The short story is an exacting form. Often compared to a watch movement where every component has a function. I was a couple of novels in before I made my first short fiction sale; it was to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, one of the surviving greats from the genre’s Golden Age, and you can imagine what that meant to me. After that I’d store up my ideas and work on them between bigger projects, until the bigger projects started squeezing closer together.

The latest collection, Comparative Anatomy, gives some priority to material that hasn’t been collected before. But it also serves as something of a career retrospective.

Stephen Gallagher