Enta Geweorc was first published in Interzone 195, November/December 2004. It was recommended by someone in the novella category for the 2005 British Fantasy Awards and had an Honorable Mention in Gardner Dozois' 22nd "Year's Best Science Fiction". Click here for a PDF of Enta Geweorc or here for html.

Peter Collard returns home from space in the aftermath of a massive war - for which he bears some responsibility - that has devastated Earth. But you can never go home. While weighing up his options, including suicide, Collard meets a survivor in a cave in Cheddar Gorge. Perhaps she can offer him a renewed sense of purpose and even a path to some kind of redemption - but is she all she appears to be?

"Enta geweorc" is Old English for "the work of giants" and appears in The Ruin, a 10thC Old English poem in which the author reflects on the dilapidated glories of the post-Romano-British landscape: "Wondrous is this stone wall, that doom destroyed/The city shattered, the work of giants crumbles..." The elegiac nature of the subjects of the poetry - battle, ruin and a wandering lonely exile - seemed to suit both my protagonist and the setting of my story. I've also made a nod to a Philip K Dick short, "Second Variety".

A post-apocalyptic Cheddar Gorge might seem an odd idea to anyone who knows the place as a tourist destination, but having been born in Beirut and lived there in the 60s and gone back in the 1990s I have a sense of what it's like to revisit a happy childhood haunt that has been overrun by death and destruction in the intervening years [July 2006 update - look, it's happening again]. Roman Bath, thought to be the subject of The Ruin, is only 20 miles from the gorge, and a reminder that our towers too can crumble.

There are some friendly reviews in Tangent Online and SFRevu online and two good ones in Locus (no. 529, Feb 2005, pp 14-15) :"Nicholas Waller's excellent novelette, 'Enta Geweorc', starts off with a penetrating appraisal of the human capacity for self-delusion "; "[the protagonist] makes already terminal matters worse, and stands as of one of recent SF's more memorable portraits of an utter dolt. Waller's bleak vision is moving and memorable" is Nick Gevers's view, and "Waller makes fine use of Old English poetry and history to complement his tale of a devastated future in which AIs have mostly taken over and are now trying to find a way into space" is from Rich Horton.

Illustrations: Apart from the Interzone cover these are mine. The astro figure is a chalk drawing from the early 80s, and the others are all photos around Cheddar Gorge with varying levels of amendment.