This evening I will be off to Bristol for the May Fringe event featuring Emma Newman and Piotr Åšwietlik. Emma will be reading from her Clarke Award finalist novel, After Atlas, which is a fabulous book.

For those of you who can’t be there, I have the podcasts from February available. Sadly the audio quality is not great. I’m still learning the new venue. It is great to not have any background noise, but the speakers are up on the wall so it is hard to get a recording that focuses on the speaker rather than anything else going on in the room. Hopefully we’ll be getting some new tech soon that will allow us to record direct from the sound system.

Anyway, with profuse apologies to our readers for the poor quality, here’s what we have for you from February.

First up there is Gareth L. Powell. He read the whole of his short story, “Entropic Angel”, which is also the title of his new short fiction collection. It isn’t quite as sweary as an Ack-Ack Macaque book, but it does still get an explicit tag. Some of you may remember that the story was initially published by Wizard’s Tower Press in the anthology, Dark Spires.

Our second reader for February is another well-known local name, Pete Sutton. He read to us from his debut novel, Sick City Syndrome. It is more supernatural thriller than anything else (it has ghosts), but Pete managed to find a fairly science fictional bit to read for us.

Finally for February we had the Q&A. Gareth tells us more about what’s in the the short story collection, and Pete tells us more about what you can expect from his novel. We discover how “Entropic Angel” was inspired by pigeon poo, and we discuss whether science fiction is a better way of understanding the world today than so-called “realist” fiction.

Tom and I are managing to get caught up on the audio. Hopefully we’ll have March (with Paul Cornell) up soon. I have an incentive, because April is the open mic and therefore has me in it.