I ask this question, because it wasn’t something I’d considered before we started work on THE WORLD AND THE STARS.

If it is to be a collection of all your own work, then it’s not so complicated. But for a multi-author compilation? Just where do you start?

A theme works well, if you start out with one in mind and go looking for stories that fit.

In our case, the idea of an anthology developed out of the wish to showcase the talents of our writer’s group – a group that has been meeting pretty much once a month for over (ouch!) twenty five years now! Between us, we have many professional sales, of short stories, novels and non-fiction work, yet we still find the critiquing skills and unique perceptions of each member to be helpful enough to continue our long association. Members have come and gone, but the core remains. Minus one very important person.

This book is dedicated to Peter T. Garratt, founder of our group, who died tragically young.

Once we had decided upon this focus, we expanded the collection somewhat beyond the immediate group, to other authors who were friends and associates of Peter. Hence the large number of contributors (the group size is regularly around 9 members), and the wide variety of stories to be found within the pages of this amazing anthology.

Peter founded and led of our group – a sub-group of the Montpelier Literary Society in Brighton (UK) – though I believe he already had a fair number of sales under his belt before it began. Over his career he sold more than 30 stories to a variety of publications, including Asimov’s Science Fiction, Interzone and several anthologies for Mammoth Books, with themes as disparate as Arthurian, Shakespearean, and land and sea battles.

It should come as no surprise then, that to reflect this, the stories in this anthology are equally wide in scope. Our hard-working editor, Chris Butler, was presented with a wealth of options from which to choose the final pieces and, as he states in his Introduction, his final decisions were based more on the imagination and craft of the authors than on any distinction between science fiction and fantasy, resulting in a truly diverse collection.

Hopefully the end result will provide something special within its pages for every reader, no matter which end of the spectrum of speculative fiction they favour.

Would you like to review this book?

If you missed it, you can see a run down of the variety of stories, both science fiction and fantasy, in yesterday’s post, here, and if even just a few of those stories intrigue you, why not grab a copy FOR FREE, and leave us an honest review on Amazon? You don’t even have to read them all, just pick your favourites – I’m sure there’s something in there for everyone.

If you’d like a FREE copy, either leave a comment below with your email address and the format you’d like (mobi, epub or PDF), or message me directly from my ABOUT ME page.