In his recent Bengal Station trilogy Brown has been revisiting some of the conventions of Pulp SF. He has also treated us to a Big Dumb Object novel in Helix. In Guardians of the Phoenix, he has turned his attention to the disaster novel, or rather, to the post-Apocalypse tale. Here too, though, there are faint echoes of Pulp SF in the Phoenix of the title.

The Earth is parched, the oceans boiled away. Resource wars and plagues have reduced humanity to dreams – and fears – of the old times. In a handful of small communities sparsely spattered over Europe a few surviving humans cling on, barely scratching a living from the harsh, sun-battered environment.

To begin with there are three main viewpoint narratives. With large animals extinct and plants beyond scarce, Paul traps lizards on the girders of the Eiffel Tower to feed his dying mentor Elise. In Aubenas the locals net bats for food and their leader quietly supplements their diet with a little cannibalism. A band of renegades has kidnapped the daughter of one of the elders of the decimated community in Copenhagen.

The action kicks off when the renegades turn up in Paris to seek out the rumoured food horde in a bank vault. A group from Copenhagen has pursued them. In the resulting gunfight the chief renegade, Hans, escapes and Paul, who had fallen into his clutches, is rescued.

Since Elise has died Paul joins the Copenhagen group’s onward trip to drill for water below what had been the Bay of Biscay. Hans returns to his former home in Aubenas just in time to join an expedition to Bilbao to find the remains of an abandoned project designed to save humanity from extinction.

As usual with Brown the focus is mainly on the characters, who are well rounded – the relationship between Dan and Kath from Copenhagen is particularly well laid out and Hans makes a convincing psychopath – though Paul, even given his earlier relative isolation, is perhaps still a little too naïve. Given the above the book’s plot has to follow certain lines but there are twists and turns along the way. The resolution is saved from being a bit of a deus ex machine by very short premonitory chapters featuring members of the Bilbao project, which however give the Phoenix game away somewhat.

As an adventure story the novel works admirably but I found I couldn’t quite buy the scenario – an Earth where the water has evaporated from the oceans would admittedly have a consequent runaway Greenhouse Effect but unless all the atmosphere had gone along with them it would surely be more like Venus, constantly overcast, and hence sunburn would be no problem. (I also wondered how in a parched world as depicted would plants be able to photosynthesise and thus keep O₂ levels up? Though animals to breathe it in have of course mostly disappeared.) These quibbles aside however Guardians of the Phoenix is fine entertainment.

Solaris, 2009, 414p.

This is the third of Brown’s Bengal Station novels, which feature the telepath Jeff Vaughan. In Cosmopath someone is asassinating telepaths. In the first two chapters both Vaughan and Parveen Das, another of the viewpoint characters, thwart attempts on their lives and are then separately invited by an extremely wealthy businessman, Rabindranath Chandrasakar, to join him on an expedition to another world. The action thereafter mainly focuses on Vaughan, but Das and Sukari, Vaughan’s wife, have occasional chapters to themselves.

With this third instalment we can see a pattern to the Bengal Station stories.

There will be a threat to Vaughan or those he cares about, or a financial incentive which drives him to undertake a mission for some third party. In Cosmopath his daughter, Li, has leukæmia and Chandrasakar offers to pay for the treatment.

The case will involve a trip off world where events reminiscent of pulp SF take place. In this one, on Delta Cephei VII, the resident aliens don’t wish humans to spread further than they already have.

While Vaughan is away his loved ones will be in danger of some sort. Here, Vaughan’s wife Sukari and his adopted daughter, Pham, are kidnapped to try to force him to reveal the secrets of Delta Cephei VII.

The self-serving Dr Rao will make an appearance or two.

None of this breaks any ground – nor is it intended to, Brown is reworking and updating familiar themes. It’s not cutting edge but it is all very readable.

He arranged for other SF writers from the area to join us. They were Chris Beckett, Una McCormack, Philip Vine, BSFA chairman Ian Whates and Rebecca Payne, most of whom I had not met before. The six of them have semi-regular meetings in the Pickerel Inn in Cambridge.

The good lady and I had a meal in the Pickerel before everyone else arrived. Our plates groaned. So many peas were heaped on them we must have been served about half a kilogram between us.

I had meant to take some pictures of the gathering but such a good time was had by all that I forgot.

(No. I wasn’t drunk. I had to drive back to the hotel.)

After the events in the first of Brown’s Bengal Station series, Necropath, Jeff Vaughan hung up his telepathic implant and married Sukara. Two years later he has an undemanding but low paid job plus a baby on the way. A former colleague invites him to join her detective agency for good pay using the new improved, and hence less mentally debilitating, implants. For the sake of his wife and child Vaughan does not need much persuading. The subsequent investigation, farmed out by an overstretched police force, centres on the trademark murder of three people by laser.

