In May 2023, our friend Eric Brown passed away after a battle with cancer. Eric was a wonderfully talented author whose body of work – in science fiction, children’s fiction, and crime – was filled with humour and humanity, as Eric himself was. I first met him at an Eastercon many years ago, and as I fell in with the sci-fi crowd in and around Cambridge where we both lived at the time, we soon ended up spending many evenings at the Pickerel pub in the company of a good circle of friends. The ‘Pickerel Irregulars’ we called ourselves. I often wondered what spin of fortune’s wheel had led me to them – a group of prolific and successful authors and editors and, somehow, also me – but I did have the advantage of working closest to the pub and, therefore, best able to snag our group’s favourite table on a Wednesday night.
Eric’s warmth and generosity as a person and as an author meant that nobody ever felt out of place around him. He was more interested in hearing what others were working on than talking about his own successes. He could grouch about the state of the world over a pint of Timothy Taylor’s Landlord, but when it came to writing he had a positive spirit which shines out in his work. He wrote many novels, novellas and short stories over the decades, and if I had to pick somewhere to start I highly recommend Kethani, a novel crafted out of many shorts Eric wrote over a span of years, in which the residents of a small town come to terms with mankind’s first contact with alien life.
After Eric passed away, I was offered the chance to contribute to an anthology to be released in Eric’s honour, with proceeds going to Eric’s family. There were no particular guidelines on genre or word length – only that the story should have a connection to Eric. And I immediately knew what I wanted to write, but had absolutely no clue how to make it happen.
Shortly before Eric moved up to Scotland with his family, we held a farewell meeting of the Pickerel Irregulars. I wanted to give Eric a parting gift and chose a pair of salt and pepper pots from a department store in town. They were shaped like mid-century robots – the sort you could get made of tin plate from Japan in the 1950s, or see lumbering across the screen in a Hollywood B-Movie. The next day, Eric emailed to say that he and his daughter had been playing with them: “robot races, robot wars… everything but putting salt and pepper in them”. And that was Eric to a tee. Never one to take what the world presented to him at face value, he would find a way to make life more interesting, to craft a story, to have an adventure – even with salt and pepper pots.
So I knew what I wanted my story to be about, but how do you write a story about kitschy seasoning dispensers? That was a question I struggled with for months afterwards, trying and failing and trying again. One sleepless night, at about three a.m., I had a thought: a robot walks into a shop… it’s not a short story, is it? It’s a set-up for a comedy sketch. But as Eric understood, you don’t have to take anything in life at face value…
You can read Peppercorns – and many other stories from the likes of Una McCormack, Chris Beckett and Alastair Reynolds – in the anthology To the Stars and Back from NewCon Press, edited by Ian Whates, out now. Thank you, Eric.
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