A Son of the Rock

Pan, 1995, 264p.

Blue Shifting contains short stories and novellas from Brown’s early career, two of them are original to the collection. Looking back at them it is striking how many of his recurring themes and tropes mark these tales. The typical Brown character is a misfit of some kind or a man awkward with women; a common plot driver is of people’s pasts hounding their presents; the typical setting is an artist’s colony or else somewhere secluded, usually on a far-flung planet.

The Death of Cassandra Quebec
Eva Hovanda, a minor artist, attends the celebration of the twentieth anniversary of the creation of the sole true work of art by Nathaniel Maltravers (a commemoration of the death of his wife) and rediscovers her wiped memories of the event.

Piloting
On Nea Kikhládes, a world of augmented and even Supra Sapient humans, the Primitivist artist Benedict Wellard is preparing his final piece. The pilot he has requested to animate the fifteen years dead body of his daughter plays an unexpected role. This story is slightly flawed by the fact that Brown withholds a crucial item of information until the denouement.

The Art of Acceptance
An oddly affecting love story – or two – set in Brown’s Engineman universe but firmly on Earth. A tale of cloning, disfigurement and, two other familiar Brown tropes, a private detective and Eastern influence. Despite the title, no artists though.

The Disciples of Apollo
A man suffering from a terminal condition known as The Syndrome goes (after selling his classical record collection! Nothing dates so fast as the future) to a hospice where those so afflicted wait to die. He eventually, and for the first time, finds love.

Elegy Perpetuum
An artist who contends that an enduring work of art is worth more than an individual’s life is faced with a fateful decision.

The Song of Summer
A middle-aged man returns to the scene of his youth and his first, lost, only, love.

Epsilon Dreams
A well-plotted tale set on Altair II in a time when the penalty for murder is memory wiping and Encoded Identity Inserts allow personalities to be transferred to other bodies after death. Brown brings both these elements together in another story of emotional shipwreck.

Blue Shifting
At 5 am every day, surrounded by a blue radiance, Gregory Janner mysteriously shifts location from continent to continent. Eventually he falls in with a group of others similarly afflicted. This story did contain the rather pleasing typo of a “billowed” command, but also the more oxymoronic construction, “markedly unremarkable.”

In all these stories, as with those of a major influence on Brown’s work, Michael G Coney, well reflected in this book, the focus is always on human motivation, on how much of an emotional driver both love and loss are. This is SF with a human heart.