Fiction Reviews
To The Stars And Back
Stories In Honour of Eric Brown(2024) edited by Ian Whates, NewCon Press,
£13.99, pbk, 287pp, ISBN: 978-1-914-95380-4
As many readers will know, prolific author and reviewer Eric Brown sadly passed away in 2023. This collection of fifteen stories, preceded by a poignant introduction by his friend and editor/founder of NewCon Press, Ian Whates, offers a fitting and comprehensive tribute. There really is something for everyone here but one of my favourites is ‘The Scurlock Compendium’ by Alastair Reynolds, an Arthur C. Clarke-ish tale of teleportation and tragedy, which even has a pub at its heart (although it’s ‘The Green Man’, rather than ‘The White Hart’). Justina Robson’s ‘The Place of the Mice’ is a close runner-up in which a Yorkshire-born Sherriff of a remote community in Northern Pennsylvania finds herself dealing with a ghoulish mystery and which reads like a slice from a novel (one that I would definitely read!). Like a number of other contributions, this nicely resonates not only with Brown’s science-fiction but his mystery writing as well.
‘Masterchef on Mars: A Murder Mystery’, by Ian Watson, for example, is, as the title and sub-title suggest, an extra-terrestrial food related crime story, laden with puns and with its tongue firmly in its cheek. Whates’ own contribution, ‘Bartering With Ghosts’, is likewise a crime story with added aliens, but is less baggy and has a neat ‘reveal’. ‘Untold’ by Keith Brooke, on the other hand, riffs directly off Brown’s own work, offering a nicely judged meta-coda to the latter’s Langham and Dupré mystery series.
Also unconventional in style is Rachel Rajendra’s ‘Peppercorns’, written in the form of a tv comedy script. Indeed, the opening is strongly reminiscent of the Two Ronnies’ famous ‘Four Candles’ sketch, although with a robot taking Ronnie Corbett’s role. Robots also feature prominently in ‘The Peaceable Kingdom’ by Chris Beckett, which is a cautionary, and perhaps rather reactionary, tale about intervention by an outsider. Kim Lakin in ‘The Guardian’ and Philip Palmer with ‘Rodeoday’ also explore the consequences of ecological meddling, in the Arctic and off-world, respectively, although the latter does offer a glimmer of hope.
Hope through alien intervention also features in ‘A Sea Change’, by Donna Scott, in which a woman’s abusive ex- gets his just, if weird, desserts. The same might be said of the rather pompous collector of old books in Philip Vine’s ‘The Neglected Bookshop’, which is written in a somewhat odd, staccato style and namechecks Brown himself. The very opposite of pomposity is represented by the title character in Josh Lacey’s ‘President Max’, a rather slight if topical piece on the vagaries of Presidential elections.
Stepping back into deeper waters, ‘May You Rise’ by James Lovegrove suggests that not all transformations – even those that might seem positive – should be welcomed and a similarly poignant tone is adopted in Uma McCormack’s ‘Last Orders’, a short piece about people leaving, told from the perspective of one who stays behind, remembering.
That theme is then taken up by Tony Ballantyne in ‘Eric and the Kéthani’, which closes the volume in a moving contrast of the epic with the mundane and asks the reader to consider which actually offers the more worthwhile life. The piece and the collection as a whole conclude with the narrator’s wife asking if he’s going to do any writing that afternoon and the author replying,
“No, I’m going to call Eric.”
“What are you going to say?”
“Just that I’ll miss him.”
I defy anyone to put the book down without a lump in their throat after that.
Steven French
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