In addition, I:

• Had a story reprinted in Concept SciFi
• Was interviewed by Concept SciFi
• Sold a third story to Interzone (Memory Dust, coming Jan 2009)
• Sold a story to the Future Bristol anthology edited by Colin Harvey (What Would Nicolas Cage Have Done? coming April 2009)
• Co-wrote a short story with Aliette de Bodard (The Church of Accelerated Redemption, finishing touches currently being applied)
• Co-wrote a short story with Rob Starr (The Winding Curve, which appeared in Rob’s collection Sophistry by Degrees, Jan 2008)
• Was interviewed by SF Crowsnest
• Garnered excellent reviews for The Last Reef & Other Stories from The Fix, SF Crowsnest, Morpheus Tales, Interzone, etc
• Wrote another short story, Laptop Jack, that’s ready to go out to market…

In his latest update, Andrew Hook explains the reasons why Elastic Press won’t be releasing any books in 2009:

I’ve increasingly found Elastic is becoming a burden rather than a pleasure. I’ve run it mostly in my spare time over the past six years (and occasionally part-time and full-time), and I’ve decided that I now want to focus on my own writing and spend more time with my family. Not only that, but I feel I’ve taken Elastic as far as it can go. We’ve had some great successes – in terms of reviews, awards, and sales – with, perhaps ironically, 2008 being the best year to date; however I feel I’ve hit a wall in my ability to expand the press further and my enthusiasm is starting to wane. Rather than wait until such time that I start to do a disservice to the authors, it seems better to quit whilst I’m ahead.

I’m personally sad about this for two reasons: 1) Elastic published my short story collection The Last Reef & Other Stories, and I was hoping they’d also publish the sequel, and 2) this drastically cuts down the available markets for short story writers, as so few of the larger publishers are interested in producing short story collections.

Sometimes when writing fiction, it’s hard to keep a mental image of all the characters involved, and mistakes start to creep in. You get muddled and describe your hero as having blue eyes in chapter two and green ones in chapter six. To get around this problem, I suggest casting your story in the same way you’d cast a movie.

Continue reading “Do you have trouble remembering what your characters look like?”

New Scientist magazine asked six major SF writers for their thoughts on the future of science fiction, and received some interesting replies:

Continue reading “The future of science fiction”

Phil Plait has news of an exciting development in astronomy - the first optical images of planets orbiting other stars.

Yet there they are, proof that our planetary system is not the only one in the Universe… There, with your own eyes, you can see for yourself that other planets exist. They are not Earthlike, not even a little… they are massive, young, hot planets that are probably mostly gaseous and completely inhospitable. But there they are.

Read the full story (and see the pictures) on Phil’s Discover Magazine blog: http://tinyurl.com/6lvxru

“the writer is delegated to declare and to celebrate man’s proven capacity for greatness of heart and spirit—for gallantry in defeat, for courage, compassion and love. In the endless war against weakness and despair, these are the bright rally flags of hope and of emulation. I hold that a writer who does not believe in the perfectibility of man has no dedication nor any membership in literature.”

- John Steinbeck

Writing on Bookslut, Paul Kincaid seeks to reassure the voices constantly heralding the “death” of science fiction:

The truth is, we tire of novelty more quickly than we tire of anything else. And because science fiction as a genre lives and dies by novelty, it suffers from this ennui more than any other form of fiction. So if, for whatever reason, science fiction is not challenging the way we understand the world, disrupting our sense of reality, or doing any of the other things we associate with novelty, then our automatic reaction is that the genre is dying. It is all or nothing… Science fiction has always been dying. That’s how it reinvents itself. 

I’ve just heard I’ve landed a new job, as Campaign Communications Manager for a recruitment communications company based in Bristol, starting at the end of this month.

I’ve always been a little irritated by the attitude that on-line magazines are somehow inherently inferior to printed publications. Granted, there’s a lot of crap out there, but there are also some web publications with high standards and rigorous editorial processes - and these publications are redefining what it means to be a “professional” Science Fiction writer. It’s not all about cents-per-word anymore, it’s about readership.

It’s no longer possible to earn a decent wage writing short stories for traditional magazines, as it was for writers like Philip K Dick. Those days are gone and it’s a sad fact that as our audience finds other things to spend their money and attention on, printed Science Fiction magazines are seeing a steady decline in subscriptions. Frankly, in the UK it’s a lot easier for curious readers to Google an online SF magazine than it is for them to find a printed copy of one at their local newsagent.

Personally, I desperately hope the printed SF magazine market continues to survive in some form, but at the same time I also realise that if the next generation of prospective readers aren’t coming to us, it’s up to us to reach out to them. Without them, the genre will grow old and die. We have to set our stall where young and old alike can see and engage with it and if that means giving some of our work away on-line, then so be it. You only have to look at Google, Facebook, YouTube, Amazon and iTunes to realise the Internet’s fundamentally changing the way we communicate, the way we shop and the way we share information and interact with one another. As Science Fiction writers, we should be at the forefront of that revolution and if the printed magazines want to survive, they’re going to have to do something to attract that global audience.

As an example, I like the approach the publishers of ‘Interzone’ are using. They’re still publishing the print magazine but they’re also offering it for sale as an electronic download on ‘Fictionwise’, and releasing free podcast readings of the best stories on their website in order to get their content out to the widest possible audience in a convenient choice of formats.

(Reprinted from an interview with SF Crowsnest. Read the full thing here.)

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.