Author: Neal Asher

Book Haul

Posted on by Neal Asher

Real highstreet book shops still have their appeal, especially when you know you want something, but are not sure what. The stack of books beside my bed was sadly lacking in decent SF so I wandered into Waterstones in Chelmsford to see what I could find. After signing their stock of my books, I started browsing, and was glad I did. Remembering authors I have enjoyed, picking up and handling books and reading the cover blurbs certainly works. I discovered quite a few that were in the ‘I must get that’ category, but then forgot to get. Here’s my haul:

Alastair Reynolds produces few duds, which means I’ll always buy his next book, and I’ve heard good things about this one.

Always loved Greg Egan’s stuff, but it’s sadly lacking in my collection. Reading the first bit of the blurb ‘A million years from now…’ was quite enough.

Greg Bear is another writer I’ve always liked, and I looked up this one when I found it on the Salamander Award shortlist with The Skinner, and thought then that I really should buy it.

I very much enjoyed Eric Brown’s stories in Interzone, many years ago, and it’s quite daft that I’ve never read one of his books. And reading the blurb of this it looks like this is an oversight I’m going to enjoy correcting.

Thing You Need to Know.

Posted on by Neal Asher

Karl Popper on falsifiability:
A property of any proposition for which it is possible to specify a set of circumstances the occurrence of which would demonstrate that the proposition is false. Falsifiability is the crucial feature of scientific hypotheses: beliefs that can never be tested against the empirical evidence are dogmatic.
Bertrand Russell’s teapot:
If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is an intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time.
If there is no way of proving something wrong, it’s not science. And if you can’t prove something wrong, that doesn’t make it right. Can you think of prime fat contemporary examples of both of these? I certainly can.

Beware the Bottom Probes.

Posted on by Neal Asher

I remember, before I was taken on by Macmillan, getting cornered at a house party by a woman who, upon hearing that I wrote SF, wanted to talk to me about UFOs. I remember, when I was in my twenties, seeing something up in the sky out the back of my parent’s house: a sphere, silver on top and black underneath which, when I saw it, shot off at great speed. But now, I need to let you in on a secret: I don’t believe we have been visited by aliens.
I don’t believe flying saucers are playing peek-a-boo with airliners or having races with Airforce jets. I reckon that object I saw was a weather balloon caught in a high wind, or maybe, just maybe, it was some sort of military drone. I don’t believe a spaceship crashed at Area 57 and that the US military has some bug-eyed monsters on ice. I don’t believe the greys, with a technology capable of propelling themselves across a distance of a minimum of four light years, have come here to stick probes up the bottom of an Arkansas yokel.
You see, I’m a science fiction writer, which means I don’t buy into crap. I buy into logic, emphiricism. Crystals don’t heal, homeopathy is bunk, the only way anyone can predict the future by the stars is if that person sees a monster meteorite on a collision course with Earth. Faith is not proof; there is no invisible friend in the sky. Any theory that doesn’t adhere to Popper’s dictum is not a theory. A tin-foil hat will not stop the mind control rays from Alpha Centauri and walking under a ladder is only unlucky if someone drops a pot of paint on your head.

And these will maybe contain some interesting, rare or even unknown natural phenomena. They will contain delusions, sad attempts at attention seeking, lies, and maybe some truths about just how suggestible is the human mind. Sorry and all that.

Who Reads My Books? Barry Arrowsmith

Posted on by Neal Asher

Since Barry hasn’t been able to supply a picture of himself, I’ve found one for him.

Wotcher, Neal.

My name is Barry Arrowsmith and I’m a Science Fiction addict.
How did I sink to this degraded state?
It all started so innocently….

Imagine…. it’s the late 1940s and a small boy has his ear glued to to a hissing, crackly radio. For what? For Dan Dare on Radio Luxembourg of course.

That was me, and it was the start of a life-long love, bordering on obsession, with SF. The obsession got fed too, what with beeb radio pulling in massive audiences with ‘Day of the Triffids’ and ‘Journey into Space’, and when TV started becoming the broadcast medium of choice, with ‘Quatermass’. All quality stuff, but then there was a bit of a gap until 1963 and ‘Dr Who’. How to satisfy the cravings?

