Guest post written by Who Will You Save? author Gareth L. Powell
Gareth L. Powell is the author of 20+ books, including novels, novellas, short fiction collections, and a non-fiction guide for aspiring authors. He has twice won the British Science Fiction Association Award for Best Novel and has become one of the most shortlisted authors in the award’s 50-year history. He has also been a finalist for the Locus Award (twice), the British Fantasy Award, the Seiun Award, and the Canopus Award. You can find him online at www.garethlpowell.com and on social media @garethlpowell
About Who Will You Save?: Action-packed and thought-provoking stories ranging across the dead sands of Mars to the backstreets of Buenos Aires, from the febrile mind of BSFA Award-winning author Gareth L. Powell. 32 stories featuring the author’s most celebrated tales alongside all new material, a thrilling experience for established fans and new readers alike.
Over the past two decades, I’ve produced a sizeable body of short stories. The trouble was, in comparison to my novels, very few people had read them. Many had been published in magazines, anthologies or small press collections, while others had yet to see print. This meant many readers familiar with my novel-length work were entirely unaware of this facet of my written work.
Therefore, I was delighted when Titan Books agreed to publish a collection of my selected short fiction, pulling 32 of the best of these stories into a widely published volume for the first time.
My first dilemma was whether to revise them.
Together, these 32 stories mapped the outline of my career as a writer, starting with ‘A Necklace of Ivy’ that dates back to the early 1990s, and the Gibson-influenced ‘Morning Star’ and ‘Silver Bullet’ from the early 2000s.
Obviously, I’ve grown and changed as an author, and maybe if I were writing them today, I would have written some of those earlier stories differently. So, there was a temptation to go back and revise the earlier work.
However, I couldn’t shake the feeling that doing so would be somehow dishonest. If I changed them, they wouldn’t be the same stories anymore. They’d feel airbrushed. And by tidying them up, I knew I’d run the risk of killing what made them special.
So, I decided to settle for correcting typos and factual errors, but leave the stories essentially as they first appeared, with only the most minor and necessary of revisions suggested by my editor.
I think the result feels more authentic, and more representative of the journey I’ve been on all these years. And with these corrections in place, I’m happy to consider this collection now contains the definitive, author-approved versions of these pieces.
My second dilemma was how to present the stories in a way that made sense.
My first thought was to order them chronologically, as they were written, starting with the earliest, and giving the reader chance to see how my style has evolved. But somehow, that didn’t seem the right way to do it, and arranging them alphabetically just seemed daft.
Eventually, after a lot of thought and some input from my editor at Titan, I decided to approach the project the same way I’d construct a mix-tape or playlist.
Now, back in my school days, I produced hundreds of mix-tapes. Mostly for my own amusement, and sometimes to share great tunes with friends. And I learned that when you’re putting one together, the order is at least as important as the content.
For those unfamiliar with the concept, the creation of a mix-tape involved laboriously recording one song at a time onto a blank cassette tape, in real time. These tapes held 45 minutes of music on each side, so compiling one would take a whole evening, and you had to get your timings right to avoid cutting short the last song, or leaving a large silent gap. Playlists are so much easier!
So with all this in mind, I took the stories and imagined them as tunes. Some were light and whimsical; others darker and heavier. By carefully mixing them in order to balance theme and create pacing and mood, I hope I’ve managed to assemble a collection that flows seamlessly and feels coherent, rather than just a random jumble.
