Gabriel Boyer

Full disclosure, there was a time when I tried to write exactly like Matthew Derby.

I first read Super Flat Times probably something like 15 years ago and at a time in my life when I was on the hunt for the gritty new thing in world of science fiction—the genre that gave the world Philip K Dick and William Gibson, Arthur C Clarke and Robert Heinlein—a genre I despised and adored in equal measure—that would come to dominate my life. And with Matthew Derby’s brilliant collection was part of that. Re-reading them for this essay, that initial electric feeling I had the first time around came rolling back. These stories are on fire!