The initial inspiration for the novel came to me while my wife and I were on our 'third honeymoon', a three-week trip to the US. In Newport, Rhode Island, we came across the street of vast houses built in the early 20th century by some of the then-richest families in America, e.g. the Rockefellers, the Gettys. As you go along the street, each house you come to seems bigger than the last, which is probably the intention, each family trying to outdo the other. And I thought to myself, What if families like these didn't run just one country's industrial base but the entire world? It was one of those lightning-flash ideas, and the concept grew and flourished almost instantaneously. By the end of the holiday, I had a rough plot in my head and the main character's name: Provender Gleed.

Why 'Provender Gleed', you ask? Beats me. It just sounded right. It had a nice ring. The forename speaks of mercantilism and bountifulness, and the surname ... well, I thought it was a nonexistent word I'd made it up, but apparently it's a real word, meaning a small spark or ember. Which also suited the character well, he being a young man whose zest for life is kindled like a flame during the course of the story.

Anyway, it so happened that Worldstorm was next on the list of novels to write, so I left Provender Gleed to germinate for a while.

Now, here's the weird bit. Fast forward a year or so from the above 'third honeymoon', and my wife and I are on holiday again, this time in the West Country, Somerset to be precise, with a small baby Monty in tow. I've finished writing Worldstorm and I'm planning on taking a breather and trying to get to grips with the whole fatherhood thing. Provender Gleed is still bubbling away nicely on the back burner but I have no intention of beginning work on it because I'm pretty exhausted, what with post-first-draft comedown and general new-parent sleep deprivation.

Then, one day, we decide to go for a trip on the Taunton-to-Minehead steam railway. While waiting to board the train, we get chatting with the station master, one of the volunteers who keep the line going, and then I notice something. Blow me down if the name on the man's lapel badge isn't 'P. Gleed'. Spooky, huh? (Turns out his first name is Peter, but then it was hardly likely to be Provender, was it?) So I take this as a sign from above, an omen, a nudge from the gods of coincidence. The world is telling me I need to start writing the book. That very day, I get to work on the plot. Once we're back home, I launch myself into actual writing. Four months later I have a first draft done, which is record time for me. I can't remember when I enjoyed writing a book more. I had a laugh throughout. Maybe it was the sleep deprivation.

Provender Gleed is fun, exuberant, comedic, but also with dark overtones, a serious message, and (I think) credible, humane, in some cases loveable characters. It's also allowed me to indulge my love of wordplay (cf. Days, Gig). I'm immensely proud of it.

Worldstorm is a big fantasy novel, something I could never have envisaged myself writing, but then never say never when it comes to envisaging your own future. The setting is a world much like ours was about two centuries ago but with one crucial difference: everyone in it is born with some form of super power, latent till the onset of puberty. These powers are divided into four categories, Air, Fire, Water and Earth (named after the four Aristotelian elements, of course). I've called these "Inclinations", and within each Inclination there are various subdivisions, each representing a particular kind of power. The powers themselves are the sort of abilities that might be considered feasible in modern paranormal circles, i.e. telepathy, telekinesis, pyrokinesis, great strength, and so on. In other words, we're not talking about laser-like eye beams or tossing spider web from your wrists.

Added to this is the titular Worldstorm, a great howling nightmare of climatic carnage which roves the planet, wreaking death and destruction wherever it goes.

So much for the premise. As for the plot, it weaves together three narrative strands which are at first seemingly unconnected but, of course, prove not to be. And to say any more would be to give away too much. I'd like this to be a book full of surprises for the reader. (It certainly was for me when writing it, in spite of the fact that I plotted it as tightly as I've ever plotted anything.) I've never attempted something on such a large canvas before, and I might go so far as to say that Worldstorm is a Dickensian piece, in size and scope if not execution. I'm very pleased with the result. I must, also, categorically state that there is going to be no sequel. I know I've muttered about doing one, or even two, but I've now decided firmly against the idea. Worldstorm is a standalone epic, and proud of it.

