Chris Beckett

Chris Beckett is a British science fiction author who won the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Dark Eden (2013), a SF novel about the descendants of two stranded astronauts living in a dark world without light. He is also a social worker and academic who brings a social science perspective to his fiction. Born in Oxford in 1955, Beckett worked for many years as a social worker in Cambridge before publishing short fiction and his debut novel The Holy Machine. Dark Eden, about a society that has grown around a bioluminescent world's only heat source over generations, was praised for its exploration of mythology, religion, and social development in isolation. He has continued the Dark Eden series with Mother of Eden and Daughter of Eden, and published other standalone novels. Beckett is a Senior Lecturer in Social Work at Anglia Ruskin University.