One of the signs of a successful short story for me is that they are: well, short, but also unforgettable, remaining as flashes of brilliance in the memory. Sometimes they are little glimpses into another place where a world, a place or a situation is set up, examined and then left after a few hundred words. They can be fragments of a bigger story or setting or stand alone. Sometimes I think that if you’re left thinking, “Well, what happens next?” you’re on to a good thing.
Although Gareth is perhaps best known for his award-wining SF novels (5 nominated for the BSFA Best Novel, 2 winners, with Embers of War and Night of Knives also Locus Award finalists) it is perhaps worth pointing out that his apprenticeship goes back much further. He cut his teeth so to speak in writing short stories.
This collection of 32 stories collects many of these stories to date. Ranging from 1992 to 2005, and with ten previously unpublished stories, it is a pleasing selection of tales that reflect Gareth’s skills.
Gareth says from the start that he has taken his original 22 and given them a slight makeover, no doubt dusting off the old copies and checking for inconsistencies. I didn’t notice anything major myself.
The stories themselves are not in chronological order but are occasionally put together in groups. For example, there are two Embers of War stories, which fans of the novel (2018) will no doubt appreciate, although you can read them and like them, as I did without having read the novel.
Going further back there are two ‘Ann Szkatula’ stories, based around a fearsome character who travels across a Chernobyl-like wasteland of the West Country of England an alien spaceship crash-landed here, creating a no-go zone around Bristol and the Severn Estuary.
His famous award-winning story from 2006, Ack-Ack Macaque, about a talking ape fighter-pilot in an alternate history is here too in its original short story form, before being taken away and written as a novel series.
The book’s title comes from the rather Philip K Dick-like ‘An Examination of the Trolley Problem Using A Sentient Warship and a Rotating Black Hole”, which looks at that old ethical thought experiment dilemma of who would you save in a trolley bus accident, but with a science-fictional edge.
In the hands of a lesser writer, this book could seem to be nothing more than a rag-tag collection of odds and ends, an assemblage of stuff published before. And yet there is a cohesion here. There are a number of themes that run throughout the stories. Although there are exceptions, I felt that there was a general sense of melancholy throughout many of the stories. Many of them seem to involve characters ruminating on past relationships, often failed. The overriding impression is one of entropy and decay, with everything worn out, tired and run-down. There’s a general ennui, a feeling that our future is rather dark and depressing, a world of decay and squalor with characters struggling to make a living.
The stories Gonzo Laptop, Hot Rain and The Last Reef are a series of stories set in places as diverse as London, Marseille and Mars, where the evolution of AI has led to hi-tech machines becoming self-aware and dangerous. Think of them as similar to the Terminator movies, although generally the focus is on the people affected by such global events.
To go with this, there’s a few stories with a cyberpunk-ish vibe, where the long black leather coats, mega-weaponry and decaying urban landscapes lit by flickering neon would not be out of place in something like Blade Runner or Cyberpunk 2077.
Some of these stories are 7 pages long, although most are around 20 pages or so. To those used to trilogies of 700+ pages such brevity can be a little alarming.
Although the stories are set in a variety of places, they do feel rather British, although I’m hard-pushed to actually define what that means. The fact that many of the stories are set around Bristol and the West Country (no doubt reflecting Gareth’s home roots) made me smile. Science fiction doesn’t just happen off-world, but here on Earth, in Britain, as well.
It reminds me a little of the old New Worlds magazine stories of the 1960’s when there was often a focus on things happening in Britain, although with visits to foreign places and foreign planets. Think of Gareth writing as a new Ballard, or as a new Michael Moorcock writing a more recent Jerry Cornelius to give the stories a uniquely British dystopian perspective.
In short, this is a solid collection with enough variety to keep those pages turning and provide enough flashes of brilliance to make the stories often memorable. They also give you an idea of Gareth’s writing and how it has developed. It made we want to go and read those novels I haven’t read yet, which is a sign of a good collection for me.
© 2025 Mark Yon
Paperback | Titan Books
WHO WILL YOU SAVE? by Gareth L. Powell
October 2025 | 422 pages
ISBN: 978 180 3368 658
