Author: Neal Asher

Fantasy Covers

Posted on by Neal Asher
Here’s a little summation of just a few opinions about fantasy covers. Some hardened SF readers simply don’t want to know, an opinion summed up by Roger Fourt: Anyone wielding shiny sacred weapons, multiple planets/moons in the background, improbable waterfalls, ludicrous cities perched atop unscalable peaks. In fact, fantasy covers are generally off-putting, along with their trite, largely write-by-numbers storylines and nerdy pubescant D&D followers. Gives SF a bad rap by association.
Those that do want to know object to depictions that bear either little relation to what the books contains, or are, frankly, embarrassing. On covers Bob Lock doesn’t like fairies, or the WOT series as all the characters seem not to scale. They look as if they are riding Shetland ponies, nothing like how I imagined them from their descriptions, whilst Stuart McMillan opines, heaving bosoms and demure damsels keep my wallet *in* my pocket. Saying that, great chested men with giant weapons are equally a turn-off. Andy Plumbly and Chuck MacKenzie respectively don’t like the typical bright colours and a generic character on the front and ‘same old’ sword & sandals designs (think the ‘Gor’ books).
And then Andi Marment and Chuck lean towards fantasy down and dirty like weaveworld or imagica, none of that wheel of time bobbins or fantasy books (athough I read very little fantasy) with cities on the cover, but that’s largely due to having read brilliant ‘city’ fantasies by China Mieville and Alan Campbell.
So what can be learned from all this? What some like and dislike about a cover is usually informed by their opinion of what is inside the book. In the end, making an exception of those embarrassed about their ‘guilty pleasure’, the truer the cover is to the book’s contents the better. But then we all knew that anyway.
Of course, the sample of opinions here doesn’t mean a lot. What would all those 10 to 18 year old boys think of the John Norman cover here? I certainly still like the lurid covers on some of my books and, had I avoided such covers, my reading, and enjoyable reading, throughout my life would have been cut down by about 80%.  

Which Cover?

Posted on by Neal Asher

Here’s a couple of question that have come up on Twitter: what kind of cover puts you off a fantasy or science fiction book? I also wonder about the reverse: in both genres, what kind of cover catches your eye and makes you turn the book over to take a look at the blurb, or maybe read a bit of the first page?

Here’s a section from an interview I’m doing now for the Mad Hatter, which seems relevant:

MH: Tor UK has been recently re-releasing many of your books with new cover art, which I must say are usually outstanding. I’ve noticed they’re usually going with some sort of crazy looking monster-alien creature popping off the page. Before I had read The Skinner I thought they’d be a crazy Horror/Sci-Fi mash-up, while they are clearly more than that were you going for a Horror feel at all. Do many of the stories involve monsters of a sort?


Neal Asher: Yes, many of my stories involve monsters, some of which, of course, are human. I don’t think the intention was to go for a horror feel to the books, since the horror market is not exactly in the rude health it was in twenty or so years ago. I think here we have more of a case of unashamed cover design. This is science fiction, this is science fiction with aliens, big guns and weird robots and, no matter what any myopic twits in the publishing industry might think, we are not going to have a still-life cover featuring a rose and a handgun.


MH: I think fans appreciate it. You can only have so many ephemeral space stations and ringed world covers…

And here’s some Facebook replies, fantasy first:

Jesper Krogsgaard: If it’s all light, bright and glamour I usually stay 100 miles away. It has to be at least a bit gritty – unless it’s a comedy.

Colin Strawbridge: Generic ‘bodice ripper’ type pictures are a big turn off.


Stuart McMillan: Heaving bosoms and demure damsels keep my wallet *in* my pocket. Saying that, great chested men with giant weapons are equally a turn-off.


Andy Plumbly: Typical bright colours and a generic character on the front. Saying that….Gridlinked originally caught my eye because of it’s snazzy cover (the green one). Loving all the newer covers of yours too!

And now SF:


Jesper Krogsgaard: Ewoks. Cute and fuzzy. Using conventional pictures doesn’t provide enough mystery unless you twist it. Again, like with fantasy, I like it gritty, dark and dangerous.

Colin Strawbridge: I think the typefaces used are more important than pictures; Gollancz have managed pretty well all these years without resorting to lurid graphics.One thing i find especially disconcerting is when they put celebrity reviewers names in much larger print than the actual author.

What do all you reading this think?

New Brass Man Cover

Posted on by Neal Asher

Mr Sullivan has done the book proud:

The knight errant Anderson is hunting a dragon on the primitive Out-Polity world of Cull, little knowing that far away a man has resurrected a brass killing machine to assist in a similar hunt that encompasses star systems. When agent Cormac learns that an old enemy still lives, he sets out in pursuit aboard the attack ship Jack Ketch … whilst scientist Mika begins discovering the horrifying truth about that ancient technology ostensibly produced by the alien Jain, who died out five million years ago.
On a planet roamed by ferocious insectile monsters the people of Cull must struggle to survive, while they build the industrial base to reach their forefathers’ starship still orbiting far above them. An entity calling itself Dragon assists them, but its motives are questionable, having created genetic by-blows of humans and the hideous local monsters before growing bored with that game. And now Cull, for millennia geologically inactive, suffers earthquakes…
Meanwhile a brass killing machine seeks to escape a bloody past it can neither forget nor truly remember. So mindlessly will continue its search for sanity, which it might find in an instant or not for a thousand years.

