Mark Watson reviews the Shine anthology on the revamped Best SF website. He writes:

Gareth L. Powell and Aliette de Bodard – The Church Of Accelerated Redemption.
One of the things I’m liking about this anthology is that the stories have a much more international flavour than most SF, and here Powell and de Bodard set their story in France. There’s a background of a wave of labour strikes (a very old French tradition which I heartily endorse), and the protagonist is a woman working for an IT company who has a bugger of a boss who certainly isn’t into liberte, equalite and fraternite. She’s working for a new church, as per the title, who are using IT to offer redemption – and the story works well with the solid setting, exploring issues around AI and sentience, impact on society and on individuals. The cyber-terrorist she meets, and his two hench-emos add a bit of colour. My recommendation to the authors would be to tweak it a bit and to get a script written and get it touted around Hollywood.

Read the full review here.

Issue #228 of Interzone includes Andy Hedgecock’s review of the Shine anthology (Solaris 2010).

“Gareth L. Powell and Aliette de Bodard have been consistently impressive Interzone contributors in recent years so it is no surprise their collaboration on ‘The Church of Accelerated Redemption’ yields rich and original insights into the lonely and disaffected life of a computer engineer. The tension arises when unexpected events offer the chance of change. A neatly crafted story of AI and human possibility.”

Writer Matthew S. Dent reviews Silversands on his blog:

“I really did enjoy this novel. It was fun, but not silly. The characters were strong, the plot engaging, and the writing well beyond competent. But the real triumph, I feel, is the world that Powell has created. A universe with humanity scattered across the stars by unreliable FTL travel is one that has a lot of potential, particularly with the developments at the end of the story. I hope that Powell returns to this universe at some point, and it would be a real shame if some of the characters from Silversands didn’t get a second appearance.”

Read the full review here.

Colin Harvey reviews Silversands for Suite 101:

Silversands is a worthy addition to any devoted SF reader’s library.

Read the full review here

“The Church of the Accelerated Redemption” gives those concerned with their effect on the environment the chance to earn back some karma via the use of ‘Artificial Intercessors’ — sub-singularity AIs that pray on behalf of the Church’s sponsors. Both Gareth L Powell and Aliette de Bodard who wrote the story, have earned considerable reputations in their own right; in collaboration de Bodard brings scientific weight to the story, while Powell’s innate romanticism makes it soar. An outstanding early contender for Year’s Best lists.

On his website, reviewer Mark Chitty writes:

Gareth L Powell has delivered a great novel in a very interesting setting.

To read the full review, click here.

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

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.