Oh dear, it seems we have a serial killer getting up to speed in Ipswich, which is about a three-quarter-hour drive up the A12 from where we live. Last weekend the discovery of two corpses warranted a couple of column inches in the papers about three pages in, now that the killer has bumped off five prostitutes in ten days the media is going into a feeding frenzy. I note that the BBC News anchorman is now at the scene and wonder if the higher-ups in that organization decided to send him, or if he threw his weight around to be in at the kill, so to speak.
One annoying aspect of this is the reporters going on at the police about guaranteeing people’s safety and speculating on how it’s possible for this killer to grab women from ‘under their noses’. Are they too stupid to realise that tens of thousands of cops in the area will not guarantee absolute safety? And that for a lot of the prostitutes there, getting cash for their next drug fix is more important than personal safety, and that lots of police in the area will rather cramp their style so they’ll try to avoid them to get hold of their next customer? The area where the latest two bodies were discovered (Nacton) is one I know. A friend and workmate of mine used to live up there and I used to visit him. I wonder how he would have been feeling if he still lived there: single bloke living alone in his own house. Of course it’s just as likely that the killer is married with kids, like the Yorkshire Ripper (Caroline and I had a bet on how quickly that name would be mentioned. It was mentioned almost immediately.), and right now some wife is maybe thinking, ‘You never said where you were last night, I thought you were having an affair and now I wonder…’ Another theory posited by someone we know is that there isn’t one killer, that this is the result of some Kosovan gang trying to take control of the prostitution racket. Interestingly, when talking about the murders the police are quite meticulous about saying, ‘person or persons’.
Author: Neal Asher
Waffling.
Mmm, perhaps I need to do a little less ranting here, not to stop pissing people off, but to keep myself sane. Really, if you look for it, there’s enough in the media every day to get one frothing at the mouth. Perhaps the anger is rather like depression: it’s there first and then looks around for an excuse to exist. Nice thoughts. I’m closing on 50,000 words of Line War and maybe I should deliver an early RSI warning: I think this is going to be a big one. I keep going in to writing say section of the story and come out the other side of it having not quite got there. Plenty of drama, but the aim I set out to achieve each time seems to take two sections. Also, at 50,000 words (which for me is usually more than a third of a book) the war itself has hardly got past the digging of trenches stage. I mean … I’ve only blown up one world for goodness sake and the death toll hasn’t moved into eight figures yet. A hundred edited pages of Hilldiggers are behind me and more are on the way. I’ve had two reader’s reports on it and on the whole they’re good. Sales are looking good too. The hardback sales of Polity Agent are over half again those of Voyage of the Sable Keech, but then I’m finding that I’m getting more readers coming back for more in the Cormac sequence than I am with stuff set on Spatterjay, which was rather surprising. What else? My weight hovers at about 12 stone, despite the fact that we’ve nearly polished off a barrel of homemade stout (this weekend I’ll be making five gallons of bitter), fitness seems good, despite the cigarettes and, really, I seem to be on top of everything. I just wish I had another set of hands and another brain to keep up with demand … note to those wannabes out there, if you really are aiming for publication success and not just pissing around, produce loads of stuff, loads, because if you do get there, it’ll all soon go.
Suffer the Children.
You know, it is unfortunate and horrible when a child is ill. It is unfortunate and horrible when anyone is ill. But why oh why are all sick children always ‘brave’? Brave: Having or displaying courage, resolution, or daring; not cowardly or timid. You act bravely or you act cowardly. Bravery is not bravery unless there is the option available to be cowardly – there’s an element of choice. A child who has had some awful illness resulting in numerous operations and perhaps the removal of a limb or two, doesn’t really have very much choice in the matter, and probably doesn’t have much of a clue about what is going on anyway. The doctor doesn’t go to the child and say, “Well, that leg is going to have to come off,” and the child doesn’t reply, “Go ahead doctor, I’ll hold the tourniquet and bite on this stick while you saw.” This perpetual pathetic misuse of the word ‘brave’ devalues it (just like the use of the word ‘hero’ to describe a football player). Now, perhaps the mother and father will be able to say that their child has displayed courage throughout the trauma, and maybe that will be true despite the usual parental bias. Perhaps the hospital staff will have some say in this. But am I cynical in assuming that in our ‘inclusive equality-driven society’ that the kid who goes screaming and whining to the hospital is going to get the same ‘bravery’ award as the one who showed resolution and courage?
NHS Come Dancing.
Oh bloody hell. It now seems the porkers of Britain will be able to get dance lessons on the NHS. After spending £2.5 million on ‘Local Exercise Action Pilot’ schemes, this sort of crap is what our Public Health Minister Caroline Flint has come up with. Well, excuse me, people are porky because they eat too much of the wrong food and don’t exercise enough. You didn’t need to spend £2.5 million to find that out or to find out what couch potatoes need to do to be more healthy. And spending money on giving these people dance lessons when others are dying in this country because there isn’t enough money to pay for the drugs they need (though of course this doesn’t apply to Scotland and Wales) is a travesty!
MP's Pay Rise.
