KEITH BROOKE: an annotated bibliography

Here's far more than you ever wanted to know about my published work. Novels appear by default, but just use the links below to find out about my other work.

novels; collections; nonfiction; edited; short fiction.

Note: this bibliography only includes work published as Keith Brooke. For details of my YA work, see the Nick Gifford website.

Also: see criticality for details of my book reviews.

Bibliography: novels

I also write fiction under other names, most notably Nick Gifford, whose young adult novels have been published by Puffin and optioned for the movies by big-name producers. For details of Nick's work, see the Nick Gifford website.

Wormhole by Keith Brooke and Eric Brown (2022)
A genre mash-up in the first full-length novel from long-time collaborators Keith Brooke and Eric Brown: a corporate thriller, a whodunnit, interplanetary SF, and more.

Enigma Season: The Enigma Quartet, book one by Eric Brown and Keith Brooke (2022)
The first volume in a new novella series where humankind has retreated underground.

Iterations: The Kon-tiki Quartet, book four by Eric Brown and Keith Brooke (2020)
The final volume in this collaboration returns full-circle to Earth as old rivalries flare up and the future of humankind hangs in the balance.

Insights: The Kon-tiki Quartet, book three by Eric Brown and Keith Brooke (2019)
The third volume in this collaboration. It's been a lot of fun seeing where we take this.

Parasites: The Kon-tiki Quartet, book two by Eric Brown and Keith Brooke (2018)
Lovely to be collaborating with Eric again! This is the second in a set of four novellas following humankind's efforts to colonise the stars.

Dislocations: The Kon-tiki Quartet, book one by Eric Brown and Keith Brooke (2018)
Lovely to be collaborating with Eric again! This is the first in a set of four novellas, starting on an Earth struggling to deal with the impact of climate change, and following humankind's efforts to launch out and colonise the stars.

Riding the Serpent's Back (2014)
Yes, I've committed Big Fat Fantasy! This one actually has its origins in a short story of the same name, published in Interzone in 1995, and reprinted in my collection Memesis. The story was set on an island set in a sea of molten lava on a colony planet; as sometimes happens, a story doesn't lose its grip on my imagination even when it's been written and I started to realise there was something bigger here, and that this world with its molten sea would make a terrific setting for an epic fantasy. Once I'd made that leap, the rest of the world started to fall into place, and the obvious kind of story to set here was an end of era story, with the world and its people threatened by catastrophe.

Expatria: the box set (2013)
Ebook-only omnibus set of the two Expatria novels.

alt.human / Harmony (2012)
Note the two titles for this one: the publisher's marketing team in North America preferred one title; the European team preferred the other; and everyone ended up confused... With this one I decided it was time for me to tackle some of the big ideas of SF. Like alternate history. And aliens. And the Fermi Paradox. So I did it: all in one book. And what's more, the novel was shortlisted for the Philip K Dick Award, which was hugely encouraging!

The Unlikely World of Faraway Frankie (2010)
A short fantasy novel with its roots in my short story 'Beside the Sea'. Frankie retreats from the traumas of his life by losing himself in day-dreams. That's all very well until those dreams start to materialise around him, and his home town warps into a fantastical version of the real place.

The Accord (2009)
I always said there was a novel in this. It grew from a background shared by three stories, 'The Accord', 'Sweats' and 'The Man Who Built Heaven', each of which forms part of the novel to one degree or another. It's a thriller about the life and love of Noah Barakh, the man who built a virtual world where people can live on after death, a secular heaven. When you're immortal a vendetta can last a long time...

Genetopia (2006)
This one was a long time coming. It dates back to my second professional sale, a story called 'Passion Play' which was published in Robert Holdstock and Christopher Evans' Other Edens III back in 1989. As soon as I wrote that story I knew I had to explore its warped future of accelerated and distorted evolution at novel-length. I spent over a decade thinking about it, and at last it's finished and with a publisher. Of course, the finished novel bears almost no resemblance whatsoever to the story that triggered it. The response to it has been fantastic, with Pyr's first ever starred review in Publishers Weekly, praise from Kit Reed, Michael Swanwick, Peter Hamilton, Jeff VanderMeer and Stephen Baxter, and a review in Locus which concluded, "Let Keith Brooke tell his tale in its cogent fullness. It is beyond any facile summary, a minor masterpiece that should usher Brooke at last into the recognized front ranks of SF writers."

Lord of Stone (1997)
I believe this one was actually listed in a Gollancz catalogue back in the early 1990s, but they pulled out without ever explaining their reasons. This is the best novel I've written, a post-war fantasy about the death of magic in an increasingly secular world, and I'm delighted that it's finally found a home.

Expatria Incorporated (1991)
The second part of the Expatria story, about the culture clash when a ship from Earth arrives to spread the gospel of the Holy Church of GenGen. I rate this as the best of my three novels published in the early 1990s.

Expatria (1991)
A far future adventure romp, set in a world that has lost contact with Earth, and rejected the ways of science and technology.

Keepers of the Peace (1990)
My angry young man novel. A near-future anti-militaristic cyber-thriller, camouflaged so successfully as the kind of writing that provoked it that at least one critic dismissed it as a right wing military wet dream. I take that as a kind of back-handed compliment. I think. Locus liked it: Tom Whitmore said it was several years since a first novel had grabbed him the way KotP did, with writing that 'recalls the 1950s Heinlein'; Faren Miller called it a 'gripping story of challenge and skin-of-the-teeth survival'.