Haworth-born Eric Brown is surely one of the hardest-working and most prolific writers working in the science fiction field today.

The “also by Eric Brown” section in his latest novel runs to a full page – 17 novels, nine novellas, eight collections of short stories. Add to that the fact Brown recently made a foray into crime writing with his 1950s-set novel Murder By The Book, and he’s got a steampunk story set in India out next Spring. On top of that, his science fiction novel Helix Wars was nominated for a prestigious Philip K Dick Award in 2012.

It seems like if you blink you’ll miss a new Eric Brown book, so let’s grab on to his latest, Satan’s Reach, while it’s passing by our orbit.

This is the second book in Brown’s Weird Space series for Abaddon Books – part of the Rebellion publishing empire, which also includes the comic 2000AD, home of Judge Dredd.

It follows on loosely, in that it’s set in the same universe, as the first book, The Devil’s Nebula, but it’s a standalone story and you don’t need to have read the first Weird Space volume to get into this, though it might help your appreciation of the wider universe Brown’s creating.

Far in the future, the Expansion government rules space with an authoritarian iron fist. Den Harper works for the Expansion, utilising his telepathic powers to read the minds of criminals, terrorists, spies and anyone the government deems a general bad lot.

It’s a dirty job, and someone’s got to do it, but after ten years of putting himself in a lot of undesirable minds, Harper has had enough. Simply handing in his notice isn’t really an option, though, so Harper clears out, stealing a starship and getting as much distance between his former paymasters and himself as possible.

Which, unfortunately for Harper, means heading for Satan’s Reach, a sector of space where the Expansion doesn’t hold much sway. It’s a lawless, frontier-town sort of bit of the universe, where people have to survive on their wits.

And Harper does, for five years, until he finds out that the Expansion is going to rather extraordinary lengths to discover his whereabouts. Despite his powers, Harper can’t think what the Expansion wants with him after all this time... until he begins to take seriously the rumours that alien intelligences from beyond known space have set their sights on Expansion territory.

Despite Brown’s big ideas concerning space and the universe, his books are always more about the humans finding their place in it.

He perfectly combines meaty concepts with character-driven stories, and has a sound ear for dialogue and a breezy pace that keeps the action moving all the time.

Satan’s Reach, despite being the second in a series, is the perfect jumping-on point for anyone new to Brown’s work, and from there you can investigate his wide body of writing.

I point you to his excellent Kethani series, the two Helix books and his post-apocalyptic adventure Guardians Of The Phoenix as your next ports of call on your journey through Brown’s imagination, which feels as limitless as space itself.