The idea for Gig came to me, as ideas sometimes do, while I was out on a run. Gollancz had just republished the first four PS Publishing novellas in flip-book paperback editions (my How The Other Half Lives was paired with Graham Joyce's superb Leningrad Nights). These, of course, echoed the format of the famous Ace Doubles series. What came into my mind, somewhere on the spine of the South Downs, was the notion of back-to-back novellas which mirrored each other and were interdependent, each telling one half of a story. I decided, in addition, that the novellas would make plentiful use of palindromes – mirror-image words and phrases – and, further, that the over-all structure would be palindromic, content reflecting form and vice versa. I'd been hankering to write a story set in the music biz, which I know a little bit about, and I felt that theme and execution would suit each other very well. By the time I'd finished my run, I had the plot worked out, the two principal characters had taken shape, and the only possible title for the project, Gig, had suggested itself.

Pete Crowther, at PS Publishing, completely 'got' the book – not only the basic conceit but my vision of how it should look as a product. The only way it would work is if neither novella was obviously the main one. They had to be perfect equals. The jacket had to be designed in such a way that the reader could start from either end, not feeling the novellas were in a preordained sequence. The result is such a fine-looking book, with such a cunningly designed dustjacket, it fair brings tears to your eyes. Throw in a couple of introductions by Eric Brown, who also played along wonderfully with the whole idea, and you have a package to be proud of.

We're hoping that, as well as the current limited-edition run, Gig will come out as a mass-market paperback, PS's first such, perhaps sometime in 2005.

The book is set in a near-future England which has been ostracised by the rest of the world following widespread civil disorder and the collapse of government. People are surviving, despite the frequent missile attacks launched by the so-called International Community which are intended to improve the situation but only make it worse. A semblance of societal order remains, not least in one small southern town called Downbourne, where the book's hero, Fen Morris, a schoolteacher, lives with his wife Moira.

Fen and Moira are undergoing severe marital difficulties, which they do their best to hide from the rest of the townspeople. Then Downbourne is invaded by a marauding band of Londoners called the British Bulldogs. They've come to kick arse and kidnap womenfolk … and one of the womenfolk they kidnap is Moira. After some soul-searching, Fen sets off after her, and what follows is a picaresque tale, with pitfalls and pratfalls and moments of serenity and moments of trauma, as Fen travels across a country on the verge of a nervous breakdown and discovers all sorts of things about the nature of dominance and the dominance of nature.

It's a good book. I like it.

My first published short story, 'Satisfaction Guaranteed', came second in a competition held by the late FEAR magazine. The prize was a signed, slip-cased, illustrated, limited-edition copy of Douglas E. Winter's horror anthology Prime Evil. It's a handsome-looking book, a very nice prize. Since then I've had a further twenty-odd short stories published, several in anthologies edited by that fine chap (and, as we have seen, possessor of impeccable taste in fiction) Peter Crowther. I've also co-written three short stories with this same fellow, including an Elric adventure (published in Tales of the White Wolf) and 'Even Beggars Would Ride', a story that was rejected for DC Comics' Sandman prose collection but then appeared, in slightly revised form, in Cemetery Dance and The Third Alternative to great acclaim and was short-listed for a British Fantasy Award.

Imagined Slights comprises a baker's dozen of my solo short-fiction works, including the above-mentioned 'Satisfaction Guaranteed'. I really enjoy the creative sprint that is the short story. I often write one as a break from the marathon of a novel. If I'm getting bogged down in a novel, a short story can act as a sort of palate-cleanser, a way of clearing the head. I like being able to start with a first line and just let the story lead me on, travelling hopefully, knowing I'll reach my final destination in just a day or so. Novels, being so much bigger, need to be plotted. Short stories tend to evolve of their own accord, and are all the more satisfying for that.

