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    The Spacetime Pit Plus Two
    The Spacetime Pit Plus Two
    The Spacetime Pit Plus Two
    Ebook99 pages1 hour

    The Spacetime Pit Plus Two

    By Stephen Baxter and Eric Brown

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    The Spacetime Pit Plus Two collects three collaborative stories by two of science fiction's finest writers. Never before published in one volume, the triptych showcases the authors' ability to create narratives on a vast scale, and yet never to lose sight of the all-important human element.

    In the award-winning 'The Spacetime Pit', spacer Katerina Wake crash-lands on a primitive alien world and faces certain death unless she can harness her ingenuity, and technical know-how, to bend the destiny of an entire race to her will...

    'Green-Eyed Monster' follows Richard as he wakes up after a night on the tiles to find himself inhabiting the body of a toad – and that's just the start of his troubles...

    In 'Sunfly', Onara and her people live on a world very different from our own – a vast ribbon encircling a sun. But a change is coming to the land, a mysterious narrowing that threatens not only the stability of her world, but the very order of everything she has taken for granted.

    "With every passing year, the oft-made remark that Baxter is Arthur C Clarke's heir seems more and more apt" - SFX

    "Eric Brown spins a terrific yarn" - SFX

    "There's real beauty and excitement to Baxter's writing" - Starburst

    "British writing with a deft, understated touch: wonderful" - New Scientist on Eric Brown

    LanguageEnglish
    Publisherinfinity plus
    Release dateJan 4, 2018
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      Book preview

      The Spacetime Pit Plus Two - Stephen Baxter and Eric Brown

      The Spacetime Pit Plus Two

      STEPHENBAXTER

      ERICBROWN

      On Stephen Baxter:

      ‘Ideas come thick and fast, and an exhilarating sense of wonder is guaranteed’ – Independent

      ‘With every passing year, the oft-made remark that Baxter is Arthur C Clarke’s heir seems more and more apt’ – SFX

      ‘There’s real beauty and excitement to Baxter’s writing’ – Starburst

      ‘Stephen Baxter is an incredibly skilled author – a successor to Arthur C Clarke and Philip K Dick...’ – Book Bag

      ~

      On Eric Brown:

      ‘A masterful storyteller’ – Strange Horizons

      ‘Brown’s spectacular creativity creates a constantly compelling read’ – Kirkus

      ‘SF infused with a cosmopolitan and literary sensibility... accomplished and affecting’ – Paul J McAuley

      ‘British writing with a deft, understated touch: wonderful’ – New Scientist

      Published by

      infinity plus

      www.infinityplus.co.uk

      Follow @ipebooks on Twitter

      © 2018 Stephen Baxter and Eric Brown

      ‘The Spacetime Pit’ © 1996 Stephen Baxter and Eric Brown

      ‘Green-Eyed Monster’ © 2000 Stephen Baxter and Eric Brown

      ‘Sunfly’ © 1995 Stephen Baxter and Eric Brown

      Cover image © Johan Swanepoel

      Cover and interior design © Keith Brooke

      All rights reserved.

      No portion of this book may be reproduced by any means, mechanical, electronic, or otherwise, without first obtaining the permission of the copyright holder.

      The moral right of Stephen Baxter and Eric Brown to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

      Contents

      Introduction

      The Spacetime Pit

      Green-Eyed Monster

      Sunfly

      The Authors

      Acknowledgements

      Introduction

      by Eric Brown

      Collaboration between writers is a curious process.

      I’ve tried writing with a number of authors, and it often doesn’t work; there’s no initial spark, or our writing styles, and methods, are too dissimilar to forge an effective working relationship. It doesn’t matter how much I like the other person, or how similar our ideas about life, art and politics might be—if there isn’t that elusive, almost alchemical spark at some point in the process, collaboration is doomed to a series of false starts and aborted stories.

