For those who have too much time on their hands.
I’m apparently: ‘a laser hen’, or maybe I ‘share elan’, whilst Caroline is a ‘rascal heroine’.
Meanwhile ‘A future fair for all’ = ‘Our fearful fat liar’ who happens to be ‘born dog worn’.
Author: Neal Asher
M is for May and Morgan
BARRY N MALZBERG | GUERNICA NIGHT THE FALLING ASTRONAUTS THE MEN INSIDE HEROVIT’S WORLD |
GEORGE R. R. MARTIN | A SONG FOR LYA |
JULIAN MAY | THE GOLDEN TORC THE NON-BORN KING THE ADVERSARY INTERVENTION JACK THE BODILESS MAGNIFICAT |
JOHN MEANEY | TO HOLD INFINITY |
R. M. MELUCH | JERUSALEM FIRE |
CHINA MIEVILLE | KING RAT PERDIDO STREET STATION THE SCAR THE IRON COUNCIL |
RICHARD MORGAN | ALTERED CARBON BROKEN ANGELS WOKEN FURIES BLACK MAN |
PETER MOORWOOD | THE HORSE LORD THE DEMON LORD THE DRAGON LORD THE WARLORD’S DOMAIN |
Blood Music — Greg Bear
As expected I did very much enjoy this. I love the idea of transformations like the ones in this (telegraphed right from the start) and wasn’t disappointed with them. The book went from a bit of genetic manipulation to quantum mechanics and rewriting the laws of physics, with an interesting spin on how those laws are formed. It also dealt with immortality, and I’m a sucker for that. One teensy little problem, however. This book suffers from what I’ll call ‘the slide rule effect’. Some of the older readers here will know exactly what I’m talking about: those old SF books with grand-scale sensawunda in which the astrogator works out the course of the superluminal starship using a slide rule – some anachronism that takes that vital ‘suspension of disbelief’ a step further away. All the way-out (or not particularly way-out) science in this is fine, but that a large part of the story takes place in the Twin Towers does bugger it up a bit.
Wikipedia
It seems I don’t need to write an encyclopedia of the Polity. Here’s the start of a piece on the Prador over at Wikipedia:
Physical description
Prador are amphibious crustaceans with flattened pear-shaped shells with scalloped rims and a raised visual turret at the broad end that houses several pairs of red spider-like eyes, some of which are on movable stalks. Prador move about on six long legs, each terminating in a wicked spike. The rear pair of legs fall off when adolescent Prador make the transition to adults, exposing their sexual organs in the process. Along their underside Prador have four manipulatory arms, each ending in a hand described as “a complex arrangement of hooks and fingers”. These hands are highly dexterous and capable of fine manipulation, just like a human hand. It appears Prador can use all four hands to perform different tasks simultaneously, such as drawing and firing four different weapons at separate targets. Above these are the two heavy “working claws”; large crab-claw limbs that can easily cut through tough materials and crush human bones. Prador feed with a set of dangerous mandibles, capable of grasping, cutting and chewing flesh. Prador are carnivorous, and mostly feed on decaying flesh, primarily harvested from giant mudskippers farmed on their homeworld. Adult Prador are very fond of human flesh, however, and many humans are bred just for this purpose, although by the end of the book The Skinner, this practice has begun to decline. Prador shells are particularly tough, able to withstand impacts and small arms fire, but they seem quite vulnerable to energy weapons and heat, which can cause the shells to burst open.And here’s their entry about me.
Neal Asher Video Clip 23/2/10
Tulip Gardens
Tulip Gardens Holland from Neal Asher on Vimeo.
Just trying out Vimeo since You Tube is being a pain.
What Now?
So, last year I finished The Departure, second book of my last three-book contract with Macmillan and at the time due to be published this year. I immediately got on with the last book of the contract, which then had the provisional title Gabbleducks, and polished off quite a lot of it. Once I was back here in Britain, Julie Crisp (senior commissioning editor for Tor UK) told me she really liked The Departure and, since it was the first book of a new series (The Owner series), she would like to publish that series consecutively. This was a break from my usual habit of books from a series alternated with something else i.e. the order of publication from the start with Macmillan has been: Gridlinked, The Skinner, The Line of Polity, Cowl, Brass Man, The Voyage of the Sable Keech, Polity Agent, Hilldiggers, Line War, with Prador Moon, Shadow of the Scorpion and The Gabble coming in through a route separate to my main contracts. I said okay, let’s give it a try.
This now meant that I had to get Gabbleducks ready for publication this year, which I’ve done. It transformed somewhat in the telling and has now turned into The Technician. Julie now has that book and I’m chewing my fingernails waiting for a response on it. But this also means I’ve hit a bit of a hiatus. I am, effectively, a year ahead of schedule, so what do I do now?