An alien race who have chosen Earth as a tourist destination, the Foreigners are tall, golden-robed, elegant and unknowable. Their arrival has brought peace and stability to the planet, and no one wants to see this peace and stability maintained more than Jack Parry, a captain with the Foreign Policy Police. His job, in the beautiful offshore resort-city of New Venice, is to keep Foreign/human relations on an even keel … so when a Foreigner turns up dead in a hotel room, alongside an equally dead human, Parry is keen to get to the bottom of the incident as quickly as possible. Matters are complicated by the fact that the human is a Siren, someone paid handsomely to entertain Foreigners using the one human faculty that seems to truly delight them, the singing voice. There's something a little unsettling about this practice, even a little sordid – but Parry has more than just anti-Siren prejudice to contend with. There's also the Xenophobes, a political movement with the avowed aim of ridding the world of all Foreigners and restoring humankind's destiny into its own hands.

The Foreigners is about the culture clash between those who have wealth and those who crave that wealth. The book's genesis came about on a trip to the Far East, where I saw at first hand just how corrupting an influence Western tourism has had on countries such as Thailand, not only in the form of the sex industry but in every aspect of life. Almost everything there has – understandably – become geared to making money off Westerners, so I thought it would be interesting to turn the tables and have the whole world, Westerners especially, in thrall to aliens who have seemingly limitless wealth and an appetite for the best (or perhaps worst) we have to offer them. I chose the murder-mystery format to tell this story mostly because I'd always wanted to write a murder-mystery but also because I wanted to do one that wasn't a whodunit so much as a whydunit. Why would someone want to kill something as apparently beneficial a Foreigner? What could they hope to gain? I also thought it would be interesting to have a central character who was a relentless optimist, someone who has seen the worst that people can do to one another – as a London policeman, Parry was involved in violently quelling a riot – and is nonetheless determined to believe that we can rise above our baser natures. The Foreigners tells how he is progressively proved wrong in this belief. Parry finds that darkness in the human soul is prevalent and ineradicable – even in his own soul. For a novel set in a whitewashed, sun-drenched city, The Foreigners proves to contain an awful lot of darkness.

Dave Golder, editor of SFX, named The Foreigners as his choice for best original novel of 2000.

Included with Graham Joyce's Leningrad Nights in Foursight (Gollancz, 2000) and Binary: 1 (Millennium, 2000)

William Ian North is an absurdly successful moneymaker. His nigh-unimaginable wealth gives him the ability to found and topple governments, ruin nations, even start wars. But down in the cellar of his mansion lies the secret of his success and it's a close-to-home secret in more ways that one. It's also a surprisingly nasty secret, and nastily surprising.

I was one of the first two authors invited to contribute a novella to the prestigious line of limited-edition chaPbooks produced by PS Publishing (the other was Graham Joyce). The prime instigator and grand high poobah of PS Publishing is none other than my friend and sometime collaborator Peter Crowther, but nothing is to be inferred from this fact other than that Pete has impeccable taste in fiction and, also, knew he could trust me not to complain if the PS experiment did not work out. In the event, PS has gone on to be a great success (I always knew it would). Its first four titles were reprinted by Gollancz as Foursight.

The brief for the novella was absolutely open. The only thing I had to take into consideration was length. Otherwise I could do whatever I wanted. I mulled for some time and came up with an idea for a detective story set in the world of repertory theatre during the 1950s. I did lots of background research, fleshed out a plot, then promptly changed tack and produced this little moral tale about the price of being rich. I wrote 'How the Other Half Lives' in four days, breakneck speed for me, scribbling the words down as fast as my hand would allow. I have to confess I was drinking an awful lot of coffee at the time - the J.K. Rowling Method, as it's known - but it was also one of those rare, magical instances where a tale tells itself, spilling out of you as though beamed into your brain from another dimension. New Agers call it 'channelling'. Writers call it 'jolly good luck'.

After a big ship, why not a big shop?

