Gareth Howe

I'm Gareth Howe, originally from the UK and now living in Tauranga, New Zealand.

I've wanted to write for as long as I can remember. For years that mostly meant filling journals with ideas and telling myself that one day I'd actually do something with them. Over the last few years I finally started taking the time to turn those ideas into stories and books.

Before that, I spent twenty years working as a chef. Some of that has probably followed me onto the page: people working under pressure, relying on one another, getting things wrong, and still having to keep everything moving.

I've always been a huge science-fiction and fantasy fan, but the stories that stay with me are usually the ones where the characters feel as though they genuinely belong to their world rather than simply inhabiting it. Amos Burton in The Expanse, the characters who fill David Gemmell's novels, and the way John Scalzi gets inside his characters' heads, particularly in Redshirts, are all examples of what I mean.

That's what I keep reaching for in my own fiction. I want readers to care more about my characters than they do about me. The setting can be strange, distant or impossible, but the people inside it should still feel real.

My first books happen to be science fiction, but I'm more interested in following the people and the story than staying inside one genre.

Away from writing, I enjoy board games and card games, have a fairly dry sense of humour, a slightly cynical streak, and rarely object to a good pun. Or a bad one, if we're being realistic.