Rapid Review - Helix, by Eric Brown

I had already received Eric Brown´s Kéthani through Mark Newton of Solaris Books when I ran into his previous novel in a bookstore here in São Paulo.

Helix is one of those pleasant surprises you sometimes have when you´re looking for easy reading - but make no mistake: Helix is not easy reading in the negative sense, as in "easy listening", that god-awful label some radios and music stores use when they want to sell muzak-type music. No: I mean that this is a good old page-turner you start reading with no expectations and suddenly finds yourself enthralled in it in such a way that you read it through the night without noticing (Have I already mentioned somewhere in this blog my favorite place to read is in bed?). So I stopped Kéthani still in the beginning to read Helix.

But hey, it´s Eric Brown versus Eric Brown, so no harm done, no hurt feelings. I went for it and wolfed it down. And I found it very tasty indeed.

In the end of 21st centuty, mankind finally managed to screw up completely, all but destroying the environment. There are no hope whatsoever of survival for the next two generations. Earth will be utterly ravaged by that.

But one ship manages to leave Earth: the Lovelock will take four thousand colonists plus a group of highly specialized engineers to a world five hundred objective years away. So they remain in coldsleep all the way, until the ship crash lands on a desolate alien planet. After the death of two engineers and one entire crate of colonists (one thousand of them), the four survivors of the tech group find out that the planet (a freezing, inhospitable environment) is just one of thousands arranged in a vast spiral wound around a central sun.

Pressed by this knowledge (and also by a weird insect-like, very belligerant race), they move forward through a ziggurat which acts as a means of transportation between the worlds, and find other planets in the process, one of them inhabited by a 19th-century-like steampunk society (or should I say lemurpunk, since they are a rodent-like intelligent race) which can prove to be an obstacle for them.

The only negative points for me were the sex scene between two of the protagonists, something very textbook-ish, lacking passion (too well-behaved), and the confrontation between the African nuclear engineer, Friday Olembe, and Joe Hendry, one of the main characters, almost in the end, when everything can go wrong by a misplaced word. But things work out far too easy after all. Even the intervention of a lemur all-powerful church (an alien, medieval church?? Cute, but not very believable).

Next book: Kéthani, of course. But there´s more coming before that, including a Jeffrey Thomas interview. Stay tuned.