“Gareth L. Powell’s The Recollection is one of those multiple-puzzle adventures that is difficult to outline in a review, partly because so many of its pleasures are tied to solving said puzzles (and thus must remain behind the spoiler curtain), and partly because of the considerable variety of its motif-hoard.”

He continues:

“So we have not only two sets of characters loose in a mysterious and dangerous environment, but they’re dragging emotional baggage around with them. We know that eventually the two stories will converge–but just to keep things stirred up, those twin plot lines hatch out additional view-point characters, auxiliary actions, and mysterious environments and agendas.”

He concludes:

“The archway network, with its grab-bag of unpredictable perils, reminded me of the boobytrapped gateways of Philip Jose Farmer’s World of Tiers series, and the mysterious-alien-artifacts of the Bubble Belt and the Gnarl and the Dho Ark have cousins all over SF history – Ringworld, Rama, and the alien ruins and mysterious weapons of a thousand space operas. The Recollection is not Powell’s first novel (that would be Silversands, 2010), but it reads like a bid to join the big leagues, with big themes, a big setting, and the option to continue to do big things with the setup. Even if it proves not to be the first of a sequence, it is a promising entry in the cosmic-issues / space-opera / alien-encounter field.”

“The Recollection is a seriously impressive novel, any fan of space opera or even just science fiction will love this book; here Gareth L Powell joins the ranks of Reynolds, Banks, Hamilton and others at the forefront of science fiction.”

Read the full review here.

“It’s a wondrously complex patchwork, with a great attention to detail and to the sub-genre’s rich history. To those who are widely read within it, the wealth of little nods here and there will stand out like little gemstones. For those without such experience, the attention to detail will do the same.

“Particularly notable is Powell’s grasp of the consequences of relativity. Space travel across the cosmos is possible in the world of The Recollection, but a journey which is instantaneous from the the perspective of the traveller takes objectively as long as the same journey would at the speed of light. It not only throws up fascinating problems of timelines out of synch, but manages to knit the plot together across centuries.

“The beauty here is that Powell has a good grasp of both the technical and the artistic side. I’m loathe to call this “hard” sci-fi, because it lacks the dryness which frequently marrs that genre. But it feels accurate, with a realistic atmosphere and entirely believable characters.”

Read the full review here.

“From the tense opening, in which gambler and failed artist Ed Rico is about to be tortured for incurring gambling debts, to the poignant, epiphanal epilogue, Powell escorts us through a series of brilliantly realised set-pieces. In the near future, hundreds of mysterious arches appear over Earth, leading to planets light years distant. When his brother Verne vanishes through an arch, Rico, stricken with guilt over his affair with his brother’s wife, follows in an attempt to locate Verne and atone. What he discovers is a future human diaspora threatened by a sentient gestalt mind spreading through the inhabited universe and turning all life into machine code – and an alien race which needs his help to defeat the threat. Powell’s second novel is not only impeccably structured, with a series of cliff-hangers, but beautifully balanced between big ideas and the smaller-scale human story. If you read only one space opera this year, it’s got to be The Recollection.”

Today is also my birthday, so the timing could not have been more perfect!

Read the full review here: Guardian Online.

The Recollection is a joy to read … GEEKchocolate don’t do star ratings, but, if we did, The Recollection would get a stellar 5 out of 5.

You can read the full review here: Link

If you haven’t already read the book, be warned: the review contains a large number of spoilers.

To help you, here are a couple of quotes with the spoilers edited out:

The mystery surrounding Madelyn Walker is carefully constructed, with Madelyn’s avatar the most fully rounded character in the book. The quality of the writing, of the action, of the conception of the novel leaps whenever she is on stage. [...] Her thread piles on the tropes of recent SF, from nanotechnology to artificial intelligence virus, but draws the pieces together into an interesting shape. Her life is gradually revealed through the memories and arguments of a number of the other characters—and when they consider Madelyn, their own characters seem to deepen in reflection.

The setting, though, could hardly be bettered for the story that Powell is telling, whilst the background generally uses the tools of the field well. Again, many of the standard tropes of our field are on parade, but they are in the service of the author. Life extension is taken as an almost everyday miracle, allowing a depth of back story and shared history for the characters which would be otherwise be outrageous. As in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy (1994-1996), it also enables the first colonists to retain a role as active players. Indeed, here, they dominate the world, pushing the younger people to the margins of their society. The descriptions of Earth and the New United Nations are used primarily as signifiers of the desire to escape, whilst the star gates provide a method. Those gates remind me a little too much of Stargate, but Powell uses their randomness—and the possibility of understanding them—well.

Read the whole review here.

… I admit to feeling a little nervous about reading Gareth L. Powell’s debut novel, Silversands, especially in light of his first collection of fiction, The Last Reef. In my opinion, The Last Reef was the best and most exciting short story SF collection in recent years (and you can read my review of it here) and one of the few collections I still go back to even now (amongst them Hope by James Lovegrove and Barker’s Books of Blood).

So when Silversands was announced I was excited, nervous yes, but excited. I mean, what delights could the writer construct over the course of a novel? Could it match the dizzying heights and imaginations of The Last Reef?

Silversands’ universe requires little introduction; the science fiction tropes within the story are familiar without being unoriginal. There is no plodding back-story to labour over and it keeps that sense of wonder that all good science fiction has. This has its own advantages as we get into the plot from the off and the story rattles along at a good pace. Powell’s writing skills are explicit and direct, creating mood and character through economical prose and without exposition. Each scene is lovingly created and you can tell the writer is enjoying his craft here.

The world building is gritty, frontier SF at its best, with the feel of a society not far away from implosion which adds it’s own sense of tension, while the action is also typically dazzling and dynamic – it has its pulpy moments but nothing that the great SF writers such as Harrison or Asimov would be worried about. It’s utterly compelling, and there’s a feeling of crescendo, of sub-plots merging for a big bang somewhere down the line …

… this is a thoroughly accomplished piece of writing; not one I’d class as a ‘novel’ (novella, probably, and something that could form the back bone of a collection someway down the line), but I’m glad it’s been published and published lovingly (beautifully bound with a great cover) by Pendragon Press. I’m not sure I’ll return to it as much as the well-thumbed Last Reef, but Silversands sits proudly on my bookshelf with other acclaimed genre authors (Dick, Bradbury, Baxter, Banks etc)…

…And you know, Gareth L. Powell doesn’t look out of place amongst them.

Read the original post here.

In his review of Conflicts, Ian Sales writes:

“Gareth L. Powell provides the highlight of the anthology: ‘Fallout’, a near-future story set in a Bristol depopulated after the crash of an alien craft, and ensuing nuclear fallout, years before.”

Reviewing Silversands, Paul Cockburn writes:

“It’s to Powell’s credit that, rapidly though this particular plot thickens, we nevertheless learn to care about his main characters and [Spoilers!] the deaths of some come as genuine, dramatic knocks. This is because, while neither a particularly flashy nor overly stylish writer, Powell is a master when it comes to using small details to give us a sense of the whole person … in many respects Silversands is an excellent debut.”

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.

“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.”