2011 books

[peteryoung]

35) Eric Brown, The Kings of Eternity, 2011
A group of men in 1930s England come across a portal that leads to outer space and an interstellar war, while in a separate narrative in 1999 a solitary English writer in Greece thinks he has found love, while someone else is researching his own mysterious past. It can't be that frequent that a published short story takes more than a decade to mature into a fully-fledged novel, but what began as a piece of short fiction of the same name in Science Fiction Age in 2000 was then followed by the serialised novella 'The Blue Portal' in Interzone in 2002. So I use the word 'mature' deliberately because this novel has the resonance of years behind it, being as much a tip of the hat to the scientific romances of the early 20th Century as it is an ode to the loneliness of a writer's life. The themes Eric Brown engages with are handled with a sensitivity to the genre's past and he wisely makes no attempt to unnecessarily update anything for 21st Century sensibilities, least of all the naive scientific presumptions that much early 20th Century SF was built upon which here he lets the reader just enjoy for what they are. This is an elegant novel that doesn't aim to dazzle; instead it fits like a comfortable old armchair, with scene-setting and characterisation that ring true with a sense of old-fashioned English familiarity. I'd like to think this is one of the most notable British SF novels of 2011 but I'm behind on what else has appeared in the past year, nevertheless I'll certainly be nominating The Kings of Eternity for a BSFA Award.