Dark Intelligence to Music

For this blog post I hand you over to Steve Buick:

I wrote the music for Dark Intelligence with the idea that long soundscapes could evoke the atmospheres in the book and enhance the reading experience without actually interfering with the reading itself. I did the same thing for Peter F Hamilton’s The Abyss Beyond Dreams, which kickstarted the concept. I noticed people on buses and trains reading while listening to music. Surely music that was created for the book would be the ideal environment for the story? Evokescape was born.
In Dark Intelligence there is a pace and energy that required musical transformations matching those of the characters with a continually moving tension. All overshadowed by deep and spiralling clouds of synths and sound effects. Layers of rhythms and pulses evolve, building with sounds that represent the dark technology of the story.
For some of these ideas I looked to 1970s/80s Tangerine Dream and Kraftwerk, with their insane sequencers and stark synths. I’ve always thought their albums felt like the soundtracks to unmade science fiction films and decided I would invent my own version of those creations somewhere down the line.
The mp3 album of three long tracks is available on Amazon, iTunes and other digital stores worldwide under the title Original Music for Neal Asher’s Dark Intelligence. Released on the same date as the book, January 29th.
Evokescape’s Steve Buick produces long, evolving musical soundscapes inspired by books to enhance the reader’s experience, creating the final seal to the outside world and deepening the reading experience.
Original Music for Neal Asher’s Dark Intelligence
Further Links:

One Week To Go!

Forbidden Planet Signing

Thursday, 29th January, 2015 18:00 – 19:00

London Megastore, 179 Shaftesbury Avenue, London,WC2H 8JR

NEAL ASHER will be signing DARK INTELLIGENCE at the Forbidden Planet London Megastore on Thursday 29th January from 6 – 7pm


One man will transcend death to seek vengeance. One woman will transform herself to gain power. And no one will emerge unscathed…
Thorvald Spear wakes in hospital, where he finds he’s been brought back from the dead. What’s more, he died in a human vs. alien war that ended a whole century ago. But when he relives his traumatic final moments, he finds the spark to keep on living. That spark is vengeance.
Isobel Satomi ran a successful crime syndicate. But after competitors attacked, she needed more power. Yet she got more than she bargained for when she negotiated with Penny Royal. She paid it to turn her part-AI herself, but the upgrades hid a horrifying secret. The Dark AI had triggered a transformation in Isobel that would turn her into a monster, rapidly evolving into something far from human.

This is the first volume in a no-holds-barred adventure set in Asher’s popular Polity universe.
Neal was born in Billericay and started writing SF and Fantasy at 16. After a range of jobs that landed him in the machine industry, he began the Hadrim trilogy, and wrote his first version of Fool’s Mate. Neal has had great acclaim and success for his books; Gridlinked, The Skinner, The Line of Polity, Cowl, Brass Man, The Voyage Of The Sable Keech and Hilldiggers.

[Book 1: Dark Intelligence (Hardcover)]

SFX Interview

Freezing author poses in a field outside Bradwell Power Station.
When the photographer Will Ireland turned up at Althorne railway station I thought why not head down to the River Crouch? There’s some nice enough scenery down there that could be used as a backdrop. However I was forgetting that I was not in Crete where car parking is easy, but in England where someone wants money or some busybody complains. We ended up at the power station because, well, what kind of backdrop do you have for an SF writer? After posing in a field for a while I was reminded of that phrase (I think), ‘The most dangerous industry in Britain,’ from The Edge of Darkness when security guards came out to see what we were doing and take down details. Apparently they had decided not to release the dogs. Mr Ireland helpfully suggested that they did, while he sat in my car and took pictures of them chasing and pulling down the author.
This photograph shoot was all to accompany an interview that’s appeared in this month’s issue of SFX. Apparently there’s a not so good review of Dark Intelligence in there too but I’m not particularly bothered about that. Fan opinions are what count and I’ve already seen some reaction prior to this…

Anyway, since the interview was just sampled I thought it worthwhile publishing the full text here:

SFX Interview 
SFX: The new book, where did it spring from? (Without quite wishing to ask where do you get your ideas from..)

