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.

In this week’s guest post, my fellow Shine author Aliette de Bodard takes a look at the science in science fiction.

Science in science fiction, or how realistic should and can we be?
By Aliette de Bodard

A large subset of science fiction concerns itself with extrapolating the future, and most particularly with imagining where science could take us [1]. A question that naturally follows is: how realistic should the science be in those stories/novels?

Continue reading “Guest Post: Aliette de Bodard On Scientific Plausibility”

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.”

SF Signal has published an interview where Aliette de Bodard and I talk about the story we co-wrote for the Shine anthology.

Read the interview 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.

Two paperback copies of the Shine anthology have just been delivered to my door, direct from the publisher. And they look great.

Shine is an anthology of “optimistic” near-future  science fiction edited by the formidable Jetse de Vries, and featuring a cover by the award-winning artist, Vincent Chong (who also designed the cover for my novel, Silversands).

Shine is a book of short stories with an upbeat outlook on the future, a book that says no matter how bad things get, there’s always the possibility of hope. It contains 16 stories, including a 10,000 word story that I co-wrote with Aliette de Bodard, called The Church Of Accelerated Redemption.

It also contains stories by Alastair Reynolds, Kay Kenyon, Jason Stoddard, Holly Phillips, and others.

Shine is published by Solaris Books.

To read an excerpt from The Church Of Accelerated Redemption, the story I co-wrote with Aliette de Bodard for the Shine anthology, head over to the Daybreak magazine website: click here for link.

Happy New Year to you all.

2010 looks to be another busy year. First off, my debut novel Silversands will be launched by Pendragon in April, at the annual convention of the British Science Fiction Association. Hopefully the event will also see the launch of two anthologies, each containing a new short story of mine: The Shine anthology from Solaris, which features “The Church of Accelerated Redemption”, a story I co-wrote with Aliette de Bodard; and Conflicts, an anthology from NewCon press, featuring a short story I wrote called “Fallout”.

In addition to the above, I’m making good progress with my second novel, and writing further short stories, which I hope will one day comprise a second short story collection, following on from 2008′s The Last Reef and Other Stories.

A few months ago, I was fortunate enough to co-write a 10,000 word novelette with the popular Interzone and Angry Robot author, Aliette de Bodard.

The story we wrote is called “The Church Of Accelerated Redemption” and I’m pleased to  announce that it will be appearing in Shine, an anthology of near-future, optimistic science fiction edited by Jetse de Vries.

The book is due from Solaris Books in April 2010, and there will probably be a Shine launch party at Odyssey, the 2010 British EasterCon, which is being held in Heathrow in April.

In the meantime, the anthology is already available to pre-order on Amazon UK and Amazon USA.

From Monday 30 November, Jetse will be running a competition on the book’s website. He will be posting an excerpt from each of the sixteen stories in the anthology and challenging readers to guess which of four alternative endings to each story is the correct one, and which authors wrote which excerpt.