BROWN, Eric

(1960-) UK writer who began publishing sf - after a children's play, Noel's Ark (1982 chap) - with "Krash-Bangg Joe and the Pineal-Zen Equation" for Interzone in 1987; like several further tales assembled in The Time-Lapsed Man and Other Stories (coll 1990), it is set in a future world dominated by the effects of bio-engineering and dense with information. This marriage of Cordwainer SMITH to CYBERPUNK, though not in itself original, has considerable potential as a focus for a complex vision of things to come, as demonstrated by his second novel, Engineman (1994), which is also set in what might be called the Nada Continuum sequence, and which sustains a note of Smith-like elegy in its depiction of an obsolescent form of space travel, that guided by "enginemen", one of whom becomes involved in a complicated plot. EB's first novel, Meridan Days (1992), set on a planet dominated by artists, is also - though loosely - connected to the Nada Continuum universe.

   JC

   See also: ARTS; INTERZONE; PERCEPTION; TIME TRAVEL.