I reviewed Helix back in June, and recently had the opportunity to interview author Eric Brown!
Check back tomorrow for a giveaway of Helix!
Angela/SciFiChick: For those who haven’t read Helix yet, can you give us a brief synopsis?
Eric Brown: The Earth is failing ecologically and humanity must find another planet to colonise. The European Space Organisation sends a colony ship on a mission to find a suitable Earth-like planet. The ship crash-lands, on what the crew thinks is an uninhabitable, ice-bound planet. However, when the sun comes up, they find they’re on the lowest rung of a vast helix comprising of some ten thousand worlds. To survive they must trek up-spiral to find a clement world. On the way they meet all sorts of alien races, and attempt to discover who built the helix.
Angela: The setting, for the most part, is set on another world(s). Did you have a definite sense of what the Helix looked like when you wrote about it? Or did it reveal itself as you wrote?
EB: The former; it was the first thing that came to me. I was having dinner years ago at a friend’s place, and he had a lamp on the table with a kind of helical beading around a glass cowl. I thought at first it would make a neat space station. Later, it came to me that it would make an interesting planetary setting.