Wormhole: publication day

To mark publication day for Wormhole, written with Eric Brown, here’s a piece I wrote for the Crime Writers’ Association:

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There’s a long tradition of mash-ups between the genres of crime and science fiction, going right back to the early days of SF, with EE ‘Doc’ Smith’s Skylark series pitching scientist hero Richard Seaton against arch villain Blackie DeQuesne. In the 1950s, Isaac Asimov set himself the challenge of writing credible crime fiction in a future setting without falling back on future-technology “cheats” to solve the crimes, almost singlehandedly inventing the human-robot buddy-cop genre, pairing human and robot detectives together in his novels The Caves of Steel and The Naked Sun. More recently, Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s Retrieval Artist stories revolve around crime and punishment scenarios in a future where human and alien moralities – and laws – don’t always correspond.

In our new novel Wormhole (by Keith Brooke and Eric Brown), our starting point was a classic crime scenario: a cold-case where the original investigation stalled over lack of evidence, possible corporate and political cover-up, and the disappearance of a prime suspect within days of the crime. What makes it a genre mash-up? Well this is the coldest of cold cases: the story is set at the end of the 22nd century, and the crime took place almost a century before the story opens – and the prime suspect is still alive, a member of the team sent out on an interplanetary mission. Having been kept in suspended animation for most of that time, the crime is still fresh in her memory, as if it had only happened a few days ago; and now, in the light of new evidence, cold-case specialist Gordon Kemp is despatched to find and return her… There ensues a mission to a distant planet, and pursuit of his suspect through exotic and very alien environments, as Kemp comes to realise that all is not as he had been told and there’s way more at stake than “merely” closing a case that has been on the books for a hundred years.

Both as authors and readers, Eric and I have always been drawn to this meeting of genres. Eric has committed SF crime in his Virex trilogy, featuring a missing persons bureau in a run-down 2040 New York where citizens escape grim reality with the use of virtual reality, while my own crime/SF short stories have frequently bridged the genre divide.

Do such genre crossovers work? They’re always going to run the risk that science-fiction fans won’t be interested in the whodunnit angle, while crime readers might find themselves dumped out of their comfort zone in very alien surroundings. The common ground is the love of a good puzzle, and the power of strong storytelling to solve it. To many authors, at least, it’s a natural marriage of genres – and we can only hope the readers agree!

Buy this ebook from: Amazon US – Amazon UK

Buy this book in print (ISBN: 9780857669964): Amazon US – Amazon UK – and other booksellers

The authors:

Keith Brooke is a habitual genre-switcher. He’s been shortlisted for major science-fiction awards, described by the Sunday Express as “the king of children’s horror”, and is a regular contributor to crime fiction anthologies and magazines.

Eric Brown has been writing and collecting books for almost thirty years, and is fascinated with British fiction of the 1950s. This interest led him to write the Langham and Dupré series of mysteries set in southern England, and one in Scotland, in the latter half of the fifties.

PS

A lovely write-up of some Brooke & Brown projects in the latest PS Publishing newsletter.

Talking about travelling long distances we are now going to take you to another time when humankind live in protective tunnels and domes on an Earth ruined by war and environmental destruction where Enforcers keep an oppressive rule of law and are also abetted by mysterious aliens called the Enigmats…

The first volume in the Enigma series, written in collaboration with Eric Brown, is in the final stages of production before going to print. Purchasing details will follow, when confirmed, or you could sign up to PS Publishing’s always entertaining newsletter to make sure you don’t miss it.

And as a new series opens, an older one ends, with the final volume in the Brooke & Brown novella series, Kon-Tiki Coda, also being prepared for print, and also soon available from PS. It was lovely to have the opportunity to return to the characters and settings of this series with a fifth story in the four-story series!

Wormhole: November 2022

“Brooke and Brown have crafted a thriller threaded with the complexities that are only possible in Science Fiction.”

Peter F. Hamilton, Sunday Times bestselling author of the Salvation Sequence

A cold-case murder enquiry takes a new turn with revelations about an ill-fated expedition to the stars. A genre mash-up in the first full-length novel from long-time collaborators Keith Brooke and Eric Brown: a corporate thriller, a whodunnit, interplanetary SF, and more.