Days, in fact, the department store of the book's title, is more than just a shop – it is a mammoth temple to Mammon. Everything and anything you could possibly want to buy is available on its shelves. Everything except, perhaps, happiness. That, at least, is what Frank Hubble feels. Frank has been a store detective at Days for thirty-three years and has finally decided to call it quits. The rigours of the job are driving him mad. All that time spent blending into the background means he has begun losing touch with reality. He cannot even see his reflection in mirrors any more. However, on what he fully expects to be his last day at Days, fate has other plans for him, including a war between two adjacent departments that is just about turn incendiary, an internecine struggle among the seven brothers who run the store, and a female shoplifter who seems to like him rather a lot.

Days is at once a satire and an action-adventure novel. I pitched it to my editor as "Blade Runner meets Are You Being Served…?". Department stores have fascinated me since I was small. My mother's family used to own one on Oxford Street, and visiting the place as a child I was always impressed by the size of it, amused by the old-fashioned deference of the staff, and intrigued by the intricate network of creaky old lifts and escalators, particularly the private lift that led up to the top-floor boardroom complex. No doubt all of this percolated away inside my brain for years before I decided to write the book. I also wanted to point up the relentless absurdity of consumerism. I hate being thought of as a 'consumer'. I hate the demeaning connotations of the word. I hate this idea that people have been reduced to nothing more than creatures that exist only to eat and shit, like locusts. In Days, I want to show the idiocy of buying things for buying's sake. Hence the riots at sales (which in the book are termed "shopping mauls", ho ho) and the window shoppers who sit all day watching the window displays, mesmerised. I was living in America at the time I wrote the book. I don't think that's unconnected with the book's contents.

Days was short-listed for the 1998 Arthur C. Clarke Award, and was beaten to the prize (as were so many other books that year) by Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow.

The Hope is a vast ocean liner, five miles long and two miles wide and one mile high, which lurches through the waves on a voyage to nowhere, carrying a million passengers in her rusting belly. After some thirty years at sea, everyone aboard her has gone just a little bit loopy, and violent death has become a way of life. All sorts of horrors lurk in the ship's darkest corners – rumours made flesh, unspeakable creatures, peripheral-vision insanities. The only certainty is this: the Hope, which was once a multimillionaire philanthropist's dream, has become a floating nightmare.

Believe it or not, I had the idea for the book while on a cross-Channel ferry, coming back from a holiday in France. It struck me that here, with all these shops and cabins and casinos and cinemas, was a seagoing city … so what if there was a ship like this actually as large as a city? (This was thirteen years ago. During the past decade, such boats have been built.) Back then, I was also deeply concerned about environmental degradation – I still am, but no longer to the point of morbidity – and so my big-ship idea seemed the perfect vehicle for a doomy eco-fable about humankind's unfailing ability to ruin its surroundings. The connected short-story format came about simply because I didn't have the confidence to write a full-length novel. In the event, the stories emerged exactly in the sequence in which they appear, and a larger narrative took shape by itself in the course of the writing, giving the book a unifying plot arc that, to me, more than qualifies it to be described as a novel.

The Hope prompted that august journal The Mail on Sunday to nominate me as one of ten first-time novelists to watch in the 1990s (the only other one you may have heard of was Hanif Kureishi).

I love a good zombie movie, me, and I've long been harbouring thoughts of writing a story in that genre. So when Barrington Stoke told me they were starting a new line, Most Wanted, for Reluctant Readers who aren't teens (i.e. adults), I thought I'd have a bash at giving them a tale about the shambling undead. But I didn't want it to be about mindless cannibalistic hordes laying siege to innocents holed up in some self-contained environment somewhere, because let's face it, that idea's been done to death. And then resurrected and done to death again (bullet through the brain, it's the only way to be sure).

Zombies in the military seemed to be the way to go - commando cadavers, Frankenstein fusiliers, grunts who grunt. And that's how Dead Brigade came into existence.

It's double the length of the usual Barrington Stoke title, so I class it as a novella rather than a short story. It's also gory, funny, nasty, cynical, and sad. If you don't feel rather sorry for the book's half-living heroes by the end, then I haven't done my job properly.

