Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    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

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    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 1, 2018
    ISBN9781386165330
    The Spacetime Pit Plus Two
    Author

    Stephen Baxter

    Stephen Baxter is an acclaimed, multiple-award-winning author whose many books include the Xeelee Sequence series, the Time Odyssey trilogy (written with Arthur C. Clarke), and The Time Ships, a sequel to H. G. Wells's classic The Time Machine. He lives in England.

    Read more from Stephen Baxter

    Related to The Spacetime Pit Plus Two

    Related ebooks

    Science Fiction For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Nine Haunting Postapocalyptic Novels

      Feb 3, 2022

      The paradox of imagined apocalypses is that they’re always more about the present than the future. Here's a list of a few haunting and evocative titles. The post Nine Haunting Postapocalyptic Novels appeared first on The Millions.

      4 min read

    • Article

      Fuel Of The Future

      Dec 31, 2019

      Fuel Of The Future
      2 min read

    • Article

      Children Of Ruin

      May 22, 2019

      Children Of Ruin
      1 min read

    • Article

      'Blade Runner 2049': Why Some Science Fiction Writers Are Tired of Dystopias

      Oct 6, 2017

      The long-awaited sequel to 1982's 'Blade Runner' seems inspired by present-day concerns. But amid the grim apocalyptic narratives, authors such as Neal Stephenson and Cory Doctorow argue that futuristic fiction should leave room for optimism and visi

      4 min read

    • Article

      Alastair Reynolds

      Aug 11, 2021

      What is your daily writing routine like? I’m not a morning person, so I don’t rush to the keyboard. Typically I’ll aim to get 1,000 words done before lunch, then another 1,000-2,000 by the end of the afternoon. Things shift around in winter as I like

      2 min read

    • Article

      Do Parallel Universes Exist?

      Nov 4, 2021

      Do Parallel Universes Exist?
      5 min read

    • Article

      The Discovery Of The Century May Be Just Around The Corner, As PHYSICISTS SEARCH FOR A NEW FORCE OF NATURE

      Jul 6, 2022

      Mysterious forces are in play 100 metres below the ground in Switzerland. Scientists from the European nuclear research institute of CERN cannot get their results to fit basic physics theories. For 14 years CERN scientists have made particles collide

      5 min read

    • Article

      Take A Chance With SF Noir

      Jul 1, 2021

      Tyche Books is a Canadian small-press specialising in science-fiction and fantasy anthologies, novels, and non-fiction, all available as ebooks and trade paperbacks. The editorial team ‘crave innovative stories that push the boundaries of imagination

      1 min read

    • Article

      Glitch In The Universe

      Dec 1, 2022

      Glitch In The Universe
      6 min read

    • Article

      Bill And The Tooth Fairy

      Mar 10, 2021

      Bill believed in the Tooth Fairy. Big deal, you’re thinking. Lots of kids believe in the Tooth Fairy. Well, Bill wasn’t a kid. He was twenty-eight years old. You don’t believe it. My girlfriend Mary Beth didn’t believe it, either. We were having dinn

      15 min read

    • Article

      Whiskery Business

      Jan 25, 2023

      Whiskery Business
      3 min read

    • Article

      Altered Carbon Gets Stuck In An Old Future

      Feb 12, 2018

      AS A GENRE, SCIENCE FICTION HAS never been smarter—especially as a more diverse array of characters have come to populate some of the most successful stories told onscreen. Last year’s Star Trek prequel cast a black woman as its lead, while the box o

      2 min read

    • Article

      The Vanished Birds

      Aug 12, 2020

      Starship captain Nia Imani returns home to one of the great trade Stations with an unexpected passenger who will change the course of history… Umbai’s Ark departed from the Colombian Elevator two years later, in early June. It was the third to leave

      5 min read

    • Article

      Shards Of Earth

      May 19, 2021

      Shards Of Earth
      2 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for The Spacetime Pit Plus Two

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      The Spacetime Pit Plus Two - Stephen Baxter

      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 wasn’t supposed to fail. It was loaded up with redundant systems to keep it functioning, if minimally, for years.

      In the end, though, everything failed. If it hadn’t been this storm, the lightning strikes Shuttle had taken, it would have been some other damn thing, on some other remote world.

      Wake was on her own, out here at the rim of human expansion. Her training had hammered home that, in the end, she couldn’t rely on the equipment. It was up to her to keep herself alive. If A fails, try B! If B fails, try C!

      If she couldn’t get back to orbit, she’d land. She would need raw materials, for repairs, fuel. She couldn’t see the surface, had no real idea what kind of conditions she was dropping into here. She’d have to deal with that later.

      Lightning leapt before Shuttle, flashing in Wake’s face, dazzling her. Shuttle took a sickening dive to starboard.

      Give me the coordinates of the Alpha One landmass.

      Affirm.

      The grey, ragged clouds parted, revealing an ocean of beaten grey steel. On the horizon sat an island, mountainous, irregular. She was skimming just a couple of hundred metres above peaking waves.

      Christ. And it’s only an hour since I was in the sauna on Mother.

      Secondary systems shutdown imminent.

      Advise emergency procedure.

      Crew loss scenario.

      Oh, for God’s sake–

      Shuttle was now, frankly, falling out of the sky. One option left. She got out of her seat and staggered towards Pod. Shuttle’s floor tipped under her in

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1