Previous SFF Author: Charles Beaumont
Chris Beckett was born in Oxford, England in 1955, and now lives in Cambridge, England. He has published three novels – Dark Eden, The Holy Machine and Marcher – and two short story collections: The Turing Test and The Peacock Cloak. He has been publishing short stories in the UK and the US, since 1990. The Turing Test, won the Edge Hill Short Fiction Award in 2009, the UK’s only national prize for single-author short-story collections. Dark Eden won the Arthur C. Clarke award in 2013. More information about his writing can be found at www.chris-beckett.com. Chris Beckett’s background is in social work and he has also written several text books on social work.
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Chris Beckett’s Dark Eden has a backstory to rival the book of Genesis. Several generations ago, two humans, Tommy and Gela, survived a crash-landing on a planet without a sun. The planet was not devoid of life or light, though; glowing plants and animals survived by feeding off of the planet’s thermal energy. On this new planet, which they called Eden, Tommy and Gela have children, becoming the Adam and Eve of a new race of humans.
Now, generations later, their progeny,
Kate Lechler´s rating: 3 | Chris Beckett | SFF Reviews | 2 comments |
Mother of Eden by Chris Beckett
Mother of Eden, Chris Beckett’s sequel to Dark Eden, was thoughtful, complicated, and engrossing. Starlight Brooking lives with her people, the almost monastic Kneefolk, on Knee Tree Ground, a secluded island on Eden, a planet dominated by water. The Kneefolk make their living by trading bark boats with a few of the settlements nearby and staying out of the way of either Johnsfolk or Davidfolk, the two dominant, antagonistic human civilizations on Eden (the story of which schism is told in the first book).
Kate Lechler´s rating: 4 | Chris Beckett | Audio | SFF Reviews | no comments |
In 2008, Chris Beckett published the novel Marcher to little acclaim. A later release, Dark Eden (2012) met a much better response (it was nominated for the BSFA and won the Arthur C. Clarke Award), and Beckett decided to thoroughly revise his earlier novel and re-release it. Using his five additional years of experience, he honed in on the story he had wanted to tell and republished Marcher in 2014. With the original version checking in at roughly 300 pages and the revised version 200 pages,
Jesse Hudson´s rating: 4 | Chris Beckett | Stand-Alone | SFF Reviews | no comments |
Previous SFF Author: Charles Beaumont
Pretty challenging book. Cut by half, speed up the cadence. Trying to figure out the plot, the main point of…
Thanks for the kind words, Marion! Coming as they are from a professional writer, they are much appreciated!
Wonderful review, Sandy.
The "body count" bothered me a bit less because being dead seemed more like an inconvenience than anything else... unlike…
Detailed, thoughtful review, Bill. I'm going to read it for two reasons. First, Karen Russell wrote it, and second, it…