According to Andrew Hook, Elastic Press have only around thirty paperback copies of my short story collection left in stock. If you want to get hold of one, you’d better act now. Once these last few copies are gone, that’s it. Elastic Press are closing down, so there won’t be a reprint.

You can order direct from Elastic Press or via Amazon.

I’ve just received an email informing me that my short story “Arches” has been nominated for The Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award for the best short science fiction of 2008.

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.

The lastest issue of Vector dropped through my letterbox this morning, accompanied by an Elastic Press “sampler” – a booklet containing an interview with Andrew Hook, the head of Elastic Press, and three stories:

• Love in the Time of Connectivity by Daniel Marcus
• La Macchina by Chris Beckett
• A Necklace of Ivy by Gareth L Powell

You can also read A Necklace of Ivy for free on the Fictionwise site by clicking here.

The following review appears on the MySpace blog of Morpheus Tales, the magazine of horror, science fiction and fantasy:

THE LAST REEF AND OTHER STORIES by Gareth L Powell

I liked this book, I really liked it. It’s not often that you come across a book by an author you have never heard of and you discover something amazing, but this is one of those rare books.

It sparkles. Continue reading “Morpheus Tales review”

I have my first mention on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elastic_Press

My favourite lines from the review were:

Now, fifteen of Powell’s stories have been brought together in The Last Reef, giving readers the opportunity for a sustained voyage through a surprisingly diverse range of imaginative and entrancing worlds.

And:

Without question, what all the stories definitely do have in common is a memorable quality – you’ll be thinking about them for a long time afterwards. These are stories that engage both the heart and the brain… Elastic Press has performed a public service in collecting them together.

Word comes from Andrew Hook that one of the short stories from my collection, The Last Reef, will appear in a short Elastic Press booklet which is going to be produced by the British Science Fiction Association as a freebie for their members.

My short story collection “The Last Reef” is now available as an ebook from Fictionwise. This means that if you’re unable to get hold of a printed copy of the book, you can now purchase it as an electronic file to read on your computer or ebook reader.

The download is priced at $6.80 (around £3.50 in the UK) and can be found online here: http://www.fictionwise.com/eBooks/eBook71799.htm?cache

Charles Packer reviews my short story collection on Sci-fi Online and gives it 10 out of 10:

The Last Reef and Other Stories is a new collection of science fiction short stories by Gareth L. Powell. It’s a worthy collection worth every pound of your hard earned dosh as the stories are universally well written.

One of the things that you first notice about Powell’s work is his apparent belief that it is women, rather than men, who act as the agent of change – a proposition that any resident of Troy would have agreed with. This is a refreshing idea from a male writer, who as a species have mostly put males at the centre of the action, and gives Powell’s work an individual voice.

Like the majority of good writers Powell presents a balance of ideas within each of his short stories. Some of the stories are interlinked, so the Monkey computer program which causes so much havoc in Ack-Ack Macaque is also referenced in A Neckless of Ivy, though in truth these mini tales of armageddon are really love notes to the women which appear in the stories.

Not everything is a love note to strong women as in The Long Walk Aft and Cat in a Box where Powell shows a playful and dark side to his humour. Both stories involve choices. The first is that age old problem of finding enough biological matter to restart your food replicator when all you have is a spaceship full of your sleeping shipmates. The second poses the problem of having a box which might grant immortality, though there is one catch, the box has a cat in it, if the cat’s dead then so are you, so would you open it?

One of the nice things about Powell’s writing is his ability to conjure whole worlds in a limited number of lines; his characters are not just ciphers there to push a clever idea forward. Having said that, the book isn’t short of these either. I was especially impressed with the idea of rogue computers which spin out of control, evolving past sentience used in The Reef and its companion stories Flotsam and Hot Rain. I feel there may be a novel in Powell yet.

As well as big ideas, comedy and world construction, Powell also does a nice turn at subtlety. This is especially evident in my two favourite stories in the collection Sunsets and Hamburgers and Distant Galaxies Colliding, though I think that Sunsets represents Powell at his best with a big idea – reconstructed humans at the death of the universe – played against both hope for the future and the depiction of a realistic relationship. The main pleasure with the story is that it treats its reader as intelligent. Powell paints just enough to get the reader’s imagination to fill in the blanks, thus engaged, you are able to enter further into the experience than the role of voyeur would allow.

In total the book contains fifteen of his short stories and there is not a dud amongst them. Buy this book and do your brain a favour; you know it will love you for it.

10/10

Full review: http://www.sci-fi-online.com/2008_reviews/book/08-08-01_last-reef.htm