Eric Brown - Rites of Passage

I would mount an expedition, I thought; I would march into the mountains with my brave band of men and women and we would meet the blackened beings, and I would find some way of communicating with these kindly creatures and I would ask them, as we shared food and drink beneath the stars, if we — the cavern-dwellers and the blackened people — were truly once, long ago, one people and the same.

My head swirled with the enormity of the idea.

Later, as the sun burned its way across the valley and the heat increased, we hurried below ground to my hollow and made love.

Eric Brown began writing when he was fifteen while living in Australia and sold his first short story to Interzone in 1986. He has won the British Science Fiction Award twice for his short stories, has published over fifty books, and his work has been translated into sixteen languages. His forthcoming books include the SF novel Jani and the Greater Game, the collection Strange Visitors, and the crime novel Murder at the Chase. He writes a regular science fiction review column for the Guardian newspaper and lives near Dunbar, East Lothian. His website can be found at: www.ericbrown.co.uk

“Bartholomew Burns and the Brain Invaders” first appeared in Aethernet #5, #6, #7, #8 .

“Guardians of the Phoenix” first appeared in Apocalyptic SF .

“Sunworld” first appeared in The Solaris Book of New SF 2 .

“Beneath the Ancient Sun” is original to this collection.

I’d like to thank the following editors of the online magazine and anthologies where these stories first appeared: Tony and Barbara Ballantyne, Mike Ashley, and George Mann.

Murder at the Chase

Salvage

Satan’s Reach

The Serene Invasion

Murder by the Book

Starship Seasons

Helix Wars

The Devil’s Nebula

The Kings of Eternity

Guardians of the Phoenix

Cosmopath

Xenopath

Necropath

Kéthani

Helix

New York Dreams

New York Blues

New York Nights

Penumbra

Engineman

Meridian Days

Famadihana on Fomalhaut IV

Starship Spring

Starship Winter

Gilbert and Edgar on Mars

Starship Fall

Revenge

Starship Summer

The Extraordinary Voyage of Jules Verne

Approaching Omega

A Writer’s Life

Strange Visitors

The Angels of Life and Death

Ghostwriting

Threshold Shift

The Fall of Tartarus

Deep Future

Parallax View (with Keith Brooke)

Blue Shifting

The Time-Lapsed Man

The Angels of Life and Death collects ten science fiction stories from two times winner of the BSFA short story award.

From cyberpunk visions of post-human futures to traditional tales of alien encounter and time travel, what connects these tales are Brown’s storytelling ability and his concern for the human element. Whether he’s writing about telepaths fleeing alien assassins on a vast spaceport city in the Bay of Bengal, or a woman reporter finding true love in the far, far future, Brown imbues his fictions with a concern for character and headlong narrative pace.

“SF infused with a cosmopolitan and literary sensibility.”

—Paul McAuley

“He is a masterful storyteller.”

— Strange Horizons

When Salvageman Ed saves Ella Rodriguez from spider-drones on the pleasure planet of Sinclair’s Landfall, he has no idea what he’s letting himself in for. Ella is not at all what she seems, as he’s soon about to find out.

What follows, as the spider-drones and the Hayakawa Organisation chase Ed, Ella and engineer Karrie light-years across space, is a fast-paced adventure with Ed learning more about Ella — and about himself — than he ever expected.

The Salvageman Ed series of linked stories — four of which appear here for the first time — combine action, humour and pathos, from the master of character-based adventure science fiction.

“These stories demonstrate everything that Eric Brown excels at: intelligent high adventure in space featuring fully-rounded characters that the reader can instantly relate to, revelling in their evolving relationship as Ed and his crew are forced to contend with all that the author’s vivid imagination throws at them. Wonderful stuff!”

—Ian Whates, author of The Noise Within

Searching for his missing sister, Flint encounters a world where illness is to be feared, where genes mutate and migrate between species through plague and fever. This is the story of the struggles between those who want to defend their heritage and those who choose to embrace the new.

“A minor masterpiece that should usher Brooke at last into the recognized front ranks of SF writers”

— Locus

“I am so here! Genetopia is a meditation on identity — what it means to be human and what it means to be you — and the necessity of change. It’s also one heck of an adventure story. Snatch it up!”

—Michael Swanwick, Hugo award-winning author of Bones of the Earth

“Keith Brooke’s Genetopia is a biotech fever dream. In mood it recalls Brian Aldis’s Hothouse , but is a projection of twenty-first century fears and longings into an exotic far future where the meaning of humanity is overwhelmed by change. Masterfully written, this is a parable of difference that demands to be read, and read again.”

—Stephen Baxter, Philip K Dick award-winning author of Evolution and Transcendent

A set of beautifully crafted tales of the imagination by a writer who was smitten by the magic of the speculative short story at the age of twelve and has remained under its spell ever since.

These few stories cover three closely related sub-genres: science fiction, fantasy and horror. In the White Garden murders are taking place nightly, but who is leaving the deep foot-prints in the flower beds? Twelve men are locked in the jury room, but thirteen emerge after their deliberations are over. In a call centre serving several worlds, the staff are less than helpful when things go wrong with a body-change holiday.

Three of the stories form a set piece under the sub-sub-genre title of ‘Anglo-Saxon Tales’. This trilogy takes the reader back to a time when strange gods ruled the lives of men and elves were invisible creatures who caused mayhem among mortals.

Garry Kilworth has created a set of stories that lift readers out of their ordinary lives and place them in situations of nightmare and wonder, or out among far distant suns. Come inside and meet vampires, dragons, ghosts, aliens, weremen, people who walk on water, clones, ghouls and marvellous wolves with the secret of life written beneath their eyelids.

“Kilworth’s stories are delightfully nuanced and carefully wrought.”

— Publishers Weekly

“A bony-handed clutch of short stories, addictive and hallucinatory.”

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