Books by Chris Beckett

“The setup is that there was a crashed ship on an alien planet, and a very small number of survivors. There were five, and then three of them went off to try and get back to the orbital ship: so there are two, a man and a woman. And because the people who went off just never come back – and we do find out that they’re absolutely not going to come back – nature takes its course…. Some generations later, you have a community of people with a number of congenital birth defects, because you’ve got genetic problems when you’re all descended from the same two people, living in one location on this not terribly hospitable world. It’s very cold, and it’s dark, because it is a world without a star. It’s geologically active, and you get hints that actually there is an incredible wealth of life on this world, mostly underground, in conditions that humans couldn’t survive. The humans are interacting with the extremophile fringes of this world’s ecosystem – which in itself is such a fascinating idea.” Read more...

The Best Hard Science Fiction Books

Adrian Tchaikovsky, Novelist