Eric Brown (1960-2023)

Writer Eric Brown, 62, died March 21, 2023 of sepsis. He was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma in 2022. Brown was the author of over 50 books, and a longtime SF reviewer for The Guardian.

Brown was born was born May 24, 1960 in Haworth, West Yorkshire. He traveled extensively in Greece and Asia in the ’80s, eventually settling in Berwickshire, Scotland.

Brown’s first work of genre interest was children’s play Noel’s Ark (1982), and his first prose was “Krash-Bangg Joe and the Pineal-Zen Equation” in Interzone (1987). Stories “Hunting the Slarque” (1999) and “The Children of Winter” (2001) won BSFA Awards. Some of his short work was collected in The Time-Lapsed Man and Other Stories (1990), Blue Shifting (1995), Parallax View (2000, with Keith Brooke), Deep Future (2001), The Fall of Tartarus (2005), Threshold Shift (2006), The Angels of Life and Death (2010), Ghostwriting (2012), Strange Visitors (2014), Rites of Passage (2014) Microcosms (2017, with Tony Ballantyne), The Spacetime Pit Plus Two (2018, with Stephen Baxter), The Ice Garden & Other Stories (2019), and The Disciples of Apollo: The Best Short Stories of Eric Brown (2019). His Kethani stories were collected as Kéthani (2008).

His debut SF novel was Meridian Days (1992). Other standalone titles include Engineman (1994; expanded to include related stories as Enginemen, 2010), Penumbra (1999), Approaching Omega (2005), British Front (2005), The Extraordinary Voyage of Jules Verne 2005), Space Ace (2005), Guardians of the Phoenix (2010), The Kings of Eternity (2011), The Serene Invasion (2013), The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: The Martian Menace (2020), and Ace Doubles (2021).

Brown also wrote numerous series. The Virex trilogy is New York Nights (2000), New York Blues (2001), and New York Dreams (2004). The Bengal Station series has Bengal Station (2004), Necropath (2008), Xenopath (2009), and Cosmopath (2009). Helix (2007) was followed by sequel Helix Wars (2012), a Philip K. Dick Award finalist. The Weird Space books are The Devil’s Nebula (2012), Satan’s Reach (2013), and The Baba Yaga (2015, with Una McCormack). The Telemass Quartet has Famadihana on Fomalhaut IV (2014), Sacrifice on Spica III (2014), Reunion on Alpha Reticuli II (2016), Exalted on Bellatrix I (2017), and Telemass Coda (2019). Jani and the Greater Game (2014) was followed by sequel Jani and the Great Pursuit (2016). Binary (2016) had sequel System (2017).

Brown excelled at novella length. The Starship Seasons novella series has Starship Summer (2007), Starship Fall (2009), Starship Winter (2012), Starship Spring (2012), and Starship Coda (2016). Other novellas include Gilbert and Edgar on Mars (2009), The Martian Simulacra: A Sherlock Holmes Mystery (2018), and On Arcturus VII (2021).

With Keith Brooke, Brown wrote the Kon-Tiki series: Dislocations (2018), Parasites (2018), Insights (2019), Iterations (2020), and Kon Tiki Coda (2022). The two also co-wrote Enigma Season (2022) and Wormhole (2022).

Brown wrote for shared world series The Web, and edited The Mammoth Book of New Jules Verne Adventures (2005) with Mike Ashley. He also wrote crime novels, including the Langham and Dupré series.

He is survived by his wife Finn and daughter Freya. For more, see his entry in the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and his obituary in The Guardian.