Parallax View showcases 'In Transit', written specially for this collection, a novella set in a future war-torn universe in which human expansion has come up against the implacable Kryte. Xeno-psychologist Abbott finds himself the guardian of a deadly Kryte on a mission to study it on his return to Earth. When they crash-land on the fortress planet of St Jerome, the Kryte prisoner turns the tables and takes Abbott into terrible custody. What follows is a terrifying journey across a hellish landscape towards a finale that might change the destiny of the Kryte and humanity, forever...
Plus six other stories that examine the interface between human and alien - a parallax view from two of Britain's top science fiction writers, both shortlisted for the 2012 Philip K Dick Award.
The blue light thickened, blotting out Janner's surroundings, and he existed in a displaced void-like limbo. Then the blue light vanished. Christ, he cried to himself, where the hell now?"
It begins with a feeling of euphoria, then the light, lapis lazuli, leaking from your body, intensifying, a blinding nimbus, then it's gone. And so are you... somewhere, anywhere.
And it is happening to you every day.
This collection contains the novella Blue Shifting, plus seven other stories from the two-times winner of the British Science Fiction Award for Short Fiction.
Take a journey into an extraordinary universe...
...where life and love face the demands of mortality on planets as far flung as Nova Francais, Earth and Henderson's Fall.
...where mankind has become Augmented or Altered, where zebra-men talk with unicorn-women.
...and where you can break the chains of physics in the cobalt glory of the Nada-continuum.
'I survive. I live from day to day – a Meridian day which humanity has created from one eternal stretch of daylight.'
Meridian, twenty light years from Earth and with just a tiny scattering of inhabitable islands, seems the perfect place for Bob Benedict to escape the tragedy of his past. Here he can live out his days in drug abuse, despised by and despising the self-obsessed community of artists who make up the population of the colony planet: the Altereds who have swapped human form for animal, and the Augmenteds who have boosted their minds with computers. But when Bob meets Fire, the daughter of the formidable Tamara Trevellion, the most ruthlessly ambitious of the artists, he is drawn into a world of corruption and murder that is far darker than his past. Soon it's all he can do just to survive...
When a young tug pilot's career is ruined by a collision in Earth orbit he has no choice but to accept a commission to fly an eccentric ship builder to planet far from the trade routes. When they discover alien ruins on the planet and the hulk of a missing generation ship they are thrown into the centre of a conspiracy that reaches back centuries. Meanwhile on Earth a young Indian police officer is trying to track down a serial killer little suspecting that the killer is linked to what is happening on a planet light years away and that her own past holds the key to everything that is happening. Eric Brown has written a novel that brings together an extraordinary imagination, rare sensitivity to character and a love of Eastern philosophy. A key novel from one of the UK's favourite SF writers.
When Salvageman Ed saves Ella Rodriguez from spider-drones on the pleasure planet of Sinclair's Landfall, he has no idea what he's letting himself in for. Ella is not at all what she seems, as he's soon about to find out.
What follows, as the spider-drones and the Hayakawa Organisation chase Ed, Ella and engineer Karrie light-years across space, is a fast-paced adventure with Ed learning more about Ella - and about himself - than he ever expected.
The Salvageman Ed series of linked stories - four of which appear here for the first time - combine action, humour and pathos, from the master of character-based adventure science fiction.