A young orphaned girl, Pham, witnessed the latest killing and underwent a strange experience immediately afterwards. She now has a voice in her head which promises to protect her, a voice which is the consciousness of an alien.

As well as Vaughan and Sukara, the self-serving Dr Rao from Necropath also appears in this sequel. Perhaps it is the familiarity established from the previous book but here the characterisation seemed fuller – although there is too much emphasis on how Pham resembles Sukara’s dead younger sister Tiger.

As in Necropath, Vaughan leaves Earth – this time for the planet Mallory, where again the encounters he has are somewhat in the tradition of pulp SF. (A xenopath turns out to be a telepathic alien.) Vaughan’s departure has left Sukara in danger, though. The working through of the various plot lines and the tying together of the strands are effected efficiently.

Brown has something here. The Bengal Station setting is a grand conceit, a macrocosm whose levels Brown has barely touched and which could support many more stories; not all about telepaths. The society on Bengal Station seems to be modelled on India but the construction as a whole is really only glimpsed, and sometimes brings to mind memories of Babylon 5. I did wonder, though, whether relationships and attitudes in such a new environment would be quite so close a mirror of the old. But human nature is unchanging, I suppose.

The book – one of the most recent in the Postscripts series of anthologies – contains short stories encompassing a range of genres from SF, Fantasy and Horror through to mainstream but mostly in the speculative realm. There are too many stories to consider individually but the standard is high. Even if not all are entirely successful the book contains very few duds. One of the most effective tales is the title story, by Lucius Shepard, about a plot by a famous movie star to enravel his associates in the – perhaps simulated – murder of his girlfriend. Eric Brown’s The Human Element works well even if it re-visits one of his early themes, the relationship between an artist and his work. All the contributions are worth reading though I found Bully by Jack Ketchum too predictable. The Forever Forest by Rhys Hughes was curiously old fashioned, as if the author was trying too hard to convey otherness; it reads as if it might have been written in the 1950s. There’s also a story, Osmotic Pressure, by someone called Jack Deighton, which contains a fair bit of (arguably necessary?) information dumping.

Jeff Vaughan is a telepath working on Bengal Station, a structure containing a bustling city and busy spaceport rising out of the Bay of Bengal. Vaughan’s special talent is as a necropath, a telepath who can access the thoughts of the very recently dead before they fade too far. He is sickened by the revelations his talent in general has given him about the nature of humanity and wishes for respite from it.

As the book starts he feels his boss – who wears a shield against telepathy as part of his job – is up to no good and the story seems set for the usual sort of trajectory, but his boss commits suicide (so does his wife after she kills their child) as soon as Vaughan’s police contact, Chandra, hauls him in on a small charge.

Thereafter, as part of his investigation, Vaughan finds himself drawn into the orbit of a new religious cult, the Church of the Adoration of the Chosen One, centred round a young girl from Verkerk’s World, where the cult originated; a child who closely resembles Holly, a dead girl from Vaughan’s past. There is a whiff of overkill here as there seem to be a few such resonances. Before she died of a drug overdose, Vaughan was friendly with a girl nicknamed Tiger who in pureness of mind also reminded him of Holly. There are echoes in this of Brown’s earlier New York trilogy where the protagonist also had a paternal relationship with a teenage girl.

Vaughan and Chandra take a voidship to Verkerk’s World. One of the sections set here is narrated from Chandra’s point of view – perhaps since Vaughan’s telepathic ability would mean the interrogation which takes place would otherwise have been over much too quickly. The pair eventually find the source of the religious cult is an alien species called the Vaith who are using their devotees religious impulses for their own ends. This aspect of the plot came close to being in the nature of pulp SF (see here) part 3, and does not quite suspend disbelief.

Another narrative strand involves Suraka, a prostitute in Thailand who, too, has a pure mind. Again, the sections dealing with Suraka’s relations with aliens fail to ring quite true.

While never being less than readable, throughout Necropath too much plot and sub-plot are being shoe-horned into the narrative, which in turn makes the characterisation seem rushed. Brown also withholds information about the dead girl Holly until too near the end.

Bengal Station itself is an interesting scenario, however, but Brown does not exploit it as much as he might. There are two more in the trilogy to come though.

Well, an unexpected package was delivered by the Post Office on Friday. (Actually the postie left a card and I had to pick it up at the sorting office.)

As I say I had no idea what it was (I hadn’t bought anything from eBay or Amazon for quite a while – and it’s nowhere near my birthday or anything.)

When I retrieved it I saw it was from PS Publishing.