The idea for Kill Swap came to me, as the author's note in the book states, when I was lying awake at four o'clock one morning. I'm not an insomniac, at least not much of one, but I do sometimes find myself snapping into consciousness at around 3 or 4 a.m. with my brain whirling full of thoughts, often bad ones (what my friend Peter Crowther calls "the rats").

On this occasion, what waltzed into my head was a simple idea: what reason would someone have to kill a person they'd never met? I was due to write another Barrington Stoke title at this point anyway, and I suddenly realised I had the germ of a story right there. I freely admit that the initial part of the tale is a crib from Strangers On A Train (as pointed out in the review below) but the rest of it, with all its twists and turns, is pure spontaneous, original invention.

Cold Keep came about largely because I wanted to write a story with a tough, resourceful young female protagonist and because the title, which popped into my head one morning, was just too good not to have a tale attached to it. I wasn't sure that the setting (an isolated fortress city shivering in the arctic wastes of a post-new-Ice-Age world) was going to work, until I came up with the idea of the heroine, Yana, having a weapon that applied uniquely to her environment: an axe made of solid ice. Once that was there, everything else fell into place.

It was only after the book was plotted that I saw the movie The Village and realised there were certain superficial similarities between the two. I decided to press ahead anyway, because (a) nobody has a monopoly on ideas, and (b) I had the idea first. So there, M. Night Shyamalamadingdong!

This is the third of my Barrington Stoke books for Reluctant Readers. The concept is a Big Idea which I've had kicking around in my head for a while, about the nature of divinity and the corresponding relationship between human beings and lesser creatures. This I've managed to compress into a small, neat fable about two boys: one, Daniel, the narrator, a reasonably normal kid, the other, his friend Jason, a high-flying eccentric who refuses to accept the world on its own terms and is constantly challenging it and trying to refashion it. Their friendship is put to the test when Jason commits an act of hubris which spells dire consequences for them both.

Like Provender Gleed, Ant God was written at white-heat speed. From five o'clock one morning till lunchtime, in fact. Which means it has a bouncy energy and vitality, while at the same time carrying a meaty, stop-and-think concept. Again, I'm very proud of it.

My second book for Barrington Stoke rewrites the short story which first appeared in the Destination: Unknown anthology (see below for details). During the rewriting process I not only was able not only to clarify the original tale's concept and themes but also to add in a great deal of background detail which improved the over-all ambience. The discipline of distilling the prose, in order to make it suitable for its target audience, made me think much harder about what I was trying to achieve. The result is a very different and, for my money, superior version.

Wings is an adaptation of a story which appears in the aforementioned Imagined Slights, rewritten for what are known as "reluctant readers", which means readers in their early teens with a lower-than-average reading age. The company putting it out is called Barrington Stoke, and the reason I'd recommend anyone of any age to take a look at it isn't because it's a brilliant story - although of course it is - but because it has illustrations provided by Ian Miller. Absolutely fucking gorgeous illustrations provided by Ian Miller. Beautiful, finely detailed, etching-type pictures that make me weep with amazement and envy.

Adenydd, The Welsh-language edition of Wings, is the book whose existence I discovered online. See the May 29th 2003 news item, entitled 'Amusing Internet Anecdote - previously unheard-of Lovegrove book discovered'.

The Hand That Feeds came about when Pete (Crowther) asked me if I wanted to revive the old collaborative team and write a story with him for a White Wolf anthology based on one of that company's magic games. I can't remember the name of the game, but it had lots of rules about plot, character and so on, which we observed for the most part. Nonetheless the story was bounced. We then redrafted it, cutting out the game-related references, and sold it as a chaPbook. It was subsequently nominated for a Bram Stoker Award and a British Fantasy Society Award (and there's a lesson for aspiring writers to take note of there but I'm not quite sure what it is).

The story is set in San Francisco just as World War II ends and features a team of magicians known as the Six. There are plans for a further five novellas about the Six which will, in order, build into a full-length novel. Unfortunately, I'm as busy as hell and so is Pete, so when we're going to get together to write these novellas is anyone's guess.

