I’m very pleased to note that The Recollection appears at number 6 in Forbidden Planet’s list of favourite books.

The Best Books of 2011

December’s issue of Locus features a review of The Recollection. The review is by Russell Letson, and he begins:

“Gareth L. Powell’s The Recollection is one of those multiple-puzzle adventures that is difficult to outline in a review, partly because so many of its pleasures are tied to solving said puzzles (and thus must remain behind the spoiler curtain), and partly because of the considerable variety of its motif-hoard.”

He continues:

“So we have not only two sets of characters loose in a mysterious and dangerous environment, but they’re dragging emotional baggage around with them. We know that eventually the two stories will converge–but just to keep things stirred up, those twin plot lines hatch out additional view-point characters, auxiliary actions, and mysterious environments and agendas.”

He concludes:

“The archway network, with its grab-bag of unpredictable perils, reminded me of the boobytrapped gateways of Philip Jose Farmer’s World of Tiers series, and the mysterious-alien-artifacts of the Bubble Belt and the Gnarl and the Dho Ark have cousins all over SF history – Ringworld, Rama, and the alien ruins and mysterious weapons of a thousand space operas. The Recollection is not Powell’s first novel (that would be Silversands, 2010), but it reads like a bid to join the big leagues, with big themes, a big setting, and the option to continue to do big things with the setup. Even if it proves not to be the first of a sequence, it is a promising entry in the cosmic-issues / space-opera / alien-encounter field.”

Sometimes, I think I’m used to the weirdness that comes with being a writer; and other times it hits me afresh, all over again. Take the other day, for instance. I walked into my local branch of Waterstones and saw that they had a couple of copies of my novel, The Recollection, on their shelves. The books were sandwiched between books by Frederik Pohl and Terry Pratchett. I picked one up and opened it. There on the page were words that I had written; familiar words that I’d poured out of my head onto the page during late night writing sessions in my office at the back of the house. And now here they were, on public display in the city centre, where anyone could see them. It was a weird feeling. Cool, but weird.

You can now buy The Recollection as an ebook, direct from the publisher.

The Rebellion Publishing Ebook Store features most of the titles published by Rebellion’s imprints, Solaris and Abaddon, available to download in both ePub and mobi formats.

You can find The Recollection here.

Jonathan Howard, author of the Johannes Cabal novels, posted a link to the following video on Twitter, saying: “Saw this and found myself thinking of the Recollection from the @garethlpowell novel of the same name.”

He has a point. This stuff moves in much the same way I envisioned the Recollection moving. Enjoy:

F L U X from candas sisman on Vimeo.

Matthew S. Dent has posted a review of The Recollection on his blog.

“It’s a wondrously complex patchwork, with a great attention to detail and to the sub-genre’s rich history. To those who are widely read within it, the wealth of little nods here and there will stand out like little gemstones. For those without such experience, the attention to detail will do the same.

“Particularly notable is Powell’s grasp of the consequences of relativity. Space travel across the cosmos is possible in the world of The Recollection, but a journey which is instantaneous from the the perspective of the traveller takes objectively as long as the same journey would at the speed of light. It not only throws up fascinating problems of timelines out of synch, but manages to knit the plot together across centuries.

“The beauty here is that Powell has a good grasp of both the technical and the artistic side. I’m loathe to call this “hard” sci-fi, because it lacks the dryness which frequently marrs that genre. But it feels accurate, with a realistic atmosphere and entirely believable characters.”

Read the full review here.

The form below appeared in an early draft of The Recollection. It is the electronic form filled out by Katherine Abdulov in the middle of Chapter Twelve, immediately prior to the Ameline‘s departure from Strauli Quay.

Continue reading “Pre-flight Check List”

I recently re-discovered my 2000AD annual from 1979. I must have read that book a hundred times as a child. Even now, more than thirty years later, I still remember most of the stories word-for-word.

Reading it back then, the year 2000 seemed unimaginably distant. The threat of the Cold War still hung over Europe, and most of the stories in the annual were set in post-apocalyptic wastelands.

I could never have imagined that thirty-two years later, the back cover of the September 2011 issue of the comic would feature a full-page ad for a novel that I had written. The thought would have blown my young mind.

In a good way.

Angelo Ventura has produced a picture loosely based on a scene from my novel, The Recollection, depicting the beach that Ed and Alice arrive at after their journey through the first portal.

You can see the picture here: DeviantArt

According to my publisher,

“The Recollection is presenting an interesting phenomenon.  The US is a much more developed ebook market, but for the first time in the UK we’re seeing Kindle sales of Recollection outpacing physical sales from Amazon.co.uk.”

Apparently, this is the first time it’s happened in the month of release.

Click here for the Kindle and paperback editions: Amazon.co.uk

What’s your preferred format?