I have a photo pinned to the cork board above my computer monitor. It is a picture of me aged 3 or 4 years old, drinking cocoa with my father in the back yard of the house we lived in at the time. We’d been digging the garden together.

My father died when I was eighteen years old.

Now that I have daughters of my own, the picture means more to me than ever. Looking at it, I feel a deep sense of loss – but also a strong determination to be as good a father to my girls as he was to me – and I wonder which pictures of me they will look back on in the years to come?

Damien G Walter argues that while the bastions of literary fiction may look down their noses at speculative fiction as an obsolete minority genre, the real picture is actually something quite different:

“Whilst a walk through Waterstones or a perusal of the Times Literary Supplement might make science fiction seem a down trodden and ignored genre, a surf through the modern day internet tells quite a different story…”

Continue reading “Speculative vs Literary Fiction”

I’m currently reading a number of non fiction books for research and/or enjoyment:

1) The Paris Interviews Vol.1, ed. Philip Gourevitch – A collection of interviews from The Paris Review. Subjects include Ernest Hemingway, Truman Capote, Dorothy Parker, Saul Bellow, Kurt Vonnegut, and Joan Didion. A great book for anyone wantiing a glimpse into the minds and habits of these great writers.

2) The Art of War by Sun Tzu - Chinese political classic dating from around 403-221 BC and a huge influence on practitioners of warfare ever since.

3) Shaping Things by Bruce Sterling – If you’re at all interested in the relationship you have to the products you consume, and the way that relationship is going to evolve over the next ten years, you should definitely read this book.

4)45 by Bill Drummond - Entertaining memoir from the former KLF frontman and musical prankster, containing his thoughts on pop music, modern art, and Spice Girl tribute bands.

5) How To Live on Mars by Robert Zubrin – Written as a handbook for new colonists, How To Live on Mars manages gives you all the science you need to know to make a life on the red planet.

6) In Memory Yet Green by Isaac Asimov – A candid and absorbing autobiography from one of science fiction’s most famous “Golden Age” writers.

7) About Writing by Samuel Delany – I’ve been slowly working my way through this collection  of essays, letters, and interviews for months. This is not a quick-fix “how to write” manual, but an erudite and densely written series of deep meditations on the craft of writing and story-telling.

There’s a reference today on the Futurismic web site to my short story Flotsam, in an article about shipping containers being turned into makeshift housing. It’s a fascinating article, which you can read by following this link.

Flotsam appeared in issue 3 of online magazine Concept Sci-Fi.  In it, I imagined container ships hastily refitted as floating refugee camps. I wasn’t the first to come up with the idea of using containers to provide living space, but it’s gratifying to be mentioned in the same breath as Ken MacLeod, Neal Stephenson, and William Gibson.

Click here to download Concept Sci-Fi #3 as a free pdf.

Mark Watson reviews my story “Memory Dust” in Interzone 220 at Best SF:

“The third story from Powell in the ‘new’ Interzone, which puts him up for being a ‘regular’. The two previous stories were well-received, with ‘Ack-Ack Macaque’ topping the last reader’s poll, and ‘The Last Reef’ having many plaudits, none of course to match the signal honour of being the first ever story to be featured in Best SF Presents. Continue reading “Best SF Review”

For the last week, my article “How To Communicate More Effectively” has been serialised on the Futurismic website. In case you missed it, there are links below to each instalment:

• 1 – Introduction
  
• 2 – Attract Attention
  
• 3 - Create Interest
  
• 4 – Inspire Desire
  
• 5 – Build Conviction
  
• 6 – Generate Action
  
• 7 – Bringing It All Together

“How To Communicate More Effectively” is aimed at writers, magazine publishers and book publishers in the SF&F field. I’m not claiming to have invented any of these techniques – these are tried and tested methods that have been successfully employed by commercial copywriters for the last sixty years – I’m simply trying to help struggling SF magazines by giving them some “extra ammo” in their appeals for the new readers and subscriptions they need in order to survive.

Editor Colin Harvey has created a new website for his “Future Bristol” anthology, where you can read extracts from the stories, including the opening section of my 5,100 word short: What Would Nicolas Cage Have Done?

Click here to visit the site: Future Bristol

From the blurb:

Nine short stories by leading (local) British authors including BSFA and Philip K. Dick Award-nominee Liz Williams, Interzone Poll-winner Gareth L Powell, Stephanie Burgis, Jim Mortimore, Joanne Hall, Nick Walters and Christina Lake. All wrapped in a gorgeous cover by BSFA Award winning artist Andy Bigwood.

As I leave the house with briefcase in hand, the Moon’s still low and bright and there’s frost on the grass. I’m wearing a scarf and gloves. Overhead, a jet crawls eastwards through the clear, empty vault of the sky, its fuselage glowing like a coal in the orange light of the unrisen sun.

When the bus arrives, it’s running late, caught behind a street sweeper. It’s a single-decker instead of a double, so everyone’s packed and crowded and I have to stand in the aisle, earphones wedged in, listening to music downloads on my mobile headset.

When I get off, a cold wind’s blowing through the city centre and the traders are setting up their stalls on Corn Street, sharpening the air with the mixed smells of coffee and ice and fresh fish. The shops are opening their blinds; yesterday’s confetti blows around the Registry Office steps; a Spanish girl stops me to ask directions; the church clock strikes; and up ahead, my office tower squats, the sun catching the steam venting from the ducts in its side and roof, making it look like a missile that’s about to hurl itself at the morning sky.

According to Craig Hogan, a physicist at the Fermilab particle physics lab in Batavia, Illinois, the universe we know and love is likely nothing more than a 3D “hologram” produced by physical processes taking place on a distant, 2D surface:

The “holographic principle” challenges our sensibilities. It seems hard to believe that you woke up, brushed your teeth and are reading this article because of something happening on the boundary of the universe. No one knows what it would mean for us if we really do live in a hologram, yet theorists have good reasons to believe that many aspects of the holographic principle are true.

Read the full story at New Scientist.

Interzone 220 dropped through my door this morning. The stories look great and there are some excellent illustrations. I particularly like the retro space ship in Daniel Bristow-Bailey‘s accompanying illustration to my story Memory Dust, and the ruined city he’s drawn at the bottom of the precipice…