Books by Brian Stableford

"The Postmortal Reservation might not be Heaven exactly, but for Peterkin the piano player it's good enough. His afterlife is unclouded by the anxieties of mortality. After all, he's a skeleton. He only has to look in the mirror to see what squishy folk take for the image of death itself. True to their permanent smile, skellies are a happy-go-lucky species. There is nothing they love more than dancing, and cutting a rug with Melissa at the Palais de Danse Macabre, Peterkin thinks he might be at the start of something beautiful. It's true he's not in the best of neighbourhoods, but things are looking up, until ... the incident with the zombies at the train track and the appearance of a suspicious-looking discoloration spreading from the carpal area of his left arm. Soon he has to place himself in the hands, both fleshy and spectral, of experts who might not have his best interests at heart and, humble piano player though he is, play his own part in the fate of the Ghetto itself. Set in a future world where ghosts, vampires, werewolves and zombies are finally recognised as real, Meat on the Bone is a unique excursion into modes of possible human existence beyond our familiar fleshy mortality. Part grinning graveyard caper, part science fiction, part oddball existentialism, this is a novel in which we learn that one man's death is another man's dance hall."--Back cover.

Zephaniah Corcoran has just returned to Earth after a seven-year jaunt to Jupiter where his special—some would say dubious—talents were put to the test in attempted communication with the Jovian cloud-whales. With no time to adjust to life on an Earth half alarmed and half fatalistic at the prospect of final catastrophe, he is headhunted for a reprise of his old job: being projected by the brilliant but asocial Walter Halleck’s Coincidence-driven Sling into the far future to make empathic contact with the various successors to the human race. In the meantime, he is discovering a close and mysterious bond with Denise, a doctor of evolutionary biology and the younger sister he has hardly known, who has been noticed by the same big players who have noticed Zeph. But nothing goes quite according to plan, and as the fate of humanity dangles on a thread grown very frayed, Zeph’s empathic skills are expanded in unexpected ways, not so much by coincidence, as by Coincidence, bringing Zeph and those around him into contact with what are perhaps only the beginning of ongoing revelations of time and space whose grandeur match the universe that Zeph and his colleagues must now begin to explore.

The concluding volume of the trilogy, Living with the Dead is set in and around Toulouse, shortly after the death in Paris of Jane de La Vaudère. Madame Louvot is now serving as Paul Furneret's housekeeper. He is living close to an old convent leased by the residents of which apparently have orders not to communicate with him, although they supply gods from their farm and their distillery to him via Madame Louvot.Seven years later, Paul Furneret is visited in his Toulousan cottage by Victor Marvaud and Gaston Lambrunet, who are keen to persuade him to return to Paris. Their visit coincides with a "coup" in the cult launched by Madame Zosima and now operated as quasi-Fouierist feminist "phalanstery." Zosima is deposed, and her "convent" is taken over by a "trinity" led by Lilith, who have their own ideas regarding the supposed revelations of anterior lives. Also visiting are the Megisters, an English couple who owns both the convent and Paul's cottage..Lilith has researched Paul's background and discovered information that might help him to identify his mysterious "guardian angel" and to decipher the mystery of his supernatural ability, which she plans to exploit. Paul, who no longer needs the help of hypnotists to contact the dead, begins to develop new psychic powers, but not the ones Lilith sought to use. Those psychic phenomena have unintended fatal results, leaving Paul in no doubt as to the dangers inherent in his powers, confronting him with a stark challenge and an awkward dilemma...Brian M. Stableford has been a professional writer since 1965. He has published more than 60 science fiction and fantasy novels, as well as several authoritative non-fiction books. He is also translating the works of Paul Féval and other French writers of the fantastique for Black Coat Press which also published his most two recent fantasy novels: The New Faust at the Tragicomique and The Stones of Camelot.

Paul Furneret returns to Paris after a four-year interval. He again contacts Camille Flammarion, Jane de La Vaudère and Madame Zosima;, who now runs a women's refuge and employs hypnosis to enable women to "remember" their alleged past incarnations.One night, he is intercepted by Baron de Rochemure, who had recognized his daughter in the sketch Paul produced during his first attempt at automatic drawing, and is very enthusiastic for Paul to try again. To that end, Rochemore convenes a séance to which he invites Flammarion, Zosima and Jane, as well as Henri Lemastur, the hypnotist involved in the first séance, his patroness, and Gabriel de Lautrec. The baron, who is dying of cancer, reveals for the first time the harrowing story of how his daughter died and why he has been so anxious to make contact with her.Paul again produces four drawings while hypnotized by Zosima, but they are not what he expected; he does, however contrive a telepathic link between several of the people present, which enables Jane, the baron and his housekeeper to share a common vision, which satisfies the baron, but convinces Jane that Paul almost died in the process, only to be saved by a mysterious "angel". As a result, she forbids Paul to have any further contact with Zosima...Brian M. Stableford has been a professional writer since 1965. He has published more than 60 science fiction and fantasy novels, as well as several authoritative non-fiction books. He is also translating the works of Paul Féval and other French writers of the fantastique for Black Coat Press which also published his most two recent fantasy novels: The New Faust at the Tragicomique and The Stones of Camelot.

