[Post originally published: Apr 10, 2026]

My guest today is award-winning British author Gareth L. Powell, who has a wide and impressive range of science fiction stories out there, both short and long. He’s also starting to publish horror under the pen name G.L. Powell, so I suggest you keep an eye on this persona too!

(Btw, I had the honor of having Gareth blurbing my Nebula finalist novella with his name on the cover!)

Gareth is also Managing Editor at Stars and Sabers Publishing.

Tell me more about something you have published recently (or will publish soon) and what made you write it.

My most recent book, Jitterbug, came out on the 3rd March. It’s a fast-moving story with bounty hunters, space pirates, and ruthless politicians all scrambling to get a handle on an unfolding conspiracy in the remains of our solar system, which has been reshaped into segments of a Dyson sphere by parties unknown… This was my attempt to infuse a near-future space adventure with the pace and intrigue of a thriller, as well as the kind of huge planetary engineering concepts you find in works such as Ringworld and Halo.

What is an underrated piece of fiction that you think didn’t get enough attention?

A few years ago, I wrote a small town murder mystery with supernatural elements called Ragged Alice, which was set in a decaying Welsh seaside town. As the son of a Welshman, I’ve always had an appreciation of the Welsh landscape, which is spectacular but also can be quite eerie after dark. I poured a lot of my childhood memories and that twin love/apprehension relationship into the story, which revolved around an alcoholic detective with the ability to literally see the guilt staining people’s souls. It was published by TorDotCom but never really seemed to find its audience. Those who read it loved it, but I think it failed to show up on the radar of crime/horror readers, and that’s a real shame because it contains some of my best writing.

Show me an illustration that you love!

I love Marcel Deneuve’s cover art for the Illumicrate hardback edition of Jitterbug.

We’re in a time where reality struggles to keep distanced from science fiction. How do you see happenings in the real world affecting your writing and the themes you broach in your pieces?

We’re living in a time in which the warnings of past science fiction authors aren’t just being ignored, the very things they warned us about—totalitarian governments, artificial intelligence, 24 hour monitoring by corporations and the state - are actively being pursued and developed. So, it’s no longer enough just to write stories featuring dire prophecies. All those prophecies are coming true faster than we can publish them. Instead, maybe we need to focus on what it takes to survive: love, cooperation, education, and science. The original Star Trek inspired a generation of engineers, and the most recent series, Starfleet Academy, has a lot to say about inclusion, healing, and rebuilding a fair and equitable society after a divisive tragedy. There’s a lot of room in science fiction for escapism (a very necessary quality in dark times), but there’s also a fantastic opportunity for inspiration. To show people what’s possible and give them futures to which they can aspire.

Let us show the newer writers that they are not alone! Tell me something that made you feel bad (a rejection, an empty signing session, a very harsh critique) and how you got over it (or not).

It’s every author’s nightmare. You finish writing for the night, save your manuscript to the cloud and go to bed. But when you wake up and turn on your computer the next morning, the file has gone. Unfortunately, that was the exact scenario I experienced while writing my tenth novel, Descendant Machine. The draft vanished from my machine and all attempts at recovery failed. I threw myself onto the sofa and lay there, mind awhirl, gut knotted with fear and grief. Was I going to have to repeat the last three months of struggle? Did I have the strength to start writing again from the beginning? Could I even bring myself to repeat that story again, one word at a time?

I got over it thanks to the outpourings of sympathy and horror from my online followers and fellow authors. With their good wishes and the support and belief of my loved ones, I managed to get up off the couch and start writing again. And as it turned out, the new draft was very different and much better than the original.