No matter how alien the world he describes, there is always something hauntingly familiar about the situations that unfold there.” I wrote the above 5 years ago, for the introduction to the Spanish version of New York Nights, and I was reminded of it when I found it amongst the quotes at the front of Eric Brown’s hugely successful novel, Helix. This novella is a very different piece of work, but the idea still holds true. Although a stand alone story which can easily be read as such, Starship Fall also provides the sequel to Eric’s Starship Summer, a delightful novella set on the world of Chalcedony which deals with a group of broken people helping each other to put their lives back together. Now, SF is a broad church; it is a field well served with battling robots, Artificial Intelligences, cyber detectives and expletive ridden tales of torture written in the first person present tense. All this shows the genre is healthy and avoiding stagnation, or at least is mistaken by some for that fact.