Neal: In a way my readers are a little bit responsible for that. What has happened here is similar to what happened in my 5 book Cormac series. In the first book, Gridlinked, I wrote about a character called Mr Crane – a rather large android made of brass – and the readers came back at me about that saying just how much they enjoyed him. The third book of the series I wrapped around Mr Crane. It was called Brass Man. But it was also my choice because I’m a fan at heart and really enjoyed writing about Mr Crane too. In Dark Intelligence I’ve revisited another character who first appeared in a short story called Alien Archaeology in Asimov’s and then in an off-shoot book from the Cormac series called The Technician. This ‘character’ is the blacklist AI Penny Royal. My readers rather liked that creation, and I like it too. Also, after writing a dystopia trilogy set in the near future of Earth, I felt the need to return to the Polity and do something sprawling. The ideas? They turn up at the keyboard as I write.   

SFX: A key theme seems to be transformation, and the effect of physical transformation on the psyche. Were you always consciously exploring that theme, or did it develop through the writing?

Neal: The theme of transformation has developed through the writing but has also been there right from the start. It was in some of my earliest short stories, for example the immortality imparting virus, spread by the bite of a leech, in a short story called ‘Spatterjay’, which formed the basis of my trilogy beginning with The Skinner. Immortality is another constant theme in my books – physical immortality through medical technology and through the recording and backing up of minds. Another of those stories concerned both ‘Always With You’ included a doctor mycelium inside the protagonist that kept him alive during a battle with one of the bad-ass aliens that appear in Dark Intelligence – the prador. I’ve been working with these from the start and thinking more and more on the second element you mention: the effect of transformation (and immortality) on the psyche. In The Skinner, for example, I looked at the ennui of immortality and that appears again in Dark Intelligence.  

SFX: There are plenty of horror elements in the book, errm, just how nasty is your imagination? More seriously, is there a desire to shock? If so, why?

Neal: My desire is to entertain and the horror elements, and the violence – the conflict – are a large part of that. Simply flick through the pages of SFX and point to a book, film or game that doesn’t contain them. I think you’ll find that difficult. There’s a large element of the voyeur in all of us of course. I guess my problem developed from when from a book about writing I read that there should be conflict on every page. I thought that meant exploding spaceships.

SFX: How does the novel fit into the existing Polity timeline?

Neal: Dark Intelligence starts a little while after the events in The Technician. The latter book was a sort of off-shoot from the second book in the Cormac series, The Line of Polity, but set twenty years later. So Dark Intelligence, and the ensuing two books of this trilogy, are set just a little while after the Cormac series and some centuries before the Spatterjay series.

SFX: Going back, were you someone who always wanted to be a writer?

Neal: Like so many people I had no idea what I wanted to do when I left school, beyond get some money in my pocket and go down the pub. I did, however, have many interests: biology also specifically mycology, chemistry, electronics, physics, painting and sculpture. I used to flit from one interest to another but not achieve much beyond learning a little more – it was after I was at school, for example, that I learned how thermionic valves and then transistors work. I also read a great deal – mostly science fiction – and at school wrote my first short story, which the teacher complimented (thank you teacher), and as a result writing became another of my pursuits. Over many years I inevitably wrote a fantasy trilogy. Only when I was in my mid 20s did I realise that writing was something that could incorporate all my other interests and only then did I really focus on it completely.      

SFX: Was there a breakthrough moment when you thought, yeah, I can do this?

Neal: For me there was no sudden break-through moment. I paused at every step up the hill. Years of nothing published at all then a short story in a magazine for which payment was a free copy of said magazine. More stories published, the odd novella, a couple of short story collections, even some money but not enough to make me think about giving up the day job. I had an agent once hawking that fantasy – no luck. I had novels taken by small publishers who crashed and burned before publication. Yes, when I got a phone call from my first editor at Macmillan that could be called a break-through, but I still didn’t give up the day job for a couple of years. I swiftly learned that getting a book with a big publisher doesn’t mean Champagne and big cars thereafter. What it means is your publisher/editor asking what you are going to produce next year, which is a step many fall flat on their faces over.

SFX: Of all the jobs you had pre-full-time writing, which would you least like to return to and why? And conversely, which would you happily do again?