Well, there were the Saturday morning matinees at the local flea-pit, the ‘tanner rush’ as it was known, for the weekly dose of Buster Crabbe as Flash Gordon. You could see the wires holding the model space-ships up, and the smoke from the rocket-ship engines always rose vertically, even in the depths of space, but who the hell cared?
Next Monday in the playground you too could be a Clayman.

Next step, comics. The Eagle (more Dan Dare) and then there were those oh so rare and coveted imports from the US. Then books. Those started with a Christmas present – ‘Death of Metal’ by Donald Suddaby (wish I still had it, but it fell apart decades ago). With strictly limited pocket-money real hardbacked books were beyond my means, but at the local market there was a stall that sold the trashiest second- hand SF paperbacks you ever did see. I loved it. Covers plastered with panicking girls in brass brassieres and everybody wearing goldfish bowls. The local library also helped fill the gaps with (among others) those wonderful old Bleiler & Dickty short story collections. Grabbed every one I could as soon as it appeared on the shelves, ‘cos with a bit of luck there might be an Eric Frank Russell story in there.

Of course as you age and cash isn’t so tight, discrimination kicks in. (It’s either that or the fact that brass brassieres on covers went out of fashion, though the reaction to Carrie Fisher as a chained Princess Leia showed that there’s an eager market for this stuff out there. Yummy!) So, it was time to switch to Penguin SF, the Gollancz SF yellow-jackets and the more sophisticated stuff.

Then in 1981 I inadvertently went sort-of cold turkey on SF. Working out in Saudi for 9 years, and back then there was no SF available out there. That’s not why I went of course, but it was one of the consequences. Worse, I’d cleared my bookcases of all fiction prior to storage for the rest before I went. Wish I hadn’t. Impossible to replace some of those books, at least for a price I can afford.

Back home in 1990, the cravings still persist, and 20 minutes away is a place of pilgrimage – Rog Peyton’s Andromeda bookshop. Oh, bliss. All those lovely imports – Vernor Vinge, David Weber, Greg Bear, Gibson, plus the new generation of UK authors when they came along – Reynolds, Stross, Morgan, Stephenson and that Asher feller. Shelves looking healthy again now, about 1500 SF titles, half of them hardback. So I’m main-lining again.

One thing, when you accumulate a lot of books you need to add them onto your contents insurance. Replacement would be bloody expensive, just work it out. But – and this is the good bit – you’ll probably be asked to value them (they like titles worth over about £50 to be listed) and that’s when you find that a volume you bought for the cover price 20 years ago is now worth a bomb. How nice. Gives you a really fine glow. Signed, dated 1st/1st ‘Revelation Space’? signed 1st/1st ‘Altered Carbon’? 1st/1st Touchstone ed. of ‘The Prestige’? Add a few more and your bookshelves are more valuable than your furnishings. Not just the new books you bought, either. Try pricing a VG+/VG+ Compton Russell hardback of Niven’s ‘Protector’, it’s slightly more than the 69p I paid in Oxfam. Rarer than hen’s teeth; rarer even than ‘Mason’s Rats’. Do I have a copy of ‘Rats’? Erm… yes, got one from an Amazon re-seller last month. Cost me a tenner – but what the hell, it’s only money.

No photos, I’m afraid. As a tech fan I’m a disgrace. No camera, no mobile phone, not even a TV. I spend so much time lost in books, you see.

District 9

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So I finally got round to watching District 9 last night. I did enjoy it, but with reservations. Yes, the way of presenting the story with news clips, segments from interviews and CCTV shots was interesting, but jarring at first – took a little getting used to. The aliens themselves were okay, but really, I’ve yet to see truly alien aliens anywhere other than the film of that name (and even they were a bit too anthropomorphic).
Some usual Hollywood tropes and issues here. Why did the alien spaceship choose to park over Johannesburg? Because characters speaking with an Afrikaans accent is sure to raise the spectre of racism, which was rather unsubtle. Admittedly Blomkamp was brave giving the ‘Nigerians’ such a bad guy role. And of course, the arch bad guys role has to be taken by the big corporation. Now where have I seen that before? Oh yeah, Avatar, all the Alien films, Blade Runner, Terminator (initially) – in fact, how often is it not the big evil corporation that’s ultimately to blame?
We had here a spin on the idea of giving beads to the natives in exchange for something more valuable, but that the beads were cans of cat-food and the natives were aliens just transported from a starship I found plain silly. Why were they starving? Here we have a race capable of zipping across the light-years in their starship, their whole technology based on biotech, yet they are incapable of feeding themselves?
I have to wonder how these aliens, starving and dying aboard their spaceship, were transported to the ground, without anyone noticing a large number of big fuck-off Men in Black guns, along with an enormous alien military exoskeleton. I also have to wonder why the alien spaceship, hanging in the sky on some sort of antigravity and empty of the prawns themselves, wasn’t crawling with reverse engineering experts, scientists, in fact some massive research effort. And I also have to wonder why the shuttle dropped to the ground and was concealed; why it didn’t stay where it was. Starvation again? So what were the father and son prawn going to eat during their at least a year and half journey back home? Maybe a scene was cut showing the shuttle packed with cans of cat food.     

