The Fall of Tartarus
In myth Tartarus was the lowest region of hell. So low, it was said, that an anvil dropped from heaven having taken nine days and nights to reach earth would take a further nine days and nights to reach Tartarus.
In reality... "I'd heard many a tale about Tartarus Major, how certain continents were technological backwaters five hundred years behind the times; how the Church governed half the planet with a fist of iron, and yet how, across scattered islands and sequestered lands, a thousand bizarre and heretic cults prospered too. I'd heard how a lone traveller was hardly safe upon the planet's surface, prey to wild animals and cut-throats. Most of all I'd heard that, in two hundred years, Tartarus would be annihilated when its sun exploded in the magnificent stellar suicide of a supernova."
These are the stories of the people who are leaving Tartarus, those have decided to stay and those who are arriving on the planet for the apocalypse.
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Eric Brown
Eric Brown began writing when he was fifteen years and sold his first short story to Interzone in 1986. He has won the British Science Fiction Award twice for his short stories, and his novel Helix Wars was shortlisted for the Philip K. Dick award. He has published sixty books, and his latest include the crime novel Murder Take Three, and the short story collection Microcosms, with Tony Ballantyne. He has also written a dozen books for children and over a hundred and forty short stories. He writes a regular science fiction review column for the Guardian newspaper and lives in Cockburnspath, Scotland.
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