Wormhole by Keith Brooke and Eric Brown (book review).

‘Wormhole’ is an excellent cross-genre novel mixing Science Fiction and crime. It was jointly written by Keith Brooke and Eric Brown and came out in late 2022. As you can see, it has therefore taken me a long time to write this review. Tragically, Eric Brown died in March 2023, aged only 62, after a long illness. As someone who had been lucky enough to correspond with Eric over a period of years, I’d been aware that he was ill but it was a real shock to hear of his untimely death. I’ve tried to write this review several times since but have not found the words. However, as the first anniversary of the book’s publication came and went, I decided it was time to get it out, right words or no.

This is not the first collaboration between Keith Brooke and Eric Brown. Most recently, they worked together on ‘The Kon-Tiki Quartet’, a tetralogy of fascinating SF novellas issued by PS Publishing, which I reviewed for SFCrowsnest between 2019 and 2020. However, ‘Wormhole’ is the first full-length novel that they have written together.

The story is set in 2190, on an Earth ravaged by climate change and resource shortages. Although there has been some migration to colonies on the Moon and Mars, many feel that humanity’s long-term future can only be secured by finding an Earth-like planet beyond our solar system. However, when the starship Strasbourg was launched towards the star Mu Arae eighty years earlier, with the mission to explore a candidate planet orbiting that star, disaster struck. Four months into a journey, due to last eight decades, an explosion destroyed the vehicle and killed everyone on board. No further interstellar missions have been launched since.

While some still hope for a future amongst the stars, Detective Inspector Gordon Kemp has his feet firmly fixed on the ground in London, while his eyes are focused on the past. He’s a once high-flying homicide detective who has been shuffled into the backwater area of cold case reviews. Trying to solve murder cases that are ten or twenty years old is hard enough, so when his boss, Inspector Tsang, orders him to drop everything and investigate the murder of a scientist eighty years earlier, Kemp isn’t happy. A case that old will be extremely difficult to solve. Even if they do, so what? By now, surely the murderer will also be dead?

When Kemp is briefed on the case by Tsang, having first been sworn to secrecy, he finds it hard to believe what he’s told. It turns out that the Strasbourg didn’t blow up. In fact, it has just reached its destination, fifty light years away. Even more extraordinarily, the ship’s crew will shortly be opening a wormhole back to Earth, which will enable instantaneous travel between the two planets in future, revolutionising space travel forever. This was the real purpose of the mission, known only to a handful of people for the last eighty years.

Kemp still can’t see what this has to do with his cold case, until Tsang’s final words. The leading suspect is Rima Cagnac, the wife of the murdered scientist, and she is on board the Strasbourg. Long thought to be dead, she is in fact very much alive, having just woken up from eighty years in suspended animation. Tsang orders Kemp to travel to Mu Arae on board a ship that will shortly become the first to travel through the new wormhole. He is to arrest Cagnac for her husband’s murder and bring her back to Earth for questioning.

Kemp has no choice, so reluctantly heads to Mu Arae. The nearer he gets to Rima Cagnac, though, the further he feels from the truth. What’s really going on and why does Kemp feel like he’s being set up for a fall?

There’s always a risk with cross-genre novels that the author is more familiar with one of their chosen genres than the other. That’s not the case here. Eric Brown and Keith Brooke have both written Science Fiction and crime stories and they shared familiarity with both genres is evident throughout the book.

On the SF side, the story includes a lot of familiar tropes, including interstellar travel, extra-solar planets and alien creatures. An interesting additional element is the apparent timeslip between the crew of the Strasbourg, who were put in suspended animation in 2110, and wake up on their ship eighty years later, but surrounded by technology of their time and those such as Kemp who join them through the wormhole and bring with them the science and technology of 2190. Having expected to be humanity’s first interstellar pioneers, many of the Strasbourg’s crew soon feel that they’ve become redundant fossils, which creates real problems for their mission of planetary exploration. I was impressed with the way Brooke and Brown dug into these psychological issues in the second half of the book.

On the crime fiction side, Gordon Kemp is a superb protagonist for this story. A dogged detective who has problems with authority figures, he spends much of the novel questioning why he’s been sent to Mu Arae and trying to figure out what the real story is. However, Kemp is middle-aged, out of shape and has a visceral hatred of new experiences. Trying to solve a murder while on an entirely alien planet puts him well out of his comfort zone, making his job a whole lot harder.

The world-building here is top class. In particular, the planet that forms the setting for much of the book is a fascinating creation. I want to avoid too many spoilers, so I’ll just say that at times the scenery felt viscerally real to me as I was reading. You can’t really ask much more than that.

‘Wormhole’ is an impressive SF/crime crossover novel which I thoroughly enjoyed from first page to last. This collaboration between Keith Brooke and Eric Brown is a huge success and it’s a tragedy that Eric’s untimely death denies us the possibility of a sequel. Thankfully, we still have Eric’s enormous back catalogue to enjoy. If you haven’t read his books before, whether in the SF or crime genres, treat yourself to one or two for Christmas. You won’t be disappointed.

Patrick Mahon

December 2023

(pub: Angry Robot Books, 2023. 400 page paperback. Price: £9.99 (UK). ISBN 978-0-857669-96-4)

check out websites :www.angryrobotbooks.com , www.keithbrooke.co.uk and www.ericbrown.co.uk