A short-story collaboration that ended up five hundred pages long, Escardy Gap was pure fun from start to finish. Pete and I set out to concoct an affectionate and respectful homage to Something Wicked This Way Comes, but, as the book evolved, we found we were creating something entirely different and altogether darker. The typical mid-Western small town of the title is visited by a train bearing the Company, a troupe of performers whose aims are, at first, as difficult to discern as their various talents. Over the course of a long (and unpleasant) weekend, the truth about the Company emerges - I'll give you a clue, they're not nice people - and it becomes clear to the residents of Escardy Gap that their town is under siege from within and that there is, apparently, no escape. At the same time, a framing story unfolds, featuring the author of a novel called Escardy Gap who finds, as his book takes shape, that the burdens and responsibilities of creatorship are much greater than he ever thought.

Big and bizarre and tongue-in-cheek and never going quite where you expect it to, Escardy Gap was the product of numerous long, long telephone conversations and the baton-passing technique of collaboration whereby each of us would leave the other a problem to clear up, resulting in twists and turns that neither of us could have predicted. The book was very well received - although critics compared it with King more than Bradbury, which just goes to prove how unread critics can be - and found its way on SFX's reader-voted list of the top fifty SF/Fantasy novels of all time, ranked above such notoriously shabby fare as The Stars My Destination and I, Robot. This was as much of a surprise to its authors as anyone.

Collected with five other stories (by Maggie Furey, Stephen Baxter, Ken MacLeod, Pat Cadigan and Eric Brown) set in the same universe, in Web 2028.

Computopia is/was a piece of work-for-hire and my first attempt at something for younger readers. The six authors involved in the second Web series - The Web 2028 - met one afternoon at the Orion offices to brainstorm an over-all plot arc for the six books. A quick toot of my own trumpet here: I suggested we inflict an alien invasion on the world of the Web, and the idea was immediately and enthusiastically adopted.

I wrote the book in two weeks, which is incredibly quick work for me, although I'd have some way to go to beat Steve Baxter, who did his in four days. I thought it would be fun to take the idea of the Web - an all-encompassing cyber-environment - and use it to satirise the whole IBM/AppleMac conflict, so I created a rival to the Web, the Net, and fitted an adventure plot around this concept.

I enjoyed the process of writing for kids. I found the need for absolute precision of language liberating. I want to do more work in this vein, and indeed I have a concept for a series which, I'm afraid, I am not prepared to divulge at this juncture.

The Guardians was pure work-for-hire. The basic concept was dreamed up by one of the higher-ups at Orion Books - a one-line idea about two races of aliens waging war on Earth - which I then developed and fleshed out, adding characters, history and basically everything else. I was really into conspiracy stuff at the time, secret alien interference in history, all that sort of thing, and so were lots of other people, but the books didn't do too well because, I think, we hit the wave just a little too late. It had crested already and the world was tiring of all things "X". Also, the Sci-Fi Channel were supposed to be doing some cross-promotion for the books and, for reasons of their own, didn't. I'm not blaming anyone. In the end, it comes down to the fact that the timing just wasn't right. (Unless, of course, I had inadvertently got too close to the truth and the Secret Rulers of the World did all they could to prevent the books from reaching a wider audience.)

Of the two Guardians titles in existence, I prefer the second, Berserker, because with the first, The Krilov Continuum, I was finding my feet and trying to adjust my style to a more pulp-fictional feel. With Berserker I got into my stride and there are bits of that book that really kick butt. It's a shame I couldn't finish the series, but there you go.

All publications are UK unless otherwise specified.