Neal: I guess that delivering coal for two weeks in the freezing rain just before Christmas was the worst. Nothing like having to use a scrubbing brush to clean parts of the body that should never see such a brush at all. I think it’s also fair to say that I would hate to return to any of the highly physical jobs I did. Even though I keep active now I’m still aware that I am of the age when constant physical work starts causing problems: trapped nerves in the back, tendonitis, cranky knees. A job I would do again (but I think to say ‘happily’ is pushing it a bit) is one in engineering when I was operating milling machines and lathes and the like. But this would be the one when I was machining a wide variety of components and also programming and operating CNC machines. It wouldn’t be a similar job I had where the instruction might have been, ‘Neal, here are 2,000 aluminium blocks. I want you to bore a hole in each and slice the corner off.’   

SFX: Crete: are you still spending large amounts of time on the island? What’s your life like there?

Neal: As a writer, who of course can do his job anywhere he can take a laptop, it has been good. I don’t have internet in my mountain house so I tended to get a lot more work done! I could do my 2,000 words a day, which is my target when doing the first draft of a book, then go swimming in the early afternoon. Food and drink are relatively cheap, the temperature can climb into the 40s and the light is intense. Mostly you live outdoors. I enjoy growing stuff in my garden there that I can’t grow very well here. Chillies being a particular favourite, but also all sorts of weird and wonderful flowers and fruits. Things are relaxed and life there can be idyllic. However, it only reaches the above stages after a lot of effort. Too many people move there on the basis of what they saw on holiday and that isn’t the life at all. It can been quite a frustrating and maddening culture shock. If you are not the kind of person who has interests it can be boring – going to the beach has its limitations for many, and many find their entertainment in a bottle. A lot make the move there then after a few years give up and go back to Britain.
However, it is difficult for me to say much about my life there now since it has changed radically this last year – my wife died of bowel cancer last January. This year I did spent a lot of time walking in the mountains, and swimming and kayaking in the Libyan Sea. This was mostly to try and hold depression at bay. I have struggled to write, and to care about much at all.

SFX: How has it changed since 2008 economic meltdown?

Neal: It depends where you go in Greece or in Crete. Generally it is not as bad as we see in the news where the impression is given of rioting all across Greece, when it is mainly just in Athens. However, in Sitia, where I get my shopping, there are apparently 120 families on the breadline. In Lidl there is a large basket by the exit where you can leave for them some of the food you’ve bought. In Makrigialos, where I go swimming – a tourist area with a lot more money about – change is not so evident. In fact the melt-down there is just a continuation of how things have been going downhill with the introduction of the Euro – tourists heading to other cheaper destinations, and businesses steadily going under. All Greeks are now being hit by new taxes as the government struggles to maintain its bloated bureaucracy while continuing to act as if ‘austerity’ is just for the public. There are property taxes now for people who are often described as property rich but dirt poor, and many simply cannot pay them. It seems that every few months we see a new tax – often abandoned when the government fails to collect it.   

SFX: You’re, as far as I can tell, politically conservative (I know, but best shorthand I can find). Does that make you feel like an outsider in the context of SF contemporaries who mostly seem to me to be left-leaning?

Neal: In Britain the divisions between left and right are a joke. I look at the two main parties in Westminster, supposedly left and right, and they both look like Orwell’s pigs. They both consist of career politicians who are divorced from reality by massive salaries, pensions and an over-privileged lifestyle. The true division now, to me, lies between authoritarian and libertarian. I can be described by that much-abused word ‘libertarian’ but, before anyone assumes that means I’m a gun-toting bible-belter, I am a libertarian in the sense of “classic liberal”. To quote: “individual well-being, prosperity and social harmony are fostered by ‘as much liberty as possible’ and ‘as little government as necessary’”.  
Yes, I do sometimes feel like I slipped under the fence and got into the SF world before anyone could release the dogs. I once chatted with an SF writer who was ‘politically conservative’ (whatever that means) who was amazed that I didn’t just keep my mouth shut and my head down. But my contention was that, even if you are writing some way out stuff, truth is one of your most important tools. However, I do tend to be more close-mouthed now simply because, over this last shitty year, my perspective on what is important in life has changed a great deal.   