Paul Furneret, a young artist working in Paris in 1901, is invited to attend a séance at Camille Flammarion's observatory after having participated in an experiment in "automatic drawing" at another séance a week earlier, in which he drew a picture, while unconscious under hypnosis, of a young woman recognized by one of the participants as his dead daughter. Paul's friend, Victor Marvaud, is unable to accompany him, as arranged, because a ship carrying another of their friends, Gaston Lambrunet, has struck a rock in the Channel, and although all the passengers have been put into lifeboats, the one containing Gaston's mother and sister has not yet reached land. Victor insists however, that Flammarion's séance is too important for him to miss, and, in order to make sure that he gets there, has asked his physician, Antoine Cros, to take Paul to the observatory in his stead.The skeptical Cros is also escorting the writer Jane de La Vaudère, who has previously taken part in Flammarion's experiments, and the two of them provide Paul with a great deal of food for thought on the journey. Their contrasted perspectives become all the more significant when Paul, hypnotized by a "magnetizer" named Madame Zosima, produces four images, including one of Gaston's sister, whose lifeboat still has not landed yet, Dr. Cros's late brother Charles, and a woman tentatively identified as Jane's long-dead mother. Cros tries hard to provide a naturalistic explanations of what Paul has done, but the uncertainty as to the fate of the lifeboat turns Paul's artwork and its apparent supernatural nature into headline news, spurring the participants in the séance to meet up again in Dr. Cros's house the following night in order to discuss the implications of Paul's seeming ability to draw the dead, albeit unconsciously.A second experiment produces even more challenging results, which throw Paul's life into dire confusion, nearly cost a young model her life, and also affect the lives of his new acquaintances, leaving Paul with difficult dilemmas to address and an intriguing metaphysical mystery to resolve...Brian M. Stableford has been a professional writer since 1965. He has published more than 60 science fiction and fantasy novels, as well as several authoritative non-fiction books. He is also translating the works of Paul Féval and other French writers of the fantastique for Black Coat Press which also published his most two recent fantasy novels: The New Faust at the Tragicomique and The Stones of Camelot.

Here, presented in English in a long-belated translation by Brian Stableford, is Isis, the first novel of the acclaimed author of Contes cruels, Villiers de l'Isle-Adam. Deserving to be reckoned as one of the foundation-stones of Decadent prose fiction, redolent with echoes of Byron and Poe, reconfigured in the Baudelairean manner, and flamboyant with Gautieresque elements, this book is a tour de force of extravagant implication and esthetic dexterity: a work of peculiar genius.In its vaulting ambitions, its quirky mannerisms, its philosophical posturing and its lush descriptions, Isis is certainly a tale given to excess, but that excess is the essence of the endeavor, the wand of its enchantment.

The novel is set in the 1480s, during the war in which the French annexed Bretagne. At the Benedictine Abbey in Paimpol, a scholarly monk named Ollivier, reputed to have practiced necromancy, is buried under the watchful eyes of two Dominican heresy hunters, the burial only attended by his fellow scholar Brother Primael, who believes him to be innocent of any wrongdoing, and believes the same of Gilles de Rais, whose court at Tiffauges both men visited in their youth. Before falling ill, Ollivier had spent three months at the Château de Tardivel and the forested region of Herbriant, where the epileptic chatelaine was once locked away by her husband as a madwoman, and her daughter Aidrena, is also chronically ill, while the young Vicomte who has recently inherited the title, Corentin, has indeed been practicing necromancy with Ollivier's aid. Primael is sent to Tardivel at Corentin's request, ostensibly to give succor to his mother and sister, but actually to assist him in his experiments in necromancy, now aimed at the summoning of Ollivier's spirit. Primael is immediately engulfed in a nightmarish series of events, both hallucinatory and real, through which he must negotiate a path in the hope of deciding in which direction virtue really lies, and solving the puzzle of exactly what Ollivier and Corentin had accomplished in their necromancy, and what its consequences might be for the inhabitants of Tardivel.

