolas Cage Have Done? due to appear next year in an anthology of “Future Bristol” stories from Swimming Kangaroo Books
5. And of course, my novel’s due to appear from Pendragon Press in April
6. Plus, I’m working on stories for two other anthologies – details to be announced shortly…