Dark Intelligence Review

This one from Booklist:
Dark Intelligence: Transformation Book One
Asher, Neal (Author)
Feb 2015. 352 p. Night Shade, hardcover, $26.99. (9781597808248).
Asher returns to his popular far-future series, Polity Universe, with another fast-paced space opera filled with his trademark technological marvels and elaborate world building. In a world where consciousness is portable, artificial, and alien—the Prador are crablike carnivores who are quite nasty— Thorvald Spear awakens a century after his death in a new body but with full recollection of dying during the Prador-Human war. Asher drops readers straight into the action, as Spear seeks to avenge the death of his soldiers by the rogue AI ship, the Penny Royal. (The AI ships have personalities of their own, some not so nice.) On his search, he encounters Isobel Satomi, a perversely augmented human who turns her body into a vicious weapon for her own ends. Asher shifts the point of view in each chapter to various players in his galactic game—the ships get chapters, too—and the result is an exciting, intricate, and unabashedly futuristic story rife with twists and turns. Fans of Hannu Rajaniemi’s The Quantum Thief (2010) will feel right at home in Asher’s Polity Universe.

Tanith Lee

When I was first being published by Macmillan I used to get invited to various parties, book launches and conventions. Generally I went not because I’m a party person, though the free booze did help, but because I felt obliged to go. At these events I met some interesting people. Many of those who were being published by Pan Macmillan at the time like China Mieville, Liz Williams, Justina Robson and Andy Secombe. Some other stars like Jon Courtney Grimwood, Alastair Reynolds and Freda Warrington. And then some megastars like Harry Harrison and Michael Moorcock.

While Caroline and I were at the launch of a book by an up-and-coming fantasy writer called Cecilia Dart-Thornton, sat in a corner out of the way, we spotted a guy standing up at the bar by himself. Peter Lavery, my editor at the time, went over to him and they chatted for a while. I noticed the guy looking over at us then he came over with Peter. He apparently came over to chat with us because we seemed like the only normal regular people in the room. Standing at about six and a half feet tall in his boots, with long black hair like a red indian, this guy did not strike me as quite so regular and normal. However, he was great company and a good evening was had, terminating after drunken pizza. This was John Kaiine who I was excited to learn was the husband of Tanith Lee.

Tanith Lee wasn’t there that evening but I did get to meet her later on during a trip to Hastings, and have been meeting up with her and John there ever since. Here’s the thing: checking dates I see that The StormLord was published in 1976 so I must have read it sometime after the age of 15, but not long after I think. Either that book, or another called Birthgrave, was my first Tanith Lee. Over the ensuing years I read many of her books (not all in the collection here since I used to regularly burn through whatever the library had too) and I can state without reservation that I never read one I didn’t like. When asked some years back for my top ten fantasy books I put her Volkhavaar in that list. I was even lucky enough to get a stack of signed copies from the lady herself.
Since meeting her I’ve learned that her books have been in and out of print over the years and that I’ve probably hardly dented the surface. She’s had 90 books published. During one chat with them the subject of ebooks came up and I was surprised to learn that this massive backlist wasn’t then available. Now it seems that it is, while others of her books are being released. So, if you like your fantasy Gothic and bloody (and let me add that she was the one who invented that kind of fantasy), I suggest you give them a try.      

Christmas Done.

The season of goodwill and good cheer and all that shite. Well, as I have learned, it’s about the worst time of year if someone you shared it with has died. I didn’t even consider getting out the decorations, since I always passed them from the loft down to Caroline and, really, it just seemed like an empty thing to do. And knew that I was going to bugger off somewhere. I think receiving Christmas cards addressed to Neal & Caroline just affirmed that. It’s a silly time of year often of pointless presents and, obviously, of meaningless Christmas card lists. Thankfully, my first boss at Macmillan, Peter Lavery, had a place for me to stay so I buggered off to Hastings.

Amazing how a bit of sunlight transforms a place and it was bright and sunny on Christmas day. A lot of wandering about ensued and since this is also the season of excessive boozing, that too.

