Эрик Браун: Starship Fall

“There is always something strikingly probable about the futures that Eric Brown writes… No matter how dark the future that Eric Brown imagines, the hope of redemption is always present. No matter how alien the world he describes, there is always something hauntingly familiar about the situations that unfold there.”

I wrote the above 5 years ago, for the introduction to the Spanish version of New York Nights, and I was reminded of it when I found it amongst the quotes at the front of Eric Brown’s hugely successful novel, Helix . This novella is a very different piece of work, but the idea still holds true.

Although a stand alone story which can easily be read as such, Starship Fall also provides the sequel to Eric’s Starship Summer, a delightful novella set on the world of Chalcedony which deals with a group of broken people helping each other to put their lives back together.

Now, SF is a broad church; it is a field well served with battling robots, Artificial Intelligences, cyber detectives and expletive ridden tales of torture written in the first person present tense. All this shows the genre is healthy and avoiding stagnation, or at least is mistaken by some for that fact.

But there is also a place within it for tales of warmth and reflection and friendship. This is one such book. It is harder to write this sort of thing than you would imagine, and it is all the more welcome for the breadth it gives to the field.

Eric has been writing for over thirty years now, and does it so well that it is easy to miss what he does. His books are easy to read, they portray sympathetic, recognisable characters drawn from real life, and they are effectively plotted. Anyone too exposed to the overwritten prose that excuses itself as cutting edge literature may think the preceding paragraph mildly insulting to Eric’s work, but they would be missing the point.

The advice given time and again to those wanting to be writers is to ensure that you don’t place anything in the reader’s way to remind them that they are reading a book. Establishing character, building a plot, explaining motive without resorting to simply telling the reader what is going on: these are skills that every writer must get to grips with.

To do all this when you can’t even rely on the reader having a familiarity with the everyday world around them is what makes SF so difficult to write. Or I should say, so difficult to write well. Eric Brown is so highly regarded amongst his peers because they recognise just how good he is at what he does. He could write a convincing story about a pair of carpet slippers, comfortable and familiar, but, just as in this story, he would still grip the reader with tension as the story built to a climax.

Eric has recently moved to a tiny thatched cottage in Cambridgeshire. He lives there with his Medievalist wife and young daughter, cooking delicious curries and gradually renovating the property. Experience suggests that when he has made the place comfortable, unpacked his large library of SF books and got the guest accommodation sorted he will probably move again, though he fervently denies this.

Eric is a prolific writer with a wide back catalogue, he is a voracious and knowledgeable reader. He reviews SF for the Guardian in between writing short stories and novellas. He is currently working on Cosmopath, the third volume of the Bengal Station trilogy, and a series of stories featuring the captain of a salvage starship, set in the year 2300.

If this is your first taste of Eric Brown’s work, welcome to his world!

Otherwise, welcome back!

Enjoy!

I lead a quiet life here in Magenta Bay, on Chalcedony, Delta Pavonis IV; some might even call my existence boring. I read a lot, and walk, and swim in the bay, and sometimes I drive into the mountains to admire the fine views along the coast. Three or four nights a week◦– the highlights of my life, as far as I’m concerned◦– I meet my friends in the Fighting Jackeral; occasionally they come round to my place, the old starship situated on the headland north of the bay, or I visit them, and we while away the evening with a meal and drinks and conversation. My friends are Matt Sommers, the famous crystal artist; his partner Maddie Chamberlain, a wonderful Englishwoman who loves Matt to bits; Hawk, the piratical space pilot and his alien girlfriend, the fey and elusive Kee. They are more than friends to me now, five years after my arrival on the planet; they are family, and I love them all.

Autumn comes late to this latitude of Chalcedony, immediately after the tempestuous storm season, and it’s a wonderful period of long warm days◦– a slow sliding into winter which is never really cold up here. Autumn is perhaps my favourite time of year, when the tourist season is winding down, and the concessions along the front close up for another six months and the locals, after the work of summer, kick back and relax and enjoy their hard won gains. The silver shola trees become golden and the Ring of Tharssos, that girdle of shattered moonlets which encircles the planet, turns molten in the long hours of sunset.

I was looking forward to a few months of doing nothing, of reading the classics◦– I still prefer real books to the screens you can get these days: call me old-fashioned, if you like◦– of walking in the mountains and seeing my friends. Nothing much had happened in Magenta Bay for five years, and for all I knew nothing else would happen for another five. Not that I would be complaining.

That morning I woke at seven, as usual, then showered and went for a walk along the beach, around the bay and back again. I breakfasted on the balcony of my starship, the Mantis , looking out across the mirror-calm surface of the bay, watching the play of sunlight on the water, like restless sequins, and the dark shadows of the jackeral shoals as they came in from the ocean in search of food.

I was on my second coffee when I noticed the woman, and I wondered why I had failed to see her earlier. She was lying on the sands below the nose of the Mantis , so that only her long tanned legs showed. Curious◦– Matt claims that I wanted to ascertain whether or not the rest of this Venus matched what I had seen so far◦– I stood and looked down at the reclining beauty.

I’d assumed that she was sun-bathing◦– though why she might be doing so at eight in the morning I was at a loss to guess. But one look was enough to tell me that she was doing nothing of the kind. She wore a black evening dress, for one thing, and her head was twisted so that she stared back along the beach towards the township.

I hurried from the Mantis , wallowed through the fine red drifts of sand, and knelt before the stricken woman.

I realised that she was older than I had first thought; and though she possessed a striking beauty, it was not that vital pearlescent lustre of early womanhood but the more weathered glamour of early middle-age: I guessed she was in her mid-forties.

She was dusky and raven haired, and her mouth was a red slash that seemed almost, almost , too wide for her thin face so that at first it seemed disproportionate.

I judged that she was not asleep but unconscious, and reached out to take her pulse. Her tanned wrist was thin, but the pulse seemed healthy enough. I sat on my haunches, wondering what the hell to do, and took in this unexpected and beauteous jetsam.