Some time ago, Colin Harvey wrote a review of my short story collection The Last Reef for the Internet Review of Science Fiction. Now that the IROSF has ceased publication, Colin has posted the review on his own website.

This is my favourite part:

Powell shares with Clarke and Stapleton a sense of humanity’s insignificance in the universe … but Powell is as reminiscent of J.G. Ballard as of Clarke — from the moment when the narrator embraces his infected wife in ‘A Necklace of Ivy,’ to the rising waters and fleets of refugee container ships of ‘Flotsam,’ echoing Ballard’s The Drowned World and his visions of drained swimming pools and abandoned Cape Canaveral … But unlike Ballard, whose protagonists were cold, damaged men, Powell’s heroes turn and face their catastrophes prompted by love or a sense of what’s right — duty, to use an unfashionable word. At their best Powell’s stories fuse the traditional ideas driven British-fiction with detailed characterization, and action.

To read the full review, click here.

Silversands, by Gareth L Powell (Pendragon Press, £12)

Avril Bradley is a communications officer aboard the starship Pathfinder on its mission to locate lost and far-flung colony worlds. She’s also on a personal quest to find Cale Christie, the man she believes to be her father, who passed through an alien wormhole years earlier. But wormhole technology is highly unreliable, and when she does manage to discover the planet where Christie lives, she finds herself caught up in a complex intrigue between competing corporations, corrupt politicians and a scheming artificial intelligence – which may just hold the answer to the stabilisation of the wormhole. Powell’s first novel is a fine hi-tech romp, marred slightly by a rushed and melodramatic dénouement.

-Eric Brown

Read the full article here: click for link

I spent the last four days at a hotel in Heathrow, attenting this year’s Eastercon, the highlights of which were:

Continue reading “Eastercon”

Damien G Walter reviews Shine on The Guardian‘s website:

In recent decades even science fiction, once abundantly optimistic about the future, has been overwhelmed with pessimism. The Shine anthology of optimistic science fiction aims to reverse that trend by bringing together some of the most optimistic visions of our future in one volume. Shine is new writing in the most literal sense, with stories from emerging talents of SF including Alliette de Boddard, Lavie Tidhar and Gareth L Powell.

Liz de Jager reviews the Shine anthology on SFRevu:

I looked first at The Church of Accelerated Redemption a collaboration between Gareth L Powell and Aliette de Bodard and found myself immediately sucked into their wonderfully intimate story of a computer engineer’s struggle with loneliness and discontent. I like Aliette’s writing having read parts of her novel Servant of the Underworld, yet in this story I found something altogether different – a main character whose search for meaning in a dead end job unexpectedly takes a turn she could not have predicted. Wonderful and full of promise, I liked her attitude and the fact that although she was pretty scared, she wasn’t too scared to grab a new future for herself.

Read the full review here.