The Telemass Quartet 1, P S Publishing, 2014, 88 p

This is the first of four novellas presumably centred round the beam-me-across-space technology Brown has dubbed Telemass and which, as I recall, made its first appearance in the author’s Meridian Days many moons ago.

Here, Matt Hendrick, a detective from Amsterdam, arrives by Telemass on the planet Avoel (Fomalhaut-IV) to seek his wife and the daughter she took with her when she left him. Once there he becomes embroiled with Tiana Tiandra, a woman whose girlfriend Lalla has also disappeared into the interior. The events of the novella are related to the goings-on of a strange cult inspired by the indigenous Avoeli who have a ritual similar to the famadihana of Madagascar from where most of the humans on Avoel originally derived. This involves the apparently dead being brought back to life. The story is mostly told in third person but small fragments from Tiana’s viewpoint are rendered in italics.

Brown does this sort of thing so well. His readers will be familiar with a protagonist not in a relationship at the story’s start or else getting over a failed one, a religion with a degree of bizzarrerie, a lost spouse or family member, strange aliens and may even expect a love interest to be encountered along the way. The entertainment comes with the twists he applies to these building blocks. In this novella the Avoel are perhaps a little too undeveloped, Hendrick’s relationship with Tiana is a bit precipitate and the resolution also feels a trifle rushed. Yet the whole thing is engaging, if perhaps lacking some of the warmth of Brown’s previous quartet for PS, Starship Seasons. But we’re only one story in. Time enough.

Pedant’s corner:- is a valued members of my congregation (member,) attempting to keep the irritation from her voice” (his voice makes more sense,) peered around it mass (its mass,) bears a passing a passing resemblance, not to hate met (me,) “He heard her breathing at her side (his.) And a fair sprinkling of instances of “time interval” later.

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.)