• 'Satisfaction Guaranteed' [FEAR, October 1990]

• 'Nana' [Imagined Slights]

• 'The Landlady's Dog' [Narrow Houses [Little, Brown, 1992 / Warner, 1993 / US: Aspect, 1994]

• 'Britworld™' [Interzone, December 1992]

• 'The Unmentionable' [Imagined Slights]

• 'The Trembler on the Axis', co-written with Peter Crowther, [US: Tales of the White Wolf, White Wolf, 1994 (Hb) / US: Borealis, 1995 (Pb) / France: 'Funambule sur l'Axe' published in Contes de Loup Blanc: La Gloire d'Elric, Pocket 1997 (Pb) / Germany: 'Die Reise ins Graue Land' published in Die Rückkehr des weißen Wolfs, Heyne 1999 (Pb)]

• 'Wings' [Heaven Sent, Creed, 1995 (Pb) / US: Daw, 1995 (Pb) / France: 'Ailes' published in Ainsi Soit L'Ange, Editions de l'Oxymore, 2000 (Pb)]

• 'A Taste of Heaven' [US: Dante's Disciples, Borealis, 1995 (Pb)]

• 'Angel of War' [US: Pawn of Chaos, Borealis, 1996 (Pb)]

• 'Rosemary for Remembrance' [Narrow Houses: Blue Motel, Little, Brown 1994 (Hb) / Warner, 1996 (Pb) / US: Borealis, 1996 (Pb)]

• 'The Gift', [Interzone, February 1996, published as 'Giving and Taking']

• 'Dead Letters' [Scaremongers, Tanjen, 1997 (Pb)]

• 'The House of Lazarus' [Destination Unknown, Borealis, 1997 (Pb)]

• 'The Driftling' [Interzone, July 1997]

• 'Even Beggars Would Ride' (co-written with Peter Crowther) [US: Cemetery Dance, Autumn 1997 / The Third Alternative #13, 1997 – nominated for 1998 British Fantasy Award – Short Fiction]

• 'Thanatophile Seeks Similar' [The Third Alternative #16, 1998]

• 'Carry the Moon in my Pocket' [US: Moon Shots, Daw, 1999 (Pb)]

• 'Terminal Event' [Interzone, December 1999]

• 'Killer-Killer' [Crimewave #3, Spring 2000]

• 'Piecework' [Hideous Progeny, Razor Blade Press, 2000 (Pb)]

• 'Running' [The Third Alternative #26]

• 'Speedstream' [Interzone, February 2001 / Greece: 'Ταξυτητα Διαφυγης', 9 #154–156 (Comics & SF supplement in Ελευθεροτυπια), June–July 2003]

• 'Junk Male' [Interzone, September 2001] / Greece: 'Ηλεκτρονικα Σκουπιδια', 9 #178 (Comics & SF supplement in Ελευθεροτυπια], December 2003)]

• 'Out of the Blue, Into the Red' [US: Mars Probes, Daw, 2002 (Pb)]

• 'At One' [42: The Ultimate Answer, October 2002] / The British Invasion, Cemetery Dance, 2007

• 'The Head' [Interzone, March 2002 / Greece: 'Ή Ασώματοσ Κεφαλή', 9 #136 (Comics & SF supplement in Ελευθεροτυπια), February 2003]

• 'Seventeen Syllables' [Postscripts #1, 2004 (digest magazine and limited edition Hb from PS Publishing)]

• 'The Meteor Party' [US: Constellations, Daw 2004 (Pb)]

• 'Londres au XXIe siècle' [The Mammoth Book of New Jules Verne Adventures, Robinson, 2005 / US: The Mammoth Book of New Jules Verne Adventures, Carroll and Graf, 2005 / Germany: Rückkehr zum Mittelpunkt der Erde, 2006, Bastei Lübbe]

• 'The Last Change' [Quercus-sf.com, 2005]

• 'Cutting Criticism' [Shrouded by Darkness, Telos, 2006]

• 'The Bowdler Strain' [The Solaris Book Of New Science Fiction, Solaris, 2007]

• Collection of short fiction (1990-1998): Imagined Slights – Gollancz, 2002 (Pb) - See Above.

• Collection of short fiction (1999-2006): Diversifications – (forthcoming) PS Publishing, 2008/09 (Ltd Edtn Hb / Hb)