“Science fiction is a big muscular horny creature, with a mass of bristling antennae and proprioceptors on its skull. It has a small sister, a gentle creature with red lips and a dash of stardust in her hair. Her name is Space Opera.”

I think I use more SF tropes than fantasy ones. Plus, my work is intended to be science fiction. Whether it succeeds in that aim is something for someone else to decide. To me, the difference between SF and fantasy lays not so much in technique or subject matter as in application. Broadly speaking, I see SF as a tool for exploring what it will mean to be human in an increasingly strange and baffling future; whereas I see fantasy exploring what it means to be human (or superhuman) in worlds which plainly do not, nor ever will, exist – a hotline into our archetypal dreams and superstitions, where mighty heroes vanquish armies of grotesque sub humans and beautiful vampires fall in love with their food.

Continue reading “The Difference Between SF and Fantasy”

Yesterday on Twitter, I asked:

We’ve had New Weird and Steampunk. What’s going to be the “next big thing” in science fiction?

As you can imagine, I had a number of replies. Some were serious, others less so. For instance, I think Marc Gascoigne was perfectly serious with this heartfelt plea:

Spacepunk, sir… Spacepunk

Whereas Jonathan McCalmont had his tongue firmly in his cheek when he wrote:

VampirePunk : The former members of Crass kick the shit out of the casts of Twilight and the Anita Blake novels.

But the one that really caught my eye was a blog post from Jason Sanford in which he puts the case for an emerging trend he calls “SciFi Strange“.

SciFi Strange writers live in today’s multicultural world, where diversity and difference are the norm, even as we explore the basic human values and needs which bind all of us together. SciFi Strange also flirts with the boundaries of what is scientifically–and therefore realistically–possible, without being bounded by the rigid frames of the world as we know it today. But don’t mistake SciFi Strange for fantasy. This is pure science fiction. It’s merely an updated version of the literature of ideas. A SF equipped for a world where the frontiers of scientific possibility are almost philosophical in nature.

He goes on to name a few stories he identifies as SciFi Strange, including stories by Aliette de Bodard,  Eugie Foster, Mercurio D. Rivera, Paolo Bacigalupi, Ted Chiang, Ian McDonald, and Nnedi Okorafor. He even includes my own short story, “Ack-Ack Macaque“.

What do you think? Does his argument make sense – or are there other “movements” emerging in modern science fiction?

I appear to have accidentally volunteered myself to be the media liaison for Bristolcon.

Bristolcon is a one-day science fiction convention being held in conjunction with the British Browncoat Ceilidh on 26 September, organised by Kumara Conventions at the Mercure Holland House Hotel & Spa in Bristol. There will be discussion panels, trade stands, book signings, live music and a bar. The guest of honour will be Alistair Reynolds and profits from both events will be donated to the charity Equality Now.

All media enquiries should be directed to me at: media “at” bristolcon.org

Tickets can be bought here: http://www.bristolcon.org

If you’re a sci-fi writer or reader, it can be extremely frustrating and difficult to explain the genre’s appeal to colleagues, friends and loved ones who just “don’t get it”. Take my wife and my mother, for example. While they’ve both been incredibly supportive of my writing career to date, neither can honestly see the appeal of science fiction and I get the feeling both secretly wish I’d write something more “mainstream”.

So, if you have people in your life like this, what can you do to convert them?

The temptation is to shower them with the books you enjoyed when you first started reading sci-fi, way back when – books by writers such as Asimov, Clarke, Niven and Dick – in the hope they’ll see whatever it was you saw first time you read it, and become hooked on the genre the same way you did.

This is not a good idea.

Don’t use the classics. In most cases, the technology, sociology and sexual politics have dated so badly you’ll end up totally alienating your potential convert, despite your fond memories of the book. Better, I think, to start with something modern, something with which they can feel a connection. To this end, I’ve knocked together the list below -  a list of books which manage to combine science fiction tropes and themes with modern storytelling techniques and sensibilities.

In much the same way as Life on Mars and the new Battlestar Galactica attracted non-sci-fi audiences through their gritty storylines and examination of contemporary issues of terrorism and freedom, so these books may be capable of drawing in readers who wouldn’t normally expect to enjoy a sci-fi novel:

1. 9Tail Fox by Jon Courtenay Grimwood. For viewers of Life on Mars and The Wire, this is an intriguing blend of crime drama and medical speculation, in which Sergeant Bobby Zha of the SFPD has to work out not only who murdered him, but also why he’s woken up in the body of a coma patient from New York.
2. Little Brother by Cory Doctorow.  Written as an educational young adult novel, Little Brother shows a group of computer-savvy school children caught up in the aftermath of a terrorist attack on San Francisco, and tells how they fight to regain their civil liberties following a government crack-down.
3. Nova Swing by M John Harrison. A generation ago, part of the mysterious Kefahuchi Tract fell to earth in the coastal city of Saudade. Now, years later, Vic Serotonin makes his living guiding tourists into the event site – a place where the laws of geometry and causality have assumed a dream-like elasticity. To Vic, the event site is a puzzle and an obsession – one that literally spills over into the external world when he illegally smuggles an unstable artefact out of the zone.
4. Altered Carbon by Richard Morgan. Morgan takes Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep and projects it several hundred years into the future, delivering a violent and absorbing mystery set on the streets of Bay City.
5. Jennifer Government by Max Barry. A no-holds-barred satire on multinational big business, Jennifer Government starts with marketing executives shooting teenagers in order to give their new line of trainers some “street cred”.

This isn’t an exhaustive list. There are other “gateway” books out there that could lure the unsuspecting into an appreciation of science fiction – books like The Time Traveller’s Wife or The Road, which use the tools of sci-fi to add spice to apparently “mainstream” novels.

But what do you think? Which books have I missed? Drop your suggestions in the comments below…

So, I was chatting with someone and mentioned that I wrote science fiction, and they asked what kind of science fiction it was. Was it hard science fiction or soft? Was it cyberpunk or post cyberpunk? Was it Mundane or Space Opera?

The trouble was, I didn’t have a ready answer for them. I just did what I usually do in such situations – wave my hands around and mention “Bladerunner” a few times. But it got me thinking: on the one hand, these sub classifications are generally pretty meaningless to anyone outside the genre, but on the other, they can be useful descriptive shortcuts when talking to fans, agents or editors.

So, here’s my question: if you’ve read my book or some of my short stories, how would YOU describe them? Do they fall into a recognised category?

Damien G Walter argues that while the bastions of literary fiction may look down their noses at speculative fiction as an obsolete minority genre, the real picture is actually something quite different:

“Whilst a walk through Waterstones or a perusal of the Times Literary Supplement might make science fiction seem a down trodden and ignored genre, a surf through the modern day internet tells quite a different story…”

Continue reading “Speculative vs Literary Fiction”

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”

The November issue of Concept Sci-Fi is now available to download as a free pdf file. The issue includes my short story Flotsam, set in Amsterdam and the Mediterranean. Flotsam originally appeared in my short story collection, The Last Reef, and is a sequel of sorts to the book’s title story.

While on the Concept Sci-Fi site, you can also check out the interview I did for them a couple of months ago: http://www.conceptscifi.com/igpowell.htm

New Scientist magazine asked six major SF writers for their thoughts on the future of science fiction, and received some interesting replies:

Continue reading “The future of science fiction”