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In myth Tartarus was the lowest region of hell. In reality it is a world about to die…
I’d heard many a tale about Tartarus Major, how certain continents were technological backwaters five hundred years behind the times; how the Church governed half the planet with a fist of iron, and yet how, across scattered islands and sequestered lands, a thousand bizarre and heretic cults prospered too.
I’d heard how a lone traveller was hardly safe upon the planet’s surface, prey to wild animals and cut-throats. Most of all I’d heard that Tartarus was a dying world, one that would be annihilated when its sun exploded in the magnificent stellar suicide of a supernova.
These are the stories of the people who are leaving Tartarus, those have decided to stay and those who are arriving on the planet for the apocalypse.
This ebook edition also features an afterword by the author.
“Eric Brown spins a terrific yarn” SFX
“This is the rediscovery of wonder” Stephen Baxter on Helix
“SF suffused with a cosmopolitan and literary sensibility” Paul McAuley
“British writing with a deft, understated touch: wonderful” New Scientist
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Rites of Passage gathers four long stories, one of which is original to the collection. “Bartholomew Burns and the Brain Invaders” features a Victorian London facing the threat of alien invasion and the mysterious ‘Guardian’ who saves the day. “Guardians of the Phoenix” is set in a near-future, post-apocalyptic world where water is in short supply and roaming bands will do anything to obtain it, while “Sunworld” is about a strange world where the sun is fixed eternally overhead and Yarrek Merwell makes a discovery that will change everything. The longest story in the collection, “Beneath the Ancient Sun” has never appeared before and is set on a far-future Earth where giant crabs and a swollen sun threaten humanity’s very existence.