From the publisher:

Brought to Angry Robot by the John Jarrold Literary Agency, we are delighted to welcome Keith Brooke and Eric Brown with Wormhole, an exciting hard SF/crime crossover. With both Keith and Eric well-known and respected throughout the SFF community for many years, as authors and reviewers alike, they have combined to create a gripping cautionary tale within a corporate conspiracy.

Acquiring Editor Simon Spanton: “Keith and Eric have, individually and together, long been producing exciting, yet thoughtful and carefully crafted SF. So to have the opportunity to publish a new book written by them in tandem is a delight. Wormhole is a twisty interstellar journey through a maze of crime and deceit that grabbed me from the first. As billionaires and corporations come to dominate our efforts to explore beyond Earth it’s also a very apposite SF novel.”

Keith Brooke & Eric Brown: “We’ve collaborated on short fiction for many years, but this is the first full-length novel we’ve produced together. We each know exactly how the other writes, so we can work seamlessly together – but also we manage to continually surprise each other so that any collaboration is unlike anything we could write individually.”

John Jarrold, John Jarrold Literary Agency: “I’ve known both Eric and Keith for many years, and loved their science fiction writing. The depth, involvement and great story-telling – and the universe they have created here – are wonderful. SF at its best.”

Wormhole is published by Angry Robot on 22 November 2022.

Drive Through

A nice start to the new year: a new crime story in the January 2022 issue of Mystery Magazine, available now on Amazon in a paperback edition: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B09P8KJTSJ?tag=infiniplusthe-21 (UK) or https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B09P8KJTSJ?tag=infiplusthesffan (US)

“Drive Through” by Keith Brooke: The quirky detective had run through all the standard questions. The vehicle’s make and colour, the driver’s description, the victim of the hit and run … But he had missed one very important question: Did you recognise the driver?

Also available at Kobo and Barnes & Noble.

Mystery Magazine is also available on a 30-day free trial subscription with Kindle Newsstands: https://amzn.to/3rnFs8W
Or from the magazine’s website: https://mysterymagazine.ca/

Revisits: Lord of Stone

One of the most often-repeated pieces of advice to writers is that you should write the book you would want to read, rather than chasing some idea of what readers might be looking for.

That’s good advice for anyone wanting to write their best work, but not necessarily good career guidance. Taking my own career as an example, I started out a little over thirty years ago with a gritty, anguished post-cyberpunk thriller. I followed this with a horror novel that never sold, and then a high-SF duology, and then a fantasy novel about the death of fantasy (and therefore one that didn’t feature a lot of actual fantasy), and then a contemporary crime novel.

If I’d chosen to follow up that first novel with a direct sequel, a top US publisher was willing to publish me at the top of their list, but I held to my artistic principles and followed my muse. No regrets, but my career would have been very different. Hell, if I’d even stuck a little more closely to a single genre groove my career would have been very different. But I genre-hopped and never quite settled – and probably had a far more interesting career as a result.

Anyway, this is a rather long-winded introduction to an idea that occurred to me recently. I’ve written a lot of fiction over the years, and now I’m very far-removed from actually writing those early books. What would it be like to re-read some of them? Would I find that it all came rushing back and it’d be something akin to that umpteenth editing pass where you’re sick of the words you’ve written and don’t believe anyone might find them even vaguely interesting? Or might that distance actually allow me to read the books with fresh eyes?

So I thought I’d give it a go.

I’m not intending to slavishly reread every word I’ve ever written, but there are some interesting concepts back there. Like that fantasy novel about the death of fantasy and belief. It’s an idea that’s been explored elsewhere, of course, but this was my take on it: a story set in the tail end and aftermath of a brutal civil war, where some people rally around faith while others question any kind of god who might allow such carnage. Early drafts went by the title Scar Tissue, and my lead character was called Blair, in acknowledgement of George Orwell, whose Homage to Catalonia was one of the big influences on the setting and dramatic tensions. The novel was a very near miss, with interest from a major publisher taking it right up to the point where it was listed in their Forthcoming Titles catalogue, but internal changes at the company before signatures hit the contract led to it falling through the gaps. After that, it was a difficult book to place – for a variety of reasons, one of which was that it didn’t fit any neat publishing categories, being neither mainstream nor out and out fantasy. It ended up coming out under the title Lord of Stone from Cosmos Books in the US in the late 1990s, and then I republished it through infinity plus a few years ago.

Rereading it now has been an interesting experience. The book is full of familiar echoes, like a movie rewatched after several years. There are scenes I remember vividly, and others that have surprised me; characters who are like old friends or colleagues, and others who I had totally forgotten.

