Entropic Angel: And Other Stories

I expected something more from this collection of short stories. Gareth Powell is Welsh, and Wales is very often present in his settings: this is a bit odd, but this is not more a curiosity then a problem. It's more problematic - at least in my own point of view - that he often uses the same basic ideas: nano- (better, femto- ) machines which become intelligent, the end of the universe, and solitary people, maybe the last human beings. True, even Asimov wrote a lot of short stories on the same topic, that is the three laws of robotics: but the Good Doctor exploited the theme to search any possible workaround against the rules he set up, while Powell seems to be stuck in the same situation. This is not a problem if one reads just a single story every now and then, but in an anthology this is a little annoying.
This said, there are many stories which I really appreciated. Besides Entropic Angel which gives the title to the collection, I liked Lift up your Face (even if it is not SF), Red Lights, and Rain, Fallout, The Last Reef (but not the loose sequel), Eleven Minutes, Gonzo Laptop with an AI more real than what it seems), and especially the last story, Forever Returning. In the footnote to the story - by the way, the idea to explain how his works were created is quite interesting - he says that he was trying to write something in the style of Philip Dick. But I think he ended up with a scene which is Fredric Brown at his best!