The first piece of fiction Smith ever wrote - a short story called The Man Who Drew Cats - won the World Fantasy award. It's included here along with many others, some unpublished, which show the incredible versatility of one of the most exciting writers working in Britain today. The collection is stuffed with surreal, disturbing gems including: 'When God Lived in Kentish Town' Someone comes up to you when you're quietly eating your stir-fried rice in a great Chinese take away, and tells you: 'I've found God'. You try to ignore them, right? But what if they have, and what if He works in a drab old electrical store on Kentish Town Road and he's not getting many customers? 'Diet Hell' Some people will do anything to fit into their old jeans. 'Save As...' What if you could back up your life? Save it up to a certain point and return to it when things went horribly wrong? 'Everybody Goes' An idyllic childhood day from a long, hot summer. The kind you want to last for ever. All good things must come to an end, mustn't they?There are those SF readers who resent the authors and publishers who attempt to downplay the genre aspects of their books to grant them more mainstream credibility. This resentment is fair enough, in that no one need be ashamed of creating a top-notch SF novel. But these readers will be doing themselves a great disservice if they do not pick up Michael Marshall Smith's superb collection of short stories What You Make It merely because the jacket has been designed to suggest mainstream fiction without the slightest SF association.

Smith has always been one of the most quirkily inventive and surprising of writers, with novels such as Only Forward and the remarkable Spares demonstrating an imaginative grasp all too rarely encountered these days. But his greatest achievement is his totally individual use of language and dialogue, and this highly diverse collection has 17 brilliant microcosms of his style. From terror in cyberspace to bizarre fusions of man and machine, through twisted manifestations of the artistic impulse to highly disturbing future sex, Smith has the measure of it all. And his gift for the bizarre image remains as acute as ever:

About a week afterwards, I noticed that my back was looking a little hairy. I figured, what the hey, maybe some hormonal thing. Then it started getting harder to hold things. My thumb seemed to be going a little weird, not as opposable as it used to be. There were a couple of days when it looked like there was some kind of tail deal developing.

--Barry Forshaw