Yesterday, I received word that I’d sold not one but two short stories, to different anthologies on the same day. I can’t tell you yet which anthologies they are, but I can tell you a little something about the stories:

1. ‘Entropic Angel’ is a quasi-supernatural Western set in Somerset in the near future, featuring angels, wind farms, crossbows and hair scrunchies – sort of like Pale Rider meets The Wicker Man.

2. ‘The Bigger The Star, The Faster It Burns’ is probably best described as a fantasy love story with an Elvis soundtrack. The day after I wrote it, I read the first draft aloud to a room full of students at Bath Spa University, as part of a lecture on creative writing. It  charts the course of the doomed affair between a disillusioned London photographer named Ed and Natalie, the smalltown diner waitress he meets on his way to visit a UFO crash site near the Welsh border.

Futher details of the books will follow as soon as the publishers give me the all-clear to announce them.

Some time ago, Colin Harvey wrote a review of my short story collection The Last Reef for the Internet Review of Science Fiction. Now that the IROSF has ceased publication, Colin has posted the review on his own website.

This is my favourite part:

Powell shares with Clarke and Stapleton a sense of humanity’s insignificance in the universe … but Powell is as reminiscent of J.G. Ballard as of Clarke — from the moment when the narrator embraces his infected wife in ‘A Necklace of Ivy,’ to the rising waters and fleets of refugee container ships of ‘Flotsam,’ echoing Ballard’s The Drowned World and his visions of drained swimming pools and abandoned Cape Canaveral … But unlike Ballard, whose protagonists were cold, damaged men, Powell’s heroes turn and face their catastrophes prompted by love or a sense of what’s right — duty, to use an unfashionable word. At their best Powell’s stories fuse the traditional ideas driven British-fiction with detailed characterization, and action.

To read the full review, click here.

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.

This morning, I submitted a new short story to market. The idea for it came to me while getting dressed the other day, and I wrote the whole first draft in an hour. Becky read it for me last night and suggested some minor changes, which I made on the spot. I’m planning to write another short story this afternoon, then it’s back to work on the novel.

Following my recent experiment in online short story selling, I am now in a position to offer you a PDF copy of my first short story collection, The Last Reef And Other Stories.

The Last Reef was originally published in hardback and paperback by Elastic Press in August 2008. It contains 15 short stories, and received glowing reviews from Interzone, Prism, Sci-fi Online, and The Fix.

In order to get a PDF copy of the book emailed directly to you from me, simply click on the big yellow button on the right (you may need to scroll up or down a bit).

This will take you to PayPal. All you have to do then is enter your payment details and decide how much you’d like to pay.

Yes, I’m putting the ball in your court. You decide what you think is a fair price for a 60,000 word book, pay me, and I’ll email you a copy.

It’s that simple.

I put a lot of work into this collection and I’m glad to now have the opportunity to make it available to a wider audience.

And as a special bonus, when you order a copy of The Last Reef, I’ll throw in a PDF copy of my short story “What Would Nicolas Cage Have Done?”, which isn’t normally included in the book.

So when placing your order, please remember to include your email address and state whether you’d like me to send you the PDF versions of the book, the short story, or both.

Many thanks!

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”

I am delighted to say that I’ve just had a short story accepted by Ian Whates for his forthcoming anthology, entitled Conflicts.

The story is called Fallout. It is five and a half thousand words long and is set in the South West of England in the near future.

Conflicts is due to be published later this year. More details to follow.

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?

Andy Bigwood’s cover art for the forthcoming Future Bristol short story anthology is now online at his site: http://www.deviantart.com/print/4885642/.

The anthology will be published in April by Swimming Kangaroo books, and features the following stories and writers:

> Isambard’s Kingdom by Liz Williams
> The Guerilla Infrastructure HOWTO by John Hawkes-Reed
> After The Change by Stephanie Burgis
> A Tale of Two Cities by Christina Lake
> Trespassers by Nick Walters
> Pirates of the Cumberland Basin by Joanne Hall
> Thermoclines by Colin Harvey
> What Would Nicolas Cage Have Done? By Gareth L Powell
> The Sun In The Bone House by Jim Mortimore

The British Science Fiction Association seeks nominations from its members for its annual awards. As my short story collection was published in 2008, three of the stories in it are eligible for the Short Fiction category, as their appearance in the book marked their first time in print:

• Flotsam
• Hot Rain
• Arches

If you’re a member of the BSFA and you enjoyed the book, you might consider nominating one of the stories. If you haven’t read it yet, you can buy it as a printed copy on Amazon or as an ebook via Fictionwise.

(Those of you who enjoyed the book’s title story The Last Reef when it appeared in Interzone, may be interested to learn that Flotsam and Hot Rain are both sequels to that story.)