Starship Fall

Starship Fall: An Introduction ^{By Tony Ballantyne}

“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!