Cover of Sterrensplinters

Sterrensplinters
Eddy C. Bertin
222 pages
published in 2013

Eddy C. Bertin was an important author in my personal Golden Age of science fiction. A Flemish author, he was one of the few science fiction writers writing in Dutch back in the late seventies & eighties. Dutch language science fiction has never been particularly abundant and most that was published was not very good. Bertin was one of the few exceptions, an author who could've found an audience in English as well (and indeed, has had a couple of stories published in English). Still active, Bertin has written everything from hard science fiction to dark fantasy and horror, often mixing genres and with a tendency towards the Lovecraftian end of horror.

Sterrensplinters (Star Splinters) is a 2013 anthology collecting some of his best stories taken from his 1970s and 1980s collections. These are all long out of print, so a new collection of them is very welcome. The short introduction doesn't tell much about why exactly these stories were chosen, or why the collection had to be divided into two parts: Membranen and Splinters, other than that the first set of stories takes place in a shared universe, while the remainder are standalone. That second set of stories feels as an afterthought, even if it includeds one of Bertin's most famous stories.

No, the real meat of the collection is in that first section, showcasing some of the key stories from his Membrane future history. This is a very seventies sort of future history, in that the coming psychic and psychadelic revolution lead to the liberation of the mind through a new class of drugs, freeing the long hidden ultracentre within the brain, that enabled jumps through ultraspace and the conquest of the universe. Fortunately however Bertin was enough of a cynic to not make this into a hippy-drippy cosmic love sort of universe, but instead the monopoly on those ultrapsych drugs was held by powerful companies like Afrostellar and LBL, underpinning an imperialistic, capitalistic, expansionist world order that looked forward to cyberpunk.

There's also more than a hint of Lovecraft and Edgar Allan Poe about the Membrane universe, unknown dangers lurking in the depths of ultraspace, attracted to the splashes human ships make in it, while in the real universe humanity despite its belief in its own propaganda, may not be a match for more cunning, more aggressive species. There's a barely controlled chaos behind the gleaming facade of the setting, a sense of moving towards a predestined doom for the entire universe. In fact, the Membrane stories were originally collected in three books: Eenzame Bloedvogel (1976), De Sluimerende Stranden van de Geest (1981) and Het Blinde Doofstomme Beest op de Kale Berg (1983), with that third featuring that ultimate doom, The Blind, Deaf-Mute Beast on the Bald Mountain that waits in the Membranes at the end of the universe...

Membranen:

Splinters:

Most of these stories are pure O' Henry type shockers, with a bizarre scenario set up and the truth behind it revealed at the end of the story. Even when first published these were somewhat old fashioned, which reveals somewhat of the level of sophistication Dutch language science fiction operated (and still operates). These aren't bad stories, just the kind of story you'd see as filler in some monthly magazine.

Webpage created 20-05-2015, last updated 02-06-2015.