The StarShipSofa Stories Volume 3 anthology is now available, featuring contributions from a host of writers, including Lavie Tidhar, Joe Haldeman, Catherynne M. Valente, Paul Cornell, Michael Swanwick, David Brin, Jack McDevitt, Aliette de Bodard, Mercurio D. Rivera, James Patrick Kelly, and many more.

The book features a reprint of my short story, Sunsets and Hamburgers, with an illustration by Bradley W. Schenck.

There’s also an “extras” section at the end of the book, where each of the authors has provided a photograph of their writing area, and pictures of other things that either inspire or interest them, or have sentimental value – such as handwritten manuscripts, convention name tags, holiday snaps, and so on.

You can buy the anthology here.

The 2020 Visions anthology is now available from M-Brane Press, edited by Rick Novy and featuring sixteen original stories of the near-future – including one of mine.

• Mary Robinette Kowal “Birthright”
• Sheila Finch “The Persistence of Butterflies”
• Randy Henderson “A Shelter for Living Things”
• Jason S. Ridler “Showing Light”
• Ernest Hogan “Radiation is Groovy, Kill the Pigs”
• David Lee Summers “The Revelation of Thought”
• Jeff Spock “Teh Afterl1fe”
• Emily Devenport “If the Sun’s at Five O’Clock, It Must be Yellow Daisies”
• Cat Rambo “Therapy Buddha”
• Jack Mangan “Dead Rookies”
• David Boop “Organ Cloning While You Wait”
• Spencer Ellsworth “The Black Plague of Our Generation”
• Gareth L. Powell “The Bigger The Star, The Faster It Burns”
• Alethea Kontis “Pocket Full of Posey”
• Alex Wilson “Nervewrecking”
• David Gerrold “Time Capsule 2120: Actual Comments from Lunar Tourists”

You can buy 2020 Visions via Amazon.com. At the moment there’s no sign of it at Amazon.co.uk, but I’m sure it will be available there soon.

Colin Harvey, the editor of the forthcoming Dark Spires anthology, has been posting snippets of the stories it contains on his blog, including this excerpt from my story, ‘Entropic Angel’:

For four days it snowed. On the fifth day, the angel came. As light dawned, the Reverend Christina Pike saw it squatting like a gargoyle on the tallest of the village’s wind turbines, its shoulders hunched over and its radiant face raised to the sky.

An hour later, that turbine failed. A few minutes later, the  one next to it did likewise. Watching through binoculars from the window of the vicarage, she said: “It’s an angel all right.”

Around her, the hastily-convened members of the village council muttered to one another. They knew what lay in store. They’d seen the lights dim around the Estuary as each of the other towns fell in turn to the depredations of the angelic host. With their own eyes, they’d watched civilisation sputter like a dying candle.

They’d spoken to refugees and army deserters and knew things were bad all over, that without power they were doomed to freeze, and there was nothing that could be done to save them.

Pike lowered her binoculars.

“Maybe I could talk to it?” she suggested, but the council leader, a retired colonel, shook his head.

“Far too dangerous vicar, I won’t hear of it.”

And so Pike stayed by the window watching helplessly as, one by one over the course of the day, all the turbines on the wind farm slowed and screeched to a halt, until by sunset nothing moved, and stripped of their electricity the houses of the village fell into darkness and silence.

Dark Spires will be released this weekend from Wizard’s Tower Press.

M-Brane Press have announced that their 2020 Visions anthology is now available to pre-order.

What will life be like ten years from now? Sixteen extraordinary writers offer their own mind-bending answers to that question, their singular 2020 Visions…

The book includes a story of mine, called ‘The Bigger The Star, The Faster It Burns’ – a mash-up of Elvis songs,  fast cars, crashed UFOs, street parties, and the musicals Grease and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.

Order online here: M-Brane Press.

Rick Novy is the editor of the forthcoming 2020 Visions anthology. As part of the build-up to publication, he’s been posting profiles of the authors included in the book. Today, it was my turn.

Here’s what he wrote:

2020 Visions Author #13 – Gareth L. Powell

By Rick Novy

Although we are both members of the Codex writers group, I know Gareth L. Powell mainly by reputation.   In addition to being a fiction writer, he is a freelance copywriter and PR consultant, and is a former software marketer.  His fiction has appeared in Interzone and in the Shine anthology from Solaris (2010).  His story Ack-Ack Macaque won the 2007 Interzone Reader’s poll for best short story.  Gareth also has a regular interview and review gig with a music magazine out of the UK called Acoustic.

Continue reading “2020 Visions Profile”

Ian at NewCon Press has sent through the table of contents for the Conflicts anthology, due to be launched at Eastercon in April:

• Psi.Copath – Andy Remic
• The Maker’s Mark – Michael Cobley
• Sussed – Keith Brooke
• The Cuisinart Effect – Neal Asher
• Harmony in My Head – Rosanne Rabinowitz
• Our Land – Chris Beckett
• Fallout – Gareth L. Powell
• Proper Little Soldier – Martin McGrath
• War Without End – Una McCormack
• Dissimulation Procedure – Eric Brown
• In the Long Run – David L. Clements
• Last Orders – Jim Mortimore
• Songbirds – Martin Sketchley

It looks like a damn good line-up and I’m pleased to be a part of it. I’m certainly looking forward to reading the other stories.

James Maxey reviews the Future Bristol anthology for Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show. Of my contribution, he writes:

“The strongest part of the story is the budding love story between the narrator and a girl he meets in a bookstore. I found the dialogue to be very natural and plausible; often dialogue in short stories is simply there to push the plot forward. Here, the dialogue has nothing to do with the gee-whiz tech that will erupt a few pages later. As a result, it felt very real to me. It seemed like the way people actually flirt, and makes the story feel like an actual window onto life.”

Read the full review online here.

Over the past 24 hours, I’ve pulled together and submitted a 30,000 word book manuscript. It’s a collection of articles (mainly advice for budding authors), interviews and other pieces of writing, some of which first appeared on this website. It’s rough at the moment and probably needs the attention of an editor, but I’m still proud that I’ve managed to pull it together in such a short time – and I’ll post further developments as they happen.

This is a sneak preview of a story that will appear in the forthcoming anthology Conflicts from NewCon Press. The full story is around 5,000 words long. This is the opening scene:

FALLOUT
By Gareth L Powell

Despite what was to come, the day started well. An hour before sunrise they landed the rented jet at a decommissioned RAF base in Wiltshire, near Swindon. It was a cold morning and frost glittered on the grass at the edge of the runway.
Continue reading “Friday Fiction”

After recently selling stories to Future Bristol and Conflicts, I’ve had yet another short story accepted for a forthcoming anthology – but this time, I can’t tell you which one, as the editor wants to keep the contents quiet for the moment…