Last September I began a novel entitled The Kings of Eternity, based on my short story of the same title published in the late, lamented Science Fiction Age, January, 2000, and on "The Secret of Hopton Wood", a long novella as yet unpublished. The short story was about a contemporary writer, resident in Greece, his three friends and their strange discovery one winter in the 1890s. The novella, written later, is about the discovery made by the friends, but updated to the 1930s. It came to me that there was more to the story and novella than I'd written. In the novel I expanded both the historical section - moving it to the 1930s, as in the novella - and the events set in Greece. It's partly a love story, partly an exploration of the effects that the gift of immortality might have on individuals, and features evil aliens, star-travel, portals between worlds and other such skiffy wonders. The back end of last year saw me re-writing great chunks of the novel - the longest I've ever written at 115,00 words - at the suggestion of my agent Antony Harwood; Stephen Baxter, Keith Brooke, and Finn Sinclair also had great comments to make on the ms.

Before and after The Kings of Eternity, I was busy working on short stories and other projects. In July I wrote "The Kéthani Inheritance" and "Thursday's Child", two more stories in my Kéthani sequence of tales, in which the eponymous aliens bestow immortality on humanity. The stories explore - in an entirely different way to The Kings of Eternity - how individuals and society cope with the choice of whether to accept the alien gift, or not. All the stories are set in the region of West Yorkshire where I live; they keep the aliens, and technology, well in the background, concentrating instead on the everyday lives of everyday people. "The Kéthani Inheritance" was published in Spectrum SF 7 , and "Thursday's Child" is due to appear in a forthcoming issue of that magazine. The other stories in this sequence are "Ferryman", New Worlds, 1997, and "Onward Station", Interzone 135, September, 1998.

January saw me working on Fire Bug, a follow-up to Twocking, published this February by Barrington Stoke of Edinburgh. These are short books for reluctant readers, and combine relatively sophisticated story-lines with very simple language, grammar and syntax. Twocking was about joy-riders, and Fire Bug is about a young arsonist. Neither are SF. Also in January I wrote another Kéthani story, "The Wisdom of the Dead", which I have yet to re-write and submit.
In the first week of February I wrote a short SF tale, "The Frozen Woman" - actually it was one of those rare gifts that come fully-blown to the writer and demand to be written in one day, which I did.

I'm in the early stages of writing a novella (with the working title of Approaching Omega) with Josh Lacey at the moment, and thinking about two further solo novellas - which seems to be a length I'm comfortable with these days. After that, I should be settling down to the next novel, as well as moving into a house in the village with my girlfriend, Finn.

And I'll endeavour to update this section of the Website a little quicker in future!

See you then.

Eric Brown,
Haworth,
March, 2002.