I have just found out that my story Fallout, which appeared in the Conflicts anthology from Newcon Press, received an honorable mention in The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 24, edited by Gardner Dozois (published in the US as The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Twenty-eighth Annual Collection).

As far as I know, this is my first mention in one of Dozois’s Year’s Best collections.

This year’s Eastercon sees the launch of two new books featuring pieces written by me.

The first is Further Conflicts from NewCon Press. It is the sequel to last year’s Conflicts anthology, and it features a short story that follows on directly from the story I wrote for the first book.

The second book is The Sixty, a collection of art works by the BFSA award-winning artist Andy Bigwood. As well as Andy’s superb illustrations, the book features short pieces of fiction and comment from over forty authors, including yours truly.

The joint launch takes place on 22nd April at Illustrious, the 2011 Eastercon event in Birmingham, and should definitely be worth popping along to.

Newcon Press has announced its forthcoming anthology Future Conflicts edited by Ian Whates.

The book will be published in April and is a sequel of sorts to the anthology Conflicts which was launched in April last year.

Here’s the table of contents:

Introduction – Ian Whates

The Wake – Dan Abnett

Unaccounted – Lauren Beukes

The New Ships – Gareth L Powell

The Harvest – Kim Lakin-Smith

Brwydr Am Ryddid – Stephen Palmer

The War Artist – Tony Ballantyne

Occupation – Colin Harvey

The Soul of the Machine – Eric Brown

Extraordinary Rendition – Steve Longworth

Yakker Snak – Andy Remic

The Legend of Sharrock – Philip Palmer

The Ice Submarine – Adam Roberts

Welcome Home, Jannisary – Tim C Taylor

‘The New Ships’ is a direct sequel to my story ‘Fallout’, which appeared in the first book.

The new issue of Interzone contains reviews of my novel, Silversands, and the Conflicts anthology, to which I contributed a short story.

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.”

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.

I finished the first draft of another new short story today, the second I’ve produced in the space of a couple of weeks. The first was called “Fault” and it clocked in at 1300 words. This one’s just shy of 5000 words; it’s called “The New Ships”; and it’s a sequel to “Flotsam”, the story I sold to Ian Whates for his Conflicts anthology (due April 2010 from NewCon Press). The action takes place in a near-future England, where much of the South West has been rendered uninhabitable by a nuclear explosion over the Severn Estuary. I’ll polish it up over the next few days, and submit it to market before Christmas, in the hope that it’ll appear in print shortly after the anthology.

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.

Regular readers will know that I recently submitted a short story to the forthcoming Newcon Press anthology, Conflicts. The story has now been edited by Ian Whates and Ian Watson and looks on course for publication later in the year.