Here are the choices I’ve considered: I could begin the next book in The Owner series, I could produce some short stories, I could pull that fantasy trilogy out of my files and start work on that, or I could set to work on writing a book about mine and Caroline’s adventures in Crete – based on my journal entries – for which I already have the title: Cicada Scream.
I recently got an email from Jeremy Lassen at Night Shade Books in which he wondered if I might consider having a crack at something else for them: a new series, maybe a fantasy – something different to help me penetrate the American market. The fantasy, which I’ve always wanted to rework but have never got round to, falls into that category. So, if I set to work on that I’ve got a target market, though frankly I wouldn’t expect difficulties selling it elsewhere.
So, right now I’m typing into my computer all my Crete journal entries in preparation for writing Cicada Scream. This will be a project I’ll work on with no finish date in mind. This evening I’ll print up the first book of the fantasy, The Staff of Sorrows, read it through and begin working on it with a pencil. More needs to be done than tidying up the English. The whole thing needs to lose its hackneyed fantasy clothing and there’s some big structural changes that need to be made too.
These I’ll work on until the time comes for me to edit The Technician. After that I’m not sure how I’ll proceed, just a case of wait and see.
You see, I can make plans.
Who Reads My Books? Kirby Ubben.
Recently you posted on your blog prior to 1999 you were shoveling shit. well, as fate would have it, same here.
I grew up on a farm in the central US, in the state of Iowa. Shoveling shit was considered one of the ‘good jobs.’ That’s not true, it’s not considered good, just available. I did however spend my formative years shoveling the proverbial and quite literal shit.
I didn’t fancy sports much, and living in the country, socializing wasn’t readily available, so it was books, and largely, those were fantasy and sci/fi. At 18 years of age, in the year of 1993, I moved to Seattle, and happened on a contract job working at Microsoft’s Redmond Campus, and my tastes in leisure time literature turned more strongly science/fiction: William Gibson, Bruce Stirling, Isaac Asimov, Kurt Vonnegut.
Over the years, as I moved about, as I went to university and continued the IT career, I always came back to sci/fi. I’d jaunt off on Japanese history, Japanese historical fiction, a good mystery series, but sci/fi has remained my baseline.
Currently (speaking of Dirty Jobs) I work as the in-house systems engineer, defacto IT director, for a small company back here in Iowa, which has been featured on Dirty Jobs. Remember the chicken sexing episode? Squeezing poop from chickens to determine gender? Yup, that’s us: McMurray Hatchery.
It’s all about poop here in Iowa.
I would guess about 2004, I picked up a copy of a book by a fellow I hadn’t read before, one Mr. Neal Asher, on recommendation from a friend in Seattle: Gridlinked.
blown
away
I absolutely fell in love with it; the world it portrayed, the characters, both protagonist and villain equally compelling… I registered gridlinked.net and have been using it for vanity email since.
Next came the epic hunt for all things Asher; minor collector nerd OCD happily at work. The pinnacle of my Asher collection, in my mind, is the copy of Mason’s Rats, the paper pamphlet original, closely followed by the US hardcover first edition of Gridlinked, amusingly signed by Mr. Asher himself.
Just another farm boy turned deep Linux nerd obsessed with British sci/fi and the epitome of said genre, Neal Asher.
Increase fanboy count by one, please.
k.
Sundog
Here’s one of them there UFOs:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/02/20/sdo-whacks-sundog/#more-16565
Not.
Dexter Ominbus — Jeff Lindsay
The language of the first page of this hauled me up, but I persevered and was soon in territory I recognized from the excellent TV series. I was a bit dubious about the somewhat camp depiction of Dexter and the emphasis on his ‘Dark Passenger’ which only kicked in in the TV series when he was pretending to have a drugs habit, both as an alibi with Rita and a way to put Doakes off the scent. I really enjoyed the first two books of this, noting the differences and being quite happy with them – there were quite simply things that happened in this only suitable an X classification and would have cut down on the success of the TV series. The last book I hated. Lindsay took Dexter’s ‘Dark Passenger’ into supernatural territory, Dexter himself became a soppy ineffectual mess, and I felt it was wrong wrong wrong.
Thing is, whilst there were a couple of really enjoyable books here, and the idea of Dexter is all down to Lindsay, I find the TV series a lot better. I think that the TV version nailed the essence of it, of Dexter, which was in the first two books, and definitely not in the last one. You may think it odd me feeling that straying into fantastical territory was the wrong thing to do here, if you do, then go read my post about UFOs again.