Iain (M) Banks discusses writing with The Guardian:

“Don’t try to perfect as you go along, just get to the end of the damn thing. Accept imperfections. Get it finished and then you can go back. If you try to polish every sentence there’s a chance you’ll never get past the first chapter.”

TTA Press have posted a scan of my latest newspaper clipping: http://ttapress.com/321/well-done-gareth/#more-321

The pictured article appeared in today’s edition of the Portishead Times. It explains how my short story “The Last Reef” came to be broadcast on WRFR FM radio in Rockland, Maine.

By a strange coincidence, today also saw the arrival in the post of a CD containing the audio recording of WRFR presenter, Paul Cole, reading “The Last Reef”, and the latest issue of Interzone.

Sam Jordison has been writing about the collision of science fiction and mainstream literature in The Guardian.

1. Why Do Critics Still Sneer At Sci-Fi?

“Science fiction writers are dismissed by the mainstream, but for mind-expanding ideas and sheer narrative excitement the genre is hard to beat”

2. Literary Apocalypse Now, And Then

“So, novelists’ visions of the future are looking very bleak at the moment. What’s new?”

3. Reading Sci-Fi For Pleasure

“As soon as someone writes a really good sci-fi book it nearly always seems to get reclassified as something else.”

I’ve been contacted by a journalist who wants me to supply a photograph of myself to accompany an article they’re writing. Unfortunately, my digital camera is broken and I’m not sure the camera on my phone will be of sufficient resolution.

Following last week’s opening episode, the second and final part of my story “The Last Reef” has been broadcast on WRFR and is now available to download as a podcast.

I’ve just had a phone interview with the Weston & Somerset Mercury, who want to run a “local writer comes good” story about me, and about “The Last Reef” being featured on the radio in the States.

Brian Appleyard explores the “sniffy” British attitude to science fiction in an article for the Sunday Times.

“The truth is,” Aldiss has written, “that we are at last living in an SF scenario.” A collapsing environment, a hyperconnected world, suicide bombers, perpetual surveillance, the discovery of other solar systems, novel pathogens, tourists in space, children drugged with behaviour controllers – it’s all coming true at last. Aldiss thinks this makes SF redundant. I disagree. In such a climate, it is the conventionally literary that is threatened, and SF comes into its own as the most hardcore realism.

He goes on to claim that HG Wells was responsible for the bombing of Hiroshima and Astounding magazine caused the Cold War…

Part one of my story “The Last Reef” was broadcast on the “Beam Me Up” show on WRFR Radio on 1st December. The show is now available to listen to as a podcast. Part two will be broadcast next week.