RIP Eric Brown

News has sadly broken of the death of British science fiction writer Eric Brown at the far-too-young age of 62.

Brown was born in Haworth, Yorkshire in 1960 and began writing in the 1970s. He travelled extensively in the 1980s and began his SF publishing career with the novelette Krash-Bangg Joe and the Pineal-Zen Equation in 1987. He first acquired a wider audience with his first story collection, The Time-Lapsed Man, in 1990, followed by his debut novel, Meridian Days, in 1992.

Brown produced a significant amount of accomplished work over the next three decades, including the Bengal Station, Starship Seasons, Helix, Virex, Weird Space, Telemass, Multiplicity, Binary, Kon-Tiki and Enigma series, as well as an impressive number of stand-alone novels. He worked in space opera, cyberpunk and first contact stories in particular, as well as drawing on his travel experience to tell stories set in non-Western locales.

Brown was also a noted SF critic, and frequently wrote reviews of science fiction works for The Guardian, among other venues.

Despite critical acclaim, Brown never achieved the global ubiquity of contemporaries like Peter F. Hamilton and Alastair Reynolds. However, he had a solid audience, especially in the UK SF scene, and wrote right up until his death; he published three works in 2022 alone.

Brown died on 21 March from sepsis. He is survived by his wife Finn and daughter Freya. Condolences to his family, and he will be missed.