"'Made it as a writer'? I'm still wondering if I've made it as a writer. I've made it as a published writer of the type of SF that I want to write and read, but I'm still waiting for that big breakthrough." -- Eric Brown
Eric Brown (born May 25, 1960) is a British science fiction author who has written (amongst others) Meridian Days (1992) and Engineman (1994). He appeared in the premier issue of "Postscripts".
"I think it's a short story writer's duty, as well as writing well about emotions and characters, to write story.""I think my fascination is less with genre figures than with writers in general.""I write about five thousand words a day, when working on a book, about three thousand a day if I'm writing a short story. I take long periods off between projects, when I read a lot, garden, and think about the next book or stories.""The inspiration to write? Perhaps it's not so much inspiration, as a NEED to write. I get itchy and guilty and dissatisfied when I haven't written for a while. Ideas come to me and need to be written down.""The market for short stories is hard to break into, but a magazine editor isn't always looking for big names with which to sell his magazine - they're more willing to try stories by newcomers, if those tales are good.""The professionals are going to be joined by the average Joe. Everybody's a publisher.""To me, it's all about opening all the doors and getting people to be not only prolific, but creative and having control of their music.""Well, to be honest I think I'm a better short story writer than a novelist. Novels I find very hard, hours and hours, weeks and weeks, of conscious thought - whereas short stories slip out painlessly in a few days.""Which, of course, isn't the point of writing - but it would be nice if, along with the creative satisfaction of writing and seeing my work in print, I could do more than merely scrape a living. Okay, moaning over.""Why my interest in writers? Well, I'm one, and many of my friends are writers. I know what it's like to write. I'm interested in the creative process. I'm fascinated by the disparity between who we are on the outside, and what we have bubbling away inside us.""You don't have to fight for your life anymore. You're starting a new one."
Eric Brown was born in Haworth, Yorkshire, in May 1960, and began writing in 1975. In the 1980s he travelled extensively throughout Greece and Asia (some of his novels are set in India). His first publication was in 1982, when his play for children, Noel's Ark, appeared.
His career took off in the late eighties with a succession of short stories in Interzone and other publications. His story The Time-Lapsed Man won the Interzone readers' poll for the most admired story of 1988, and an Eastercon short text award in 1995. He was voted the Best New European SF writer of the Year in the early nineties and has subsequently won the British Science Fiction Award twice (for the short stories Hunting the Slarque in 1999 and Children of Winter in 2001). He should not be confused with Eric J. Brown, the co-author of The Effective CIO, a technical book on Information Technology.
He has publicly admired the science-fiction writing of Michael G. Coney, Robert Silverberg, Richard Paul Russo and Robert Charles Wilson, amongst others.
Eric Brown's online fiction at Free Speculative Fiction Online
Infinity Plus has a short profile of Eric Brown, as well as an interview conducted by Keith Brooke and an earlier conversation between the two, and Brooke's introduction to Brown's collection Deep Future.