What it contained was the traycased, signed edition of The Company He Keeps, aka Postscripts 22/23, which contains that story, Osmotic Pressure.

As an artefact The Company He Keeps is a thing of beauty, sumptuously produced. The traycase is lined with velvet and comes with green silk ribbon. The dust jacket is sensuously smooth, the hard cover has both back and front illustrations incorporated into it, the paper smells delightfully creamy. (I know another author who always assesses a book’s quality by its paper’s aroma.) I have never before been published in such a beautiful manner.

This is of course the de luxe, collector’s edition but I have no reason to suppose the “ordinary” hardback will be any less carefully produced.

There are several well-known names on the contents page (better known than mine certainly.) These include Lucius Shepard, Eric Brown, Steve Rasnic Tem and Darrell Schweitzer, to name only some.

I’m chuffed beyond measure to be appearing in said company.

In the information bit preceding the story I say, “I had always wanted to write a story with a two word title that was also a scientific concept, preferably Chemistry related. Osmotic Pressure is the result.”

I’m delighted it found a publisher.

(Osmotic pressure is the hydrostatic pressure produced by a difference in concentration between solutions on the two sides of a surface such as a semipermeable membrane.)

Partly my inspiration came from James Blish’s Surface Tension, which also has a two word scientific concept as its title.

I must emphasise that I do not claim that my story stands any comparison at all with Surface Tension – which is one of the early classics of Science Fiction – only that Blish’s story was one of the influences on its genesis.

In Common Time Blish wrote another famous story with a two word title. So celebrated is Common Time that Damon Knight once published a critique extolling it as an extended sexual metaphor – told in reverse. The metaphor begins (ends?) with a pun. The title, so Knight suggested, is actually Come On Time. His critique was longer than the original story.

Now, if anyone can give me an idea for a story to be called Dielectric Constant; or even Dipole Moment ……..

The usual caveat applies to this review.

Despite having the outward appearance of a novel this book is in fact a fix-up, stringing together a series of shorter pieces which Brown has published in various magazines or anthologies over the years along with one original story. In addition there is an introductory prelude, shorter “interludes” to link the stories, and a coda; all written for this publication. Despite the potential scope the stories are without exception located in and around a small town in West Yorkshire which Brown calls Oxenworth.

The enigmatic aliens of the title have appeared suddenly, offering to restore the dead to life – either to come back to Earth or to help in populating the galaxy. An implant under the skin of the temple starts its mysterious work when its bearer dies. The uncorrupting bodies are then ferried to the nearest Onward Station for their essence to be beamed off-planet for the process to be carried out. Returnees come back six months later, subtly changed, to carry on with their interrupted lives or to say farewell to friends and family before departing to the stars on Kéthani business.

There is something about the Onward Stations that is reminiscent of the tower which featured in Brown’s collection The Fall Of Tartarus – see link above – and also recalls a similar structure in Brown’s early novel Meridian Days.

The Brown tendency to feature religion is again to the fore, this time mixed with those perennial literary issues of love and death as the author works through the many responses humanity brings to the aliens’ gift. A new focus, here, is on the vagaries of married life and the joys of fatherhood. An uncommon (or should that be common?) touch is the frequent mention in the earlier segments of Leeds United Football Club.

Curiously it always seems to be snowing in Brown’s West Yorkshire. Did the Kéthani bring a change of weather with them?

There is a huge erratum on page 59 of my edition, covering two lines of text. I had to read the paragraph containing it several times in order to get the full sense. Other typos were few in number. I mention this only because such things are avoidable.

The stories, despite the inevitable repetitions entailed in their initially disparate origins, do add up to a coherent, if disjointed, narrative, though on occasion they can feel a little rushed. (This could be explained if Brown had a strict word count to adhere to for their original publications.) Despite having different narrators most adopt a similar tone. All are eminently readable.

Throughout there is the nagging doubt about the nature of the Kéthani’s motives. Brown never fully resolves this issue – though the last segment comes close. A US author would certainly have taken the idea in a completely different direction to Brown and I was reminded a little of Murray Leinster’s The Greks Bring Gifts (whose title is a nice play on “timeo Danaos et dona ferentes”) a novel of which Brown may be unaware.

The inherent difficulty with a scenario such as this is how do you portray the returnees as different from the characters they were before resurrection? Brown does not quite bring this off, not helped by having the narrator of the interludes die partway through the book – though appearing in later segments as a returnee though.Force majeure, perhaps, in that that segment may have been written early in the sequence and Brown was stuck with it.

As a working-out of what it might mean for humanity if death were to have no dominion, however, the lassitude and ennui that may ensue, the new goals that would need to be sought, Kéthani is a worthy achievement.