St. Leonards' Visit.

Posted on by Neal Asher

Another place we visit at least once a year, ever since being introduced to it by Peter Lavery ten years ago, is St. Leonards-on-Sea and, by foot from there, Hastings itself. In the winter time it is a little bit dreary, but there’s still some excellent stuff to see, and to do. The latter of these usually involve fish and chips and red wine, which we always find we need after first installing ourselves in a fifth floor flat and then tramping for miles up and down various slopes. You have to remember we come from flatland Essex, and we live in a bungalow. My calves are still aching.

Here’s one of the typically Victorian (Edwardian?) streets:

The Jain technology died in this park many years ago, but this remnant remains:

Nobody told Caroline it was a Whomping Willow:

Hastings Pier, a wonderful place where once you could play silly games, buy sickly sweets, stroll out over the sea or sup wine out at a table in the sunshine. Now being left to fall to ruin while the arseholes in the council instead blow money on a modern art gallery no one will visit. The sea air may clear ones head, but doesn’t clear stupidity from the heads of council bureaucrats:

I nice little pub whose name I can’t remember right now. It has everything a pub should have, except cigarette smoke and customers (there’s a connection):

Family History

Posted on by Neal Asher

We took a wander up to Chatteris a week ago, stopped in a pub called The Cross Keys, then sloped back to Soham to do some research into Caroline’s family history. (Of course the latter place is famous for somewhat nastier events than being the breeding ground of the Sizer family. I did wonder about a rather odd look I got when I asked about the location of a particular graveyard) This research generally involved clumping about graveyards checking the names on tombstones, checking the names on a war memorial, then drinking beer and eating bacon and egg baguettes. Here’s a couple of pictures from the area. First off The Cross Keys itself:

Next the well-guarded door to our room:

Caroline’s parents got the better bed!

One of our hunting grounds:

One of our finds (Sizer):

The Fountain – location of those wonderful baguettes, and where we wished we had stayed:

Wonders of the Solar System

Posted on by Neal Asher

I’ve been enjoying ‘Wonders of the Solar System’ because of Professor Brain Cox’s enthusiasm for science, for his relish of the great things we have achieved in throwing spacecraft millions of miles out to expand the frontier of human knowledge. It’s been good to see some of the newer pictures from that frontier and of course to see the superb graphics created. The program hasn’t really told me anything I don’t know – it’s really a Solar System basics class for those unaware of things like the order of the planets or how many planet Earths you could drop into Jupiter’s red spot, or generally what conditions pertain on each world. But it has seemed to be a return to the good BBC science program untainted by political ideology.
I mean, at one time I used to love Attenborough’s Life on Earth programs, but now I cannot watch them without feeling the urge to throw something at the TV when he delivers his regular-as-clockwork homilies about how we are destroying the planet with our profligate globally warming ways.
The first few episodes of Wonders of the Solar System remained pure enthusiasm and science so I watched with some trepidation when I realised this latest episode was about the ‘thin blue line’ – about planetary atmospheres. I enjoyed the stuff about Mercury’s lack of atmosphere leaving it open to direct meteorite collisions  and vast temperature changes, the stuff about Earth’s magnetosphere protecting it from the solar wind and how deep in Jupiter the pressure turns hydrogen into a metallized liquid. But then, with the inevitability of tax rises on petrol, booze and cigarettes, we got to the greenhouse effect, and Venus.
Cox gave a brief description of how the greenhouse effect works, perhaps annoying the faithful by pointing out how without it we would be freezing our butts of in temperatures 30 degrees lower than they are now. He then went on to say that the temperature on the surface of that world is hot enough to melt lead, apparently because of its CO2-laden atmosphere. I was there rooting for Cox because he did seem a little embarrassed to be mentioning this, and I was hoping he would also go on to point out some of the rather large elephants in the room.. But no, all we got was some nonsense about Venus being in the same ‘region’ of space as Earth. Rather disappointing really.
No mention then of how Venus being 26 million miles closer to a giant fusion reactor called the sun might have some bearing on its temperature. No mention how a ground level pressure of 93 times that of Earth’s might have an effect too, or that Venus receives over a thousand Watts per square metre more solar radiation than Earth. Nope, it’s all those Venusian coal-fired power stations.
I like to think that this was the minimum deal with the Devil Cox could make to ensure he would present the program. I like to think this was the minimum he could say to calm the political demagogues at the BBC so as to enable him to zip off to Africa to experience an English Electric Lightning jet flight straight up at 5 gees to the limits of the atmosphere to observe that ‘thin blue line’, or race across the Namib in a 4×4 to do a small piece about the sands of Mars, or race a speed boat across a lake to gather up some methane whilst talking about Saturn’s moon, Titan.

Anyway, I’ll continue watching the program, and just hope that the homilies are out of the way…  

Prador on Earth

Posted on by Neal Asher

I small colony of prador was discovered in a Victorian apartment block in St. Leonards on Sea. The owner of the flat in which they were found, one Peter Lavery, said, “Ah, they’re just a bit of fun,” but failed to explain why so many neighbouring flats now seem to be vacant.