I’m proud and pleased to have had a story selected for this collection, which has been put together by Ian Whates at Newcon Press in honour of the late Eric Brown who died last year.
Eric was well-known and well-loved in the British science fiction world. He was a warm, gentle, unassuming man without a trace of arrogance or pretentiousness, and was an exceptionally prolific writer, not just in science fiction, but in many genres including children’s books and crime novels. Yet he’d never read a book until he was in his teens, when he first encountered the work of Agatha Christie. This (as Eric described it) opened up what felt like a magical and entirely new world to him to which he proceeded to dedicate himself, as a reader, writer and reviewer.
The stories in this collection are written by some of his many writer friends. Some of them (I’ve only read a couple so far) refer directly to Eric and his world. Mine doesn’t, but I like to think it’s a story he would have approved of, and perhaps even one that he might have written. It’s called ‘The Peaceable Kingdom.’
Here is the Guardian’s obituary for Eric (who was the paper’s SF critic for many years). The book is available now.