Who Will You Save? by Gareth L Powell

I would like to thank Titan for a copy of this collection in exchange for a fair and honest review

Publisher - Titan

Published - Out Now

Price - £9.99 paperback £7.99 ebook

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.

Ranging from the dead sands of Mars to the half-flooded remnants of Amsterdam, from the seedy backstreets of Buenos Aires to the gravity well of a singularity, these action-packed tales explore mind-bending ideas through the eyes of unforgettable and all-too-human characters.

As their lives implode around them, will they use the moment to save their own skins, or to find a way to make up for past misdeeds?

Who will they save?

Who would you save?

This entertaining and thought-provoking collection features work drawn from Powell’s twenty-year career as a writer, his best-loved stories, and previously unpublished material revisiting the expansive settings of his acclaimed science fiction sagas.

Things on my mind this week feeding into a few things I’ve been reading. What is science fiction for? The idea of it to help warn us of going down the wrong path I finding worrying because where we currently would suggest that’s hugely ineffective. Is it pure entertainment? Sometimes we rarely do things we don’t enjoy but I usually need a bit more than shiny battles and tech to stay with something. Perhaps for me science fiction is about the hope that if we put our minds to it there may be another way out of this as the song might have said (or the Cylons it’s complicated). Which made great timing for me to read Who Will You Save? an expansive collection of acclaimed U.K. science fiction author Gareth L Powell’s short stories and as well as a fascinating look at how his work has changed over a long period it managed to be a bit of all all the above reminding me why I enjoy this genre so much.

In this collection. I really enjoyed the following stories

Sunsets and Hamburgers - a strange surreal opening to the collection as a man finds himself waking on an island and not knowing where he got there. It’s a weird dreamy story where time and space seem to be played with leading to a bigger revelation. It could easily have ended in a traditionally dark section but as often appears in future stories there is an element of accepting its time to explore the world and see what happens next. An interesting replay of this comes again in a later take ‘Movies and Bottled Beer’ but I think this version works more for me

Ride The Blue Horse - I get past my disappointment at no blue horses in this story but I did like the wrecked future delivered in quick shorthand that our characters find themselves in. Two people living a monotonous life and seeing a chance to take it even if the odds of success are low. It’s a lot of fun.

From The Table of My Memory I’ll Wipe Away All Trivial Fond Records - I really lied this as it’s the kind of story only science fiction or fantasy could do. Do genetically enhanced immortals meet up every few centuries for a chat and one always has decided to edit their memories making the chats tricky. However a chance discovery out in space may finally explain who one of these characters is: the story’s final revelation is a delight to read.

Railroad Angel - off to 1968 New Nexico for a story that surprised me as Powell takes a famous figure of US counterculture and creates a Saf story around their final moments. Again the question recurring in these stories is don’t you want to see what else is out there appears and is handled very beautifully.

The Redoubt - this feels a more melancholic tale in dialogue with the earlier Sunset and Hamburgers two almost lovers on their last night on holiday discover an alien object and get the chance to see the universe. The set up is again that mix of the surreal and the more old school Saf but the emotional beats of the big decision and the desire to get away from this world is quite powerful again.

Red Lights and Pain - a glorious violet battle on the streets of Amsterdam dealing with time travellers from the future facing each other. A twist of Highlander combined with a fascinating set of revelations make this hugely enjoyable and makes the reader re-appraise the story too with a view on consequences.

Entropic Angel - in a post apocalyptic Wales a small village is being terrorised in winter by an angel sipping all their electricity. The local vicar tried to keep her parishioners calm as they face potential death but help comes in the form of the magnificently named and carmine lipstick wesrising Kenya Vick and he says he can kill an angel. Oh this was just delightful fun mixing setting, action and characters you just click with Eve without knowing mic about them.

Eleven Minutes - a mischievous story set in NASA as a Martian probe explored the landscape. It uses the science of the time gap between messages for the planets to build up tension as to what may be happening and then ends in a very amusing quote daft but very satisfying way!

The Wind Through The Tall Grass - a really impressive story of explorers who find a mysterious anomaly and verytije our narrator goes in it time and possibly universes change. Powell plays with may many bosons of our future and where we could go next and our narrator had to decide what they want to do about it. Again the theme of the collection that you don’t have to settle for just one way of life filters through here and I really liked the variations explored.

Line Across The Darkness - the story told of humanity’s last stand against an overwhelming alien force and how we won at a cost. In shorthand Powell created the setting and the cunning solution but also managed to add poignancy to the cost of this action too. A really impressive jewel of a tale.

What Would Nicolas Cage Do? - The final story as well as that fantastic title is interestingly also in dialogue with Sunsets from the start of the collection. A man sorting his life out almost appears to get a scone chance when the world ends. He awakens in a very different world and gets a choice. Do you stick to your principles and hope for the best or do something else? A story where you ponder what would you do or would you be kind even if not perhaps the guaranteed best outcome for you?

We have a few stories featuring a tough as nails not quite secret agent or mernceary called Ann Szkatula in Fallout we have her as a roadie/bodyguard to a boy and boating a ruined part of the U.K. the desolation is ultimately shown to be not quite of this world and Ann’s former life comes back quite violently to haunt her: it’s well paced and as this collection shows Powell is very good at kinetic action sequences be they in space organs to hand. The revelations in this are followed up some time later in The New Ships where Ann finds one of her relatives has got himself in trouble. The stakes here are high, the battle sequences are very well handled and the final revelations really underline Ann Szkatula is not be be messed with. A story with more than one packed punch.

One of Powell’s most popular works is their Embers of War trilogy where we meet the cybernetic almost human AI Mind Trouble Dog a former galactic warship turned rescue vessel. The collection features a number of tales set in the same universe.

Waiting for God Knows - this could act as an early prologue for the series. Here Trouble Dog is still a warship and with her sibling Carnivore battleships had been called for a virtual reality catch up. It’s a prelude to battle set in the Roman Colliseum and Powell neatly foreshadows the future dynamics of the series AI characters we will meet again and the big question is there more to life than fighting?

An Examination of The Trolley Problem Using A Sentient Warship and A rotating Black Hole - a once fierce battleship is now working quieting as a giant combine harvester and is called up for one more mission. I like the strange turns this story gets and despite that hunourous title and harvester joke then the story turns quite serious with a huge decision on which trillions of lives depend that really invested me in the outcome. ASo what would you do?

As you can tell this is a very large collection and I was impressed how w can see themes and indeed Powell’s style of storytelling shift from very early post cyberpunk SF settings to something feeling a lot more adjacent to hopepunk SF. We get away from the pure space opera their novels are perhaps best known for and have a range of tales all I think having some emotional hook as well as some form of kinetic action to them. Fans of science fiction in short form should definitely enjoy this and highly recommended!