Even without the dedication on page 1, knowing the author and reading this book’s title I would have guessed that this might be an hommage to Michael G Coney.

As a standard to aspire to this is aiming high. Coney is (or was; he died in 2005) one of my personal favourites among writers of SF. While never being too obvious about it Coney’s emphasis on characters has been followed by Brown throughout the latter’s career. In Starship Summer, explicit echoes of Coney abound. The story is clearly Brown’s, though, and not in any way a pastiche.

David Conway has moved to the planet Chalcedony to get over the death of his daughter for which he feels to blame. He buys a starship (which the man who sells it describes as being more like an atmospheric craft) from a scrapyard to use as a dwelling and is quickly drawn into the vendor’s social circle. The ship turns out to be “haunted” by a holographic projection of one of the Yall (aliens who originally built and operated the craft and who also erected the striking feature of Chalcedony, an enigmatic, towering Golden Column which has become the focus for pilgrims of various stripe.)

As this last implies Brown’s theme of religion is again to the fore, as is his fondness for characters with a past they are trying to escape, or an affliction that distances them from others, and (another Brown trope from his early career) we also have an artist with fading powers.

The book (a limited edition of 500) is sumptuously produced with its cover painting embedded into the (hard) binding. The spaceships depicted thereon do more resemble downed World War 2 bombers than the typical representation of interstellar voyagers. All is revealed, however, when Conway’s new home finally flies.

The spaceship scrapyard is an almost Ballardian touch – starships have been replaced for interstellar travel by Telemass, a technology akin to the SHIFT mechanism I deployed for the same purpose in A Son Of The Rock. (I merely make a comparison here. This sort of thing has become part of the tool kit SF writers can use to move characters across galaxies; I’m not suggesting Brown filched it from me. He has used a similar concept before.)

As is Brown’s wont, the focus is on the characters – the SF stuff is background, but background which heightens, and in one case alleviates, their dilemmas and problems. Yet there is still a large quantity of plot in the 120 pages.

I’m sure Brown won’t mind me saying he does not manage quite to achieve Coney’s sublime heights but Starship Summer is nevertheless a worthy effort.

Disclaimer:- Eric is one of my many acquaintances in the SF world. I have been in his company at various conventions and shared many talks over a glass or a meal. We stay in touch. He, for example, steered me in the direction of ‘Postscripts’ which recently accepted my story “Osmotic Pressure.”

The Fall Of Tartarus is a collection of short stories/novellas Brown set on the planet Tartarus in the two hundred years before its sun was to go supernova. Published in various magazines between 1995 and 2000 they were not collected in the one book till 2005.

As a playground for Brown’s imagination Tartarus provides fertile soil. Tartarus is terrestrial and therefore familiar in some respects; jungles, lakes, extinct volcanoes and so on. In others it is not like Earth at all; bizarre plants, exotic locales, alien creatures, a rather restricted social organisation described as mediaeval. This gives the place a dated feel – the adolescent sexuality of A Prayer For The Dead notwithstanding. In particular the planet has affected some of its inhabitants, who, though descended from immigrants from Earth, can be totally unlike their forebears. There is a dreamlike quality to some of the events which adds to the strangeness. At times there is a stilted tone to the writing, emphasising the old-fashioned feel. Above all, life on Tartarus is never comfortable.

Reading the stories together it is possible to pick out various common threads. There is the same tonal quality throughout (which is not an absolute requirement of tales such as this) and extensive use of flashbacks. One character, usually the narrator, will be on a quest of some sort. Someone will be seeking to atone for past deeds. There is a strong emphasis on the importance of family. Religions feature strongly, with their usual exhortations to sacrifice and martyrdom, heightened here by adherents of various faiths that their excessive devotion may stem the sun’s demise. In several stories characters explicitly state that their destiny lies on Tartarus, though that, of course holds for everyone in all the stories, whether their characters realise it or not. Most obviously, and not surprisingly for such a doomed setting, there is a preoccupation with death. Not that all of the tales have a downbeat ending. Occasionally we are allowed a life-affirming conclusion.

I found myself wondering if sometimes, for original publication, Brown had to accommodate a particular story to the limits of a word count. The People of The Nova rushes a bit in the run-up to its climax and makes too little of the partly redemptive event that occurs afterward, though the reverse is true of The Hunting Of The Slarque which has a few longueurs.

It would be interesting to discover in what order the stories were written, how Brown developed his ideas. It is as well, though, that Dark Calvary finishes up the collection as there is nothing redemptive in it at all. This, of course, is when the supernova finally strikes. Farewell then, Tartarus.

If you like stories which, while not neglecting ideas or action, focus primarily on characters and their dilemmas, Brown won’t fail you.