Within a very short space of time I was totally absorbed in the story of a young man in the thick of a foreign war. First a bystander, Bligh (as I renamed him, because by the time the book came out a certain other Blair figured large in UK political life) soon becomes passionately involved in the struggles of people he has come to know and love; and before long he’s fighting in the international corps, while powerful forces of the old religion close in around him, and he is clearly being marked out as something special. The fantasy element remains ambiguous – just like the characters in the novel, the reader can choose to believe or not, a fine balance that, for me at least, draws me right into Bligh’s struggles to understand what is happening to him.

It’s odd. This is a book I wrote. These are words that occupied a year or more of my life back in the early 1990s. And yet I’ve actually enjoyed reading this novel as much as any other novel I’ve read this year. Does that sound egotistical? Arrogant?

Perhaps. But remember that piece of writing advice. Always write the story you would want to read. And by setting Lord of Stone aside for a couple of decades I find that I’ve given myself enough distance to prove that true. This novel might not have the same resonances, or power to move, for you or anyone else, but for me this is exactly the book I would want to read. And regardless of career trajectory, marketing, or any other aspect of a writer’s life, you can’t really ask for any greater success than that.

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Trace: a country where magic is dying out. A country at war with itself. A country where the prophecies of the Book of the World have started to come true.

Bligh: a young foreigner, drawn irresistibly to the war in Trace. A man who has rejected religion, yet appears to be possessed by one of the six Lords Elemental. Bligh thinks he’s going mad, but if he is then it’s a madness shared by others…

‘Satisfying prose … well realised and visualised characters … powerful and vivid portrayal of the conditions of war.’ –Eric Brown

‘Keith Brooke’s prose achieves a rare honesty and clarity, his characters always real people, his situations intriguing and often moving.’ –Jeff VanderMeer

Buy this ebook from: Amazon US – Amazon UK – Barnes and Noble – Kobo – Apple – Smashwords

Buy this book in print (ISBN: 1722889322): Amazon US – Amazon UK – and other booksellers

The nature of creativity, the creativity of nature

[Guest post by Stephen Palmer]

What makes a man go out into his local wood to take photographs of fungi?

In my new Conjuror Girl trilogy the main character, Monique, a resident at Shrobbesbury Orphanage, is a young woman with a talent only men are supposed to have. She encounters great resistance from those believing she is a freak – perhaps a dangerous freak, because she isn’t a man – and her story follows her attempts to understand why she is talented and why she is different; and then, what to do about that. Resistance comes from the Reifiers, men able to make real the contents of their minds.

These novels are set in 1899-1900, and one of Monique’s closest friends is a French painter, Henri Manguin, a real person who I encountered whilst reading a book about the Impressionists. Monique and Henri engage over the course of the first two volumes in a conversation about what creativity is, especially in the field of art. Monique paints buildings and other structures with a modernity and zest which takes Henri’s breath away. He, meanwhile, paints evocative images of the orphanage pool, in which he sees ethereal images of his childhood in Paris.

At first, Monique is wary of Henri, despite him clearly being in awe of her. In fact, Henri soon realises Monique’s talent is a gift, which he nurtures, not least because she is an orphan with absolutely no prospects other than servitude. Yet the two, as their relationship develops, begin to tease out the characteristics of visual art, and when in the second volume Monique meets a certain Mr Bleakmonger, her education improves further.

Art, Henri says, “is following nature, yet interpreting it also… to make a painting we grasp what is inside our mind, we splash it out upon the canvas.” Later he says, “We take nature as it is, though we interpret what we see for our canvases. But a Reifier, he take what he believes to be nature from his mind, which we would never do – which we could never do. And such a man therefore can on occasion be wrong.” To this Monique says, “Then I must be open to the world, not closed to it.” When with Mr Bleakmonger she says, “I was thinking of my creativity. Mr Bleakmonger, it could be one of two things. On the one hand is the selfish option – forcing your will upon the world to make real the mind’s fancies. My creativity is the same process, making real my mind’s images, yet it’s the selfless option. I reach into my mind, to create… I do believe I see the difference now! A Reifier reaches into his mind, but he doesn’t interpret the world. He doesn’t allow the world a chance to affect his sentiments. He blocks it off. He denies it… An artist allows the world to have a profound effect deep inside them, because they’re sensitive. When I paint, I welcome the world into me, and then I interpret it.”

