Early Novels and Short Fiction is the first of three volumes covering Peter Cowlam's adventures into fiction, dating from the mid-1970s and forward into the twenty-first century. Included is the short-story collection Penumbra, and the novella The Border and Back. Novels are Bim Shay, a re-imagining of the detective yarn, Electric Letters Z, a satire on literary celebrity, and Caliban's Machine, the memoir of George du Plé, a young English poet in American exile. Electric Letters Z was first published in 1998, which under the title Who's Afraid of the Booker Prize? won the Quagga Prize for Literary Fiction in 2015. Peter Cowlam won the same prize more recently recently in 2018, for his novel New King Palmers, which is at the intersection of old, crumbling empires and new, digital agglomerates. He has worked as commissioning editor for The Finger, and as literary editor for Ars Notoria. Early Novels and Short Fiction, volume one of three, belongs to the period circa 1974 to 1998.