      My most prolific writing partner is Keith Brooke: together we’ve written more than a dozen stories, two novellas and a novel. With Keith, the process is wonderfully easy. What isn’t so easy is finding the time to write something together: we live at opposite ends of the country, and for much of the time are often engaged on solo projects. On the rare occasions that our busy schedules afford us a window of opportunity, we swap ideas until something sparks, and not long after that we have a fully-fledged story-line, which one of us begins and then the other takes up, and so on, until the tale is finished.

      The second writer I’ve collaborated with is the late Michael Coney, author of such classic SF novels as Brontomek!, Hello Summer, Goodbye, and The Girl With A Symphony In Her Fingers, as well as a host of excellent short stories. Although we lived half a world apart at the time, Mike in British Columbia and I in England, we corresponded by email and over a period of six months wrote a long short story, the biological murder-mystery set on an alien world, ‘The Trees of Terpsichore Three’, which was published in the Scottish SF magazine Spectrum 8.

      I’ve also collaborated with my friend and fellow curry aficionado Tony Ballantyne, author the Hard SF novels Recursion and Twisted Metal, and one of my favourite fantasy novels of all time, Dream London. A while back I wrote a series of stories about a race of aliens who come to Earth and bestow the gift of voluntary immortality on the human race. Tony liked these tales, and had an idea for one. He started the story, I took it up and finished it, and then we each rewrote the other’s sections. ‘Matthew’s Passion’, collected in my fix-up novel Kéthani, is the result: Tony imbued the tale with spirituality and his knowledge of music, attributes I signally lack.

      Which brings me to the collaborations which form the content of the current volume, The Spacetime Pit Plus Two, and my collaborator, Stephen Baxter, the author of such ground-breaking novels as The Time-Ships, Evolution, The Light of Other Days with Arthur C Clarke, and the Xeelee story sequence.

      I first met Steve at a science-fiction convention, the Nottingham MexiCon of 1989. We’d both just started selling short stories to markets such as Interzone and David S Garnett’s Zenith anthologies, and were in the process of writing our first novels. Not only did we have our writing in common, and our love of the genre, but a passion for football: Steve follows Liverpool, while I, for my sins, suffer the travails of Leeds United. We got on well, and it wasn’t long before one of us suggested collaborating on a story or two.

      This was over twenty years ago, and sad to say I have no recollection of how we went about the process of collaboration, though Steve reminds me that we worked on ‘Spacetime...’ when I visited him in Prestwood in the summer of ’95. I do recall that I had the initial idea for ‘The Spacetime Pit’, which Steve, with his scientific and technological nous, proceeded to pull apart at the seams and stitch back together in a way that would work. It’s a grim tale that spans billions of years, but has the dilemma of a human being at its very core. ‘Spacetime...’ won the 1996 Interzone readers’ poll for best story.

      The second story in the volume is ‘Green-Eyed Monster’. By contrast, it’s a light-hearted tale about bodily transmogrification, love and jealousy. It’s nice to be able to write a tale from the viewpoint of a toad from time to time. I rarely write humorous stories, but on rereading this one I found myself chuckling: Steve must have written those passages.

      The final story, ‘Sunfly’, is a strange tale set on a very alien world—a strip of land girdling a sun—and follows the exploits of student Onara as she comes to understand not only her world but her destiny within its complex history.

       Enough. Herein, collected for the first time in one volume for your entertainment, is The Spacetime Pit Plus Two...

      Eric Brown

      Cockburnspath

      2018

      The Spacetime Pit

      Shuttle lurched. Primary shipboard systems failure.

      Wake stared through the monitor as lightning leapt between fat cotton-wool clouds. She was deep inside this remote gravity well, inside a storm, and fast falling further in.

      Switch to secondary, Shuttle. Affirm.

      Shuttle bucked through turbulent air.

      I said, ‘Affirm.’

      Crew loss scenario.

      She felt sweat prickle her skin beneath her flight suit. Detail.

      Ninety per cent likelihood of secondary shipboard systems failure.

      Shit. That was non-survivable, all right, according to the book.

      Switch to manual. Tell Mother I’m aborting the landing and coming home.

      Boosters inoperable. No pressure in propellant tank. Crew loss–

      –scenario. Right, she muttered. Now what?

      Shuttle was old, but it

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