Solaris, 2012, 384 p.

Jeff Ellis is a shuttle pilot who travels between the many worlds of the Helix. On a flight to Phandra his craft is shot down by the Sporelli who are invading from the neighbouring world on the spiral. His life is saved by a Phandran healer, Calla, but they are taken prisoner by the Sporelli. Meanwhile the Mahkan, Kranda, has set out to rescue Ellis from the Sporelli in order to fulfil the debt of honour she incurred when Ellis previously saved her life. She does so but the Sporelli have taken Calla in order to utilise her healing powers on their injured. Thereafter we are involved with the search for Calla as Ellis feels he is now in her debt. Elsewhere, on the Helix world of New Earth, Ellis’s more-or-less estranged wife, Maria, has begun an affair with her boss.

The Helix is one of those familiar SF tropes, a Big Dumb Object. In his first novel set there, Helix, Brown did not explore the structure nor its mechanics to any great degree. That omission is remedied here. The technology of its Builders, which allows its inner exploration, is – as Clarke’s Law has it – indistinguishable from magic, perhaps from the point of view of the story conveniently so. But then if you’ve got a tool kit why not use it? The novel reads like a kind of mashup of the BDO tale and a shoot-em-up.

Brown is incapable of writing a book which does not feature human dilemmas, however. In Helix Wars these seem to sit awkwardly with the more straightforward video game type elements even if the extended interplay between Kranda and Ellis on the morality of the use of force raises the tone.

Brown’s more character driven novels are much more satisfactory. Unless you’re into shoot-em-ups I’d advise you to savour his “Starship” sequence or The Kings of Eternity instead.

Aside:- Helix Wars has a cover which, had Eric not been a mate, would have made me disinclined ever to pick the book up.

Solaris, 2010, 350p

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.