A debut novel which deals with guilt, art, and suspicious happenings on a troubled colony founded on matter transmission.
Originally published in 1992 - and out of print for many years - Meridian Days is the debut novel by British SF author Eric Brown (1960 - 2023). Following on from a string of successful stories, the novel is connected to Brown’s wider “Telemass” setting. Meridian is a planet over 20 lightyears from Earth, which orbits the star Beta Hydri. Its colonisation by humans has been made possible by advanced technology; a huge sunshield which dampens the star’s intensity, and an interstellar matter transmission system which permits trade with distant Earth. The novel’s protagonist is Bob Benedict, a former spacecraft pilot with a drug habit, a guilty conscience, and a desire for solitude. Slowly but surely, Benedict is drawn into the tangled affairs of a prominent artist, Tamara Trevellion, and her troubled family. The former pilot becomes determined to establish the facts of a case which may have dramatic implications for the future of Meridian itself.
Welcome to Meridian
Meridian is a planet with unusual characteristics. It is tidally locked to Beta Hydri, so that one side - “Brightside” - is always exposed to the sun and experiences constant daylight and searing temperatures. The other side, “Darkside”, is in perpetual, cold darkness. The human colony exists on a chain of islands in the temperate zone in between, under the sunshield. Meridian is far from self-sufficient; everything it needs is teleported from Earth in matter transmission shipments three times per month. Bob Benedict is haunted by a spacecraft crash in which he was the only survivor. He lives an idle life on an island of his own, with few friends that he visits infrequently. He spends much of his time in a drug-induced reverie of the past, made possible by a narcotic made from plants that thrive only on Meridian. Benedict is one of the few colonists who is a baseline human. Most others are either cybernetically enhanced “Augmenteds”, or bio-engineered “Altereds”, who often choose to resemble human-animal hybrids. Benedict makes a particular point of avoiding these modified humans, many of whom form an influential community of artists whose work is much respected on Earth. When he uncharacteristically accepts an invitation to a party, it proves to be a fateful decision. He becomes entangled with the nineteen-year old Fire Trevellion, her part-fish artist mother Tamara, and their dysfunctional family dynamic. Meanwhile, a dead body is found on Brightside and there are rumours that the status of the Meridian colony may be downgraded, with devastating effects on its fragile economy.
Creating Meridian
In an interesting “afterword” written in 2003, Eric Brown offered a number of insights into the novel’s creation. He admits to being “a short story writer [...] at heart”, and to finding novel writing to be a “labour of Sisyphus”. When he began writing Meridian Days in 1990, he decided that his first novel would need to be brief, and to deal with themes he had already explored in his short fiction during the 1980s. The first draft was around 63,000 words, a similar length to the Ace Doubles that Brown had grown up on. As Brown recalled, the reviews were mixed. Much of his short fiction had been published in Interzone. The magazine’s reviewer, Mary Gentle, said that the novel’s concepts were “strictly yesterday’s tomorrow.” Conversely, Gary K. Wolfe reviewed the book favourably for Locus, calling it “a deftly plotted and suspenseful adventure which never loses its strangely elegiac and haunting tone.”
A castle built on sand
Meridian Days is an unusual book in a number of ways. One is that Bob Benedict is an oddly impassive character. He is strictly an everyman, with no particular skills. He has little to no impact on the outcome of the plot, and he does not grasp what is happening on Meridian until very late in the narrative. For much of the time, he is preoccupied with pursuing an arguably inappropriate relationship with the teenaged Fire Trevellion, to whom he seeks to be a kind of knight in shining armour. Another unusual aspect is the setting. Brown conjures up a memorably strange planet, with an odd geography and various exotic subcultures. In the hands of another author, Meridian’s distinctive properties would be the principal driver of the plot. But in Meridian Days, neither the planet’s attributes nor the advanced human technology are explored in any detail; neither are they important to the plot. Surprisingly, the entire concept of “Darkside” is mentioned only in passing and no characters ever venture there. It is easy to see why Mary Gentle was critical of Brown’s deployment of science in the story. Gary K. Wolfe was also right, however, to identify an “elegiac and haunting tone”. There is a growing sense that Meridian is basically doomed. This is not due to any impending disaster, but because the colony has no means to sustain itself; it is a castle built on sand. Bob Benedict is not equipped to solve its problems, and Brown provides no heroic supermen who could offer comfort with their presence - only frail, fallible, believable people.
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