Chris Beckett's Fiction

My next book, to be published during 2011 by Corvus, will be Dark Eden.

In the short story of the same name  – it’s included in the  collection, The Turing Test – four men and a woman find themselves on the  sunless planet Eden, lit and kept warm by its own  geothermal life.   Their ship is badly damaged and the chances of returning successfully to Earth are very slim.  The woman Angela offers to stay on Eden with one of the men, so that human life can carry on there if the  ship doesn’t manage to get through.  T0mmy (a womanising astronaut who she doesn’t like much) offers to be the one to stay with her.

The novel is set five or so generations later.  Tommy’s  and Angela’s descendants are now a small community which just calls itself Family.  They have stone age technology and a culture shaped by the community’s traumatic beginnings.  After all this time, the people of Eden are still reluctant to leave the spot where their ancestors first landed and where, they hope, the people of Earth will one day return for them.

Tired of the stifling, backward-looking  conformity of this little incestuous society, John Redlantern begins to rebel against the accepted order.  Family is torn apart, bloodshed comes into the world and the matriarchal order begins to crumble.

The story ‘The Circle of Stones‘ was an early prototype for the novel, though the novel has a rather different feel and rather more complicated and conflicted characters.

For those commentators who note that I tend to use well-tested SF themes.   Yes, guilty as charged, and, yes, this isn’t the first Adam and Eve in space story ever written.   (And the Adam and Eve story itself has been around for a good few millenia).   But then again Shakespeare wasn’t the first person to tell the stories of Hamlet or King Lear.