The Contes de fées, defined here as tales that contain fées, i.e.: "fays" (as opposed to "fairies," which in British literary history referred to imaginary entities often different from the French fées), were invented by aristocratic women of the 17th century, such as Madame d'Aulnoy, the Comtesse de Murat, Madame Leprince de Beaumont, etc.In making visible the operations of the human heart, they also did so with their torments, fears and resentments: the tightly-laced corset of social convention, the catastrophe of arranged marriages; the tyranny and frequent brutality of those in legal control of their lives and fortunes.Such aspects of everyday life were exaggerated by the conventions of the genre: the princesses were the most beautiful in the world, or the ugliest; the prisons in which they were contained were inaccessibly tall towers or lightless subterrains, often guarded by dragons; their captors were ogres, hags or giants, often addicted to setting them impossible tasks to complete, under the threat of dire punishment. And the fantasies of their salvation were exaggerated in consequence, beyond all reasonable expectation: the magic wand of a good fay, and, perhaps even more implausibly, the trustworthy love of a good man.Since the 1970s, there has been a spectacular increase in the popularity of a kind of fantasy that has revivified many of the imaginative materials previously developed in the contes de fées, and they can now be seen as a key link in a strand of imaginative literature that extends forwards from Classical literature and Medieval Romance all the way to a significant sector of contemporary literary production, and its extensions into visual media, connected not merely by the complex transference of imagery, but by the underlying psychology of composition and consumption. In order to understand modern fantasy fully, it is therefore necessary to understand its roots in previous literary genres, and one of the most important is the conte de fées.This volume also includes 38 exemplary stories sampled from 1696 to 1914, forming the most complete anthology devoted to the History of the Faerie to-date.Brian M. Stableford has been a professional writer since 1965. He has published more than 70 science fiction and fantasy novels, as well as several authoritative non-fiction books. He has also translated many of the works reviewed herein for Black Coat Press.

St. Madoc, on the coast of North Wales, seems like a suitably quiet place for an aging writer to work; when Simon Cannick moves into Raven Cottage he thinks it might even be too quiet. Stopping by the pub, he learns of local lore concerning mermaids, spirits and the Murden family who inhabit the nearby Abbey. Perhaps some of this might furnish Simon with material, but soon he finds he has little time to write. Before he can investigate the folklore it has already begun to investigate him, through the venerable and isolated Murdens, the bewitching Cerys and even a raven called Lenore. Truth, however, turns out to be stranger than folklore, and, as a storm approaches that has been brewing for generations, destiny intervenes to divert Simon's plans for a quiet life into deeper and vaster waters.Eccentric, erudite, adventurous, Spirits of the Vasty Deep by Brian Stableford, is an eclectic, bubbling cauldron full of cosmic vision, droll humour and off-beat science fiction. Intelligent fantasy for those who long ago strayed from the beaten path.

Brian M. Stableford's latest novel, The Pool of Mnemosyne, concludes the saga of the immortal Axel Rathenius, from the artists' colony of Mnemosyne, an island located off the northern coast of what in our world is called France, in the Everlasting Empire, 2,000 years after the birth of the Divine Caesar... Rathenius now returns to Mnemosyne after his meeting with the legendary Madame Minerva only to be confronted by a new conspiracy which threatens to annihilate his beloved island...Brian M. Stableford has been a professional writer since 1965. He has published more than 80 science fiction and fantasy novels, as well as several authoritative non-fiction books. He has also been translating the works of numerous authors of French mysteries, scientific romance and fantasy for Black Coat Press, which has previously published his four Mnemosyne novels.

Alastor, the son of an iron-master, has no inclination to follow his father's trade, preferring to work with wood. He and his musically-talented sister Catrianne leave the foundry to go and live in a town, where Alastor soon begins to specialize in making musical instruments. One day, while delivering an unusual musical instrument to a hamlet high in the mountains, he is thrown by his horse during a storm. Temporarily lame, he is forced to take refuge in a strange cabin in the forest, where the mysterious Melusine lived with her daughter Lucinia. When Alastor returns to the town, he takes Lucinia with him and marries her. They have two children, Handsel and Chanterelle. Everything goes well with the family until disaster strikes, leaving Catrianne in sole charge of the children, obliged to seek shelter first at the iron-master's foundry and then at the cabin in the mountains, where a great many surprises await them regarding their own identity and the peril overhanging the forest and the world of Faerie, which is under threat of extinction. Perhaps something can be saved, and if it can, the key to its salvation might lie, at least in part, in Catrianne's music, Handsel's uniqueness, and Chanterelle's dreams.

Mathieu Galmier, formerly of the Pasteur Institute, has to leave Paris under a cloud when one of his pioneering experiments in hematology goes awry. He is given refuge -- of sorts -- in London by Sir Juliam Templeforth.Unfortunately, the rewards both men hope to reap from continuing the experiments are slow to materialize. The research hits snags, and its human costs are beginning to weigh on Mathieu's conscience.Complicating matters further, some of Sir Julian's unruly Irish tenants have come to London to demand satisfaction, and Mathieu's presence has been detected by Philippe and Myrtille de Valcoeur, who have an intense interest in his research -- seemingly more mystical than scientific.When complications lead to catastrophe, Mathieu has to flee. But his past proves exceedingly difficult to escape...