Starship Spring by Eric Brown
Posted in Eric Brown, Reading Reviewed, Science Fiction at 12:00 on 5 October 2013
PS Publishing, 2012, 69 p
The fourth novella in Brown’s Starship sequence, this one finds David Conway six years on from the events of Starship Winter, happily married to Hannah van Harben and with a five year-old daughter, Ella. His artist friend Matt’s latest show has been funded by a patron, Dr Petronious, an alien art collector, on condition that he takes a holiday at the resort of Tamara Falls (which lies in a region of Chalcedony where the mysterious locals, the Ashentay, mostly keep themselves to themselves) with his group from Magenta Bay. A visit to an otherwise restricted archæological site has been included in the deal. Dr Petronious has also provided an alien artefact, a metal cone made into a necklace, to be gifted to Ella.
How all this locks together and links into Chalcedony’s Golden Column, which allows interstellar travel to take place by means of jumps, is delivered in Brown’s usual effective way. As is common with Brown, there are enigmatic aliens and strange quasi-religious ceremonies, though the climax here is more reminiscent of his Bengal Station trilogy than the previous Starship novellas.
The series has, I believe, now been collected as Starship Seasons and is well worth searching out.
(Misprints corner:- 7 typos – mainly word/letter omissions or interpolations.)