Had to include this picture. This is Inspector Foyle’s house from Foyle’s War. I have other pictures on my phone, which I’ll download when I find or purchase the correct USB cable. These are of the house where Rider Haggard lived and the house where Alan Turing was born. I didn’t get a picture of the first pub I ever went into there – where Whistler drank – it’s been converted into four flats.

While there I met John Kaiine and Tanith Lee and had an excellent afternoon. I’ll talk more about that in another post, because people need to be aware that many of her 90 books (I’ve never read one I didn’t like) are being reissued and can now be picked up on Kindle. Above is the first I ever read. I was attracted by the cover probably because back then I was reading the Robert E Howard Conan books, but found something very different.

But I drank too much wine. This resulted in some stupid drunkenness and crashing depression. I came back home to a familiar stabbing in the guts and feelings I remembered from my earlier months in Crete, and which are somewhat more than hangover blues. And even a day later I’m still getting post alcoholic cringes. That’s Christmas over and done for me and the start now of the season of temperance. I’ll not toast in the New Year – just hope it’s a better one.

Lowering my Sights

I discovered something quite interesting yesterday. For some while now I’ve been sitting down at the computer with all good intentions to write 2,000 words a day. I open up the thing I’m working on (another Owner book) stare at it for a little while, then wonder if there’s anything interesting on Facebook, or Twitter, or if any of my 5 online scrabble opponents have made a move…

I’ve been sure that the reason behind this is that I’m just not interested. I don’t care about fiction – something reflected in the fact that I haven’t read a book for the best part of a year. In fact I don’t have much interest in quite a few things. Not much on TV engages me – I can’t even get angry at the news. In fact my reaction is sadness interspersed with weak irritation and I tend not to watch.  I’ve had the stuffing knocked out of me, I’m low, depressed, fed up.
Bollocks.
The reality is that plenty of stuff still interests me. I might not like the TV news, but that’s due to a combination of the partiality of the BBC (and ITV for that matter) and the tendency for ‘news’ to always be ‘oh look, some more bad shit has happened’ or the always contemptible, ‘this politician says, or has done…’. When I can select the news on the internet that’s fine. I would rather read something about the latest development in graphene tech than ‘David Cameron gets tough on Europe’ or ‘ten body bags back from Timbuktu’ or yet another BBC environmental waffle before photo-shopped condensation towers.  In fact I’m interested in a lot of what I find on the internet and it can keep me engaged for hours – I read a lot here and watch a lot. I am also starting to get back into fiction. I watched Lord of the Rings again and enjoyed it thoroughly. I’m even starting to think I might pick up a book again.
But back to the original point, from which I’ve somewhat strayed. The interesting thing that happened yesterday was that while I sat staring at the screen I decided that something is better than nothing, so I reduced my target. This is something I’ve never had to do before. I would aim to do 500 words a day, I thought. Even a fuck-up like me should be able to manage that? The moment I made that decision I opened up the file labelled ‘Grazen1’. I stared at it for a moment completely baffled then decided I would just go with another POV – an alien one. Less than an hour later I’d done 500 words. By the time I was straying back to Facebook and twitter I’d done over 1,000.

Same target today – I shan’t beat myself up if I do over 500 words.     

The Complete Owner Trilogy

This one is for American readers only I think. A ‘holiday’ gift perhaps?

The Complete Owner Trilogy by Neal Asher, including The Departure, Zero Point, and Jupiter War. 

The Departure: Visible in the night sky the Argus Station, its twin smelting plants like glowing eyes, looks down on nightmare Earth. From Argus the Committee keep an oppressive control: citizens are watched by cams systems and political officers, it’s a world inhabited by shepherds, reader guns, razor birds and the brutal Inspectorate with its white tiled cells and pain inducers. Soon the Committee will have the power to edit human minds, but not yet, twelve billion human being need to die before Earth can be stabilized, but by turning large portions of Earth into concentration camps this is achievable, especially when the Argus satellite laser network comes fully online . . . This is the world Alan Saul wakes to in his crate on the conveyor to the Calais incinerator. How he got there he does not know, but he does remember the pain and the face of his interrogator. Informed by Janus, through the hardware implanted in his skull, about the world as it is now Saul is determined to destroy it, just as soon as he has found out who he was, and killed his interrogator . . .