Suffice to say that we have some great scenes here – the action scenes are particularly good – but the whole, if you just think about it for a little while, doesn’t stand up to inspection.

The Technician.

Posted on by Neal Asher

Okay, I’ve gone and done it now – I’ve emailed The Technician to Macmillan. There is a point I often reach when checking through and editing where I wonder if I’m beginning to make changes simply because I’m bored with reading it for the nth time. I know that there will be mistakes in the book that I’ve missed, but finding them becomes an increasingly difficult chore as I read the words that are in my head, rather than the ones on the screen.

Time to sit back now, take a breath, and start looking at the the next one.

Incidentally, more questions for the next video clip please, but no more: “When are we going to see so and so again?” or “What’s next?” I’ve already covered that The Technician comes out next August, The Departure comes out the year after and meanwhile I’ll be writing the series of books that come after the latter.

The Technician.

Posted on by Neal Asher

I’ve just written a synopsis of the book, which always helps to get it clearer in my mind and enables me to identify any faults in the plotting. My usual move at this point would be to carry on reading it through, back and forth, editing, until sick of it, then put it to one side and get on with something else. I would then print it out a month or two later and cast a fresher eye over it. Also, reading from a typescript rather than a screen also enables me to pick up on any problems. However, this is due to be published in August, so I need to send it to Macmillan soon. The fresh eye re-read will have to wait until after scary pencil time.

New Moon — Stephenie Meyer

Posted on by Neal Asher

I have my fingers in my ears ready for the howls of derision. Very much enjoyed this book and hope she can keep the story telling and bring it to a satisfactory conclusion at the end of the series – I’ve got Eclipse and I’ll get the one after when it’s out in paperback. These books are also very successful and selling well so I want to know why. Apart from their targeted demographic, they have exactly the same quality as the Harry Potter books, which I also enjoyed: transparency. The author isn’t getting in the way of the story. Of course these won’t make it to many people’s top tens – I don’t mean the ‘what I really enjoyed reading’ top tens, but the ‘what I want people to think I enjoy reading’ top tens. 

Who Reads My Books? Paul Schofield.

Posted on by Neal Asher

Hi, my name’s Paul Schofield and I’m 46. I’ve been  married, to Gill, for the past 20 years. I’ve lived on the Fylde Coast in Lancashire for all my life. We have no kids. We do have three boisterous cats; two Siamese and a tabby.

We love America and spend as much time there as we can. New York and Vegas are our current favourites. I’ve enclosed a picture of the wife taken in Quark’s Bar in the Hilton Las Vegas at The Experience Tour. He did offer me 3 bars of gold pressed latinum for her, but how could I accept? Have you seen the price of gold these days? Doh!

I’ve been a big fan of Sci-Fi since reading the Day of The Triffids and The Tripods at school. I’m a big fan of Arthur C Clarke, Greg Bear, Stephen Baxter, Peter Hamilton and Greg Bear, among many others.

I work for Jobcentre Plus, in a Contact Centre, in Blackpool. It was once the home of ERNIE, the Premium Bonds number generator. I’ve worked for The Man for the last 29 years, and probably will for the next 29 too. It pays the bills…and that’s really all I can say about it. God that’s depressing!

Last March I had a second heart attack and spent 3 months at home recovering. I discovered Neal’s book Gridlinked on Amazon one day, ordered it and couldn’t put it down. I quickly ordered the other Cormac books in the series and they got me through my rehabilitation, and saved me from daytime TV!