What then of our photographer? It is surely the fungi and the atmosphere of the wood which affect him: Nature. He is sensitive to it. The wonder and beauty of the wood, and the things growing in it, affect his deeper mind – “We take nature as it is, though we interpret what we see for our canvases…” – which in turn gives him the impulse to create, interpreting the wood through his lens. And although photography is a technique of capturing reality, the person behind the camera uses insight and sensitivity to choose and frame what they wish to photograph. Photography is Art. To quote Monet: “Every day I discover more and more beautiful things, it’s enough to drive one mad.”

Monica Orphan, book one in the Conjuror Girl trilogy:

Buy this ebook from: Amazon US – Amazon UK – Barnes and Noble – Kobo – Apple – Smashwords
Buy this book in print (ISBN: 9798759486374): Amazon US – Amazon UK – and other booksellers

All three books in the trilogy are now available.

New: Monique Orphan by Stephen Palmer

New from infinite press: Monique Orphan by Stephen Palmer, the first book in the Conjuror Girl trilogy.
Books two and three to follow in November and December 2021.

In an alternate 1899…

Monique, resident for as long as she can remember at Shrobbesbury Orphanage, has a strange talent, which she neither understands nor can control. This talent, however, is only supposed to be possessed by men.

Should she conceal her abilities in order to survive, or should she be true to herself? If she hides her gift she will languish, yet if she reveals her true self she will be hunted down and experimented upon by men whose talents outshine her own…

A most peculiar adventure through a fantastical alternative fin de siècle Britain where the darkest creations are those that come from within.

‘His work is unique, original, sometimes challenging, always fresh…’ Amazing Stories

Buy this ebook from: Amazon US – Amazon UK – Barnes and Noble – Kobo – Apple – Smashwords
Buy this book in print (ISBN: 9798759486374): Amazon US – Amazon UK – and other booksellers

Fictions #11: Stealthcare by Liz Williams

Today sees publication of the eleventh story in our Fictions series exploring the future of health and social care in collaboration with the Future Care Capital charity:

“Stealthcare” by Liz Williams

The story is illustrated by Vincent Chong.

More Fictions

Today the tenth story in our year-long Fictions collaboration with Future Care Capital goes live: “CareFree” by Keith Brooke. It’s been a fascinating project, and unlike anything we’ve worked on before: four writers and an artist working with a health and social care charity to explore near-future scenarios – putting fictional flesh on the bones of what might be as a way of helping professionals and policy-makers in these fields to shape their thinking about how things should be.

The stories range from explorations of virtual living funerals, disease tourism and various interventions in childbirth, care, and more. One of our stories was shortlisted for this year’s British Science Fiction Award for best short story, which was particularly satisfying as a project operating beyond the normal publishing channels like this could easily pass unnoticed by genre readers.

All ten stories are available to read for free on the FCC website, with two more to come, and all are illustrated by Vincent Chong:

• Goodbye by Stephen Palmer (July 2020)
• All I Asked For by Anne Charnock (August 2020)
• Life’s Lottery by Keith Brooke (September 2020)
• Infectious by Liz Williams (October 2020)
• Vigorish by Keith Brooke (November 2020)
• Genomancer by Stephen Palmer (December 2020)
• When I Visit the Palace by Liz Williams (January 2021)
• George by Stephen Palmer (February 2021)
• Don’t Push the Blame On Me by Anne Charnock (March 2021)
• CareFree by Keith Brooke (April 2021)

Ten years of infinity plus

Ten years ago today, the first ebook title from infinity plus was made available. (Well, actually, Amazon lists the publish date as 23rd November rather than the official 24th, because it went through their systems faster than expected and became available a day early.)

In that decade we’ve published a total of 95 infinity plus titles; this figure includes a series of 20 standalone short stories, the infinity plus singles, so that leaves 75 full-length books – novels, collections and anthologies. We’ve also published a further 20 titles in our infinite press imprint.

So I make that a grand total of 115 titles in a decade. Not bad!

Our authors include winners of World Fantasy Awards, Hugos, and most of the other major awards. A fabulous set of people to work with.

And we’re still going strong. We’ve just published a fine collection from Tony Ballantyne (‘Superb’ The Guardian), and we have another collection, including an original novella, from Garry Kilworth in the new year.