8:24am Friday 27th February 2009
By David Barnett
A writer from Haworth might fully expect to be overshadowed by the village’s more famous literary dynasty. So it’s a good job that Eric Brown sets his sights higher than the windswept moors that rise around the village.
Eric is widely-regarded as one of the leading lights of contemporary science fiction, and last year’s portmanteau novel Kethani, positing first contact with aliens and set around his native Bradford, established him as a writer whose star is still in the ascendant.
Kethani was published by dedicated sci-fi and fantasy imprint Solaris, and following Kethani’s critical acclaim they signed him up for a new trilogy, the first of which, Necropath, has just been released.
Necropath introduces Jeff Vaughan, gifted with the ability to read minds, who acts as a kind of super immigration officer in the near future. But jostling for space with Vaughan as the star of the book is the ambitious backdrop of the series of novels, the place where Jeff Vaughan works – the exotic Bengal Station.
Bengal Station is a vast spaceport rising from the ocean between India and Burma, where all the major space traffic docks before its inhabitants – and this is a near future where alien contact has been made and extraterrestrials ply their trade between far flung stars and the Earth – are admitted into the world.
Vaughan’s role is to scan the minds of newcomers to ensure they aren’t up to mischief. Or, as is the case in the first book, the members of a sinister cult which worships an obscene alien god.
Like all good anti-heroes, Vaughan has a past and secrets from which he’s running. But although the world and the universe beyond it is vast, secrets have a habit of catching up with people.
Throw in a series of murders of high-profile space explorers, a deadly new drug, and a sub-plot with a disfigured prostitute trying to escape the fleshpots of Bangkok, and Necropath makes for a high-octane sci-fi thriller.
What’s especially interesting about Brown’s book is the way he avoids the Anglo/US-centric futures that many sci-fi writers go for, and instead sets his action in the Far East, with only Vaughan’s Canadian background offering much in the way of Western intervention. It’s a bold move, but one successfully pulled off by Brown, and he brings the crowded streets of Bangkok and their residents alive with his descriptive flair and rapid-fire plot.
It isn’t giving too much away to say that Jeff Vaughan survives the action – after all, he’s appearing in the next two Bengal Station books. So, what are they all about? Over to Eric: “Book two, Xenopath, is set two years later. Vaughan is a happy man, married to Sukara and with a child on the way. Working for a telepathic detective agency, Vaughan investigates a series of murders linked to the colony world of Mallory, and the slaughter of innocent aliens there by the Scheering-Lassiter colonial organisation.
“Even what he discovers cannot shake his new-found optimism and happiness – despite the genocide, and the threat to his own life and that of Sukara – Vaughan discerns goodness in the heart of individuals.”
If you’ve already read the first book, you might want to go over Eric’s quote again. The misanthropic Vaughan, happy? Don’t worry, though, it won’t last.
Eric says: “That optimism, however, is tested to the limits in book three, Cosmopath. Vaughan is approached by the billionaire colonial tycoon Rabindranath Chandrasakar, who wants him to read the mind of someone on the unexplored world of Delta Cephei VII.
“There’s one problem – this person is dead, and Vaughan must undergo an operation to be installed with technology to enable him to read the dwindling minds of the dead spacer...
“On Delta Cephei VII, Vaughan discovers that Chandrasakar is using him in a game of treachery and deceit in a bid to discover a secret an alien race is concealing from humanity which could change the course of human expansion through the universe.
“The novels explore Vaughan’s reaction to the evil at the heart of the human race – and his quest to uncover goodness and do the right thing – in the form of fast-paced, space opera action-adventure.”
The first book, Necropath, is in essence a new version of Eric’s 2004 novella, Bengal Station, which was published in the small presses and had critical acclaim though limited exposure. With this deal with Solaris putting Eric’s books on the bookshelves in major chain stores across the country, it’s evident that Eric Brown’s time has now come.
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