This was actually meant to go up at the beginning of June, but my surprise eye operation put the kibosh on that. And I probably really should apologise to Eric and Keith for not managing to get this up before now. I'm still doing a lot of catch up, both in my own writing and in my editing work.
This time around, Eric Brown and Keith Brooke are here to tell you about their epic Dislocations saga.
I’ve known both Eric and Keith, on and off, for a couple of decades, usually encountering them at conventions. My primary contact, however, was through the pages of Interzone magazine. When I found out about their latest collaboration, I had no doubt I wanted to give them a spot here. Here they are in their own words:
Keith Brooke and Eric Brown first met almost thirty years ago, two bright(ish) young(ish) writers getting their first breaks with short stories in the magazines and anthologies of the time. Pretty soon they’d sold their first books – a collection of short stories by Eric, a novel from Keith – and also they’d become good friends and, more importantly for the purposes of this piece, first readers of each other’s work, casting beady and very critical eyes over each other’s writing before it went out to the wider world.
Inevitably talk turned to collaboration, an obvious next step from critiquing, but always the conclusion was never, not on your nelly, no, not ever.
More than a hundred solo books between them later, the two have a collection of collaborative stories to their credit (Parallax View) and are halfway through a series of four collaborative novellas, The Kon-Tiki Quartet.
Collaboration? No, it would never work.
In The Kon-Tiki Quartet, Brooke and Brown chart the future of humankind amongst the stars, featuring such well-loved genre tropes as cloning, telepathy, alien beings, and colonisation – as well as some innovations like the science of somatic printing and identity downloading. At the core of the series, however, is the very human story of psychiatrists Kat Manning, Daniel DeVries, and the biologist Travis Denholme, and their complex, often explosive personal relationships.
In the first novella, Dislocations, a colonisation ship is being prepared to flee an Earth ravaged by environmental catastrophe, global warming and political inertia, and settle on a planet orbiting Sigma Draconis 19. The novella is set in and around the East Anglian spaceport of Lakenheath and concentrates on three main characters in the countdown to the launch, the political and personal in-fighting, and a gang of eco-terrorists' violent opposition to the colonisation program.
Book Two, Parasites, is set on the world of Newhaven, where humankind has established a fledgling colony. Parasites is a murder-mystery featuring the science and technology of cloning, telepathy, and alien biology. Through his study of native life-forms, biologist Travis Denholme has discovered means of developing elective telepathy, with all the advantages and pitfalls that this entails – including the unravelling of a years-old tragedy back on Earth.
The third novella, Insights, brings together the stories set up in the first two volumes: the consequences of a humankind blessed – or cursed – by the availability of telepathy and the political creed which violently opposes the idea. At the core of the story, three very different characters – often intimately and violently linked – must work out what is best for themselves and for society at large… while on the run from forces that want them, and their research, eradicated.
Book Four, as yet untitled, will bring the story full circle with a return to a far-future Earth, as printed ‘iterations’ of the three main protagonists explore an Earth they left behind many centuries earlier.
All four novellas in the Quartet are published by PS Publishing.
Other bits:
Book one, March 2018: Dislocations
Book two, June 2018: Parasites
Book three, date tbc: Insights
Book four: date and title tbc
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