Every now and again I’ll read something, blink, read it again, then listen for the theme music from The Twilight Zone playing in the background. I’d like to say that what I’ve just read beggars belief, but it doesn’t, it seems par for the course for the 646 twits in Parliament pretending to run this country. It’s just the normal ‘I’m sitting at the top of the heap so fuck you’ attitude of these lying, cheating, grasping, slobbering Orwellian swine.
These rancid turds claimed a total of £86,700,000 in expenses and office allowances last year, which averages £134,000 each. These 646 septic shitbags each cost us £726,000 a year for which they actually work (if it can be called that) for less than half a year. Their pay has risen by 37% since 1997. They get a £40,000 a year inflation-proof pension
AND NOW THEY WANT THEIR BASIC SALARY TO RISE FROM £60,277 BY 66% TO £100,000!!!
They are on £625 a day before expenses! With expenses they are on £1250! Will the expenses go down? Will they buggery. If they get their way these sodden lumps of fecal matter floating at the top of the parasitic public sector will be on £1500 a day – that’s just about the weekly minimum wage per hour!
Shit! Where is Guy Fawkes when we need him most!
Max Again
Prador Moon Reviews
Other than to say thank you very much every now and again I don’t normally make any reply to reviews. Having seen quite a few of them now I know that every time I come across something negative in one review I can point at a number of others that flatly contradict that negativity in every detail. However (you knew that was coming didn’t you), despite the many positive reviews out there, I am getting a little hacked off with the nature of some of the adverse responses to Prador Moon. It is, apparently a) Too short b) Too expensive c) Too simple.
Now, let me just point out that it is simple because the story … erm, let me think … because it is short? In its way this book is a bit of a reply to those other reviewers who claim my books are far too complex and convoluted (though that wasn’t the intention). It’s a straightforward story with a lot less plot threads than usual – something I’ve been aiming at more lately because my plot threads usually seem to proliferate during the writing of the first two thirds of a book and I then spend as much time extracting and discarding threads as I do writing the last third of the book. It’s short because that is what the publisher in this case requested. As to the price let me just say, “What’s that got to do with me?”
Authors have as much to do with the cover price of books as the inventor of sherbet dips has to do with what they sell for in the sweet shop. And as for the kind soul who put up a two star review on amazon.co.uk without even reading the book and because of ‘a’ and ‘b’ above … well, the page count is there and the price is there, you either buy it or you don’t, but you don’t put up a negative review of something you haven’t even read!
Another Translation.
Ah, the juggernaut rolls on: the Czech publisher Polaris have now made an offer for Brass Man, which they intend to publish in the next twelve months. Thus far they have published The Skinner and Gridlinked, with The Line of Polity next. The Skinner won the Salamander Award (the picture here is of the publisher collecting the award) given by the Czech Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror as the best SF book published there in 2004. This was out of a shortlist of Blood Music by Greg Bear, Chasm City by Alastair Reynolds, The Scar by China Mieville and A Deepness Upon the Sky by 
Vernor Vinge. What an excellent list! The following year Gridlinked appeared on the shortlist, but didn’t win. What’s really good about all this, of course, is that most of the foreign publishers who have taken my first books for translation, are now coming back for more. Other news: in a recent phonecall Jason Williams of Night Shade Books has expressed surprise and delight at the sales of Prador Moon. The first print run is all but gone and orders are still coming in. He also made a book club deal with it too. And it now seems likely that there’ll be a British edition of Prador Moon and a collection of Polity short stories including those published in Asimov’s, Interzone and elsewhere. I’m presently working through the editing of Hilldiggers, with Line War now at over 40,000 words sitting to one side. Also set to one side at the moment is a another book I’ve started for Night Shade Books, which tells the story of Cormac’s early years.
Misty
Peter Watts
Some while ago Tor US sent me an ARC of Peter Watts’ excellent book Blindsight, which I read almost in a state of shock because it was so good, and for which I wrote the blurb:
“Blindsight is excellent. It’s state-of-the-art science fiction: smart, dark and it grabs you by the throat from page one. Like a C J Cherryh book it makes you feel the danger of the hostile environment (or lack of one) out there. And it plays with some fascinating possibilities in human development, and some disconcerting ideas about human consciousness. What else can I say? Thanks for giving me the privilege of reading this.”
A short while after this I was checking a few things out on the net when I discovered Peter has an excellent website here http://www.rifters.com/index.htm — particularly worth checking out is his lecture on Vampire Domestication http://www.rifters.com/real/progress.htm To my delight I discovered that he already had four other SF books published, so I got chatting with him and arranged a books exchange. Subsequently I received signed copies of Starfish, Maelstrom, Behemoth B-Max and Behemoth Seppuku (The last two here are actually one book divided into two for the benefit of American book sellers – perhaps their staff have been suing for RSI damages caused by lifting any book of more than 110,000 words).
I’ve read all four books now and though I don’t think the last three are as good as Blindsight (which I have to say is the best SF book I have read in years), I definitely put them in a league ahead of most stuff out there. Really, if I hadn’t read Blindsight, Starfish would have been at the top of my best SF book list for the last few years, with the others a short distance behind it.
Why these books are not much more well-known and why they are not published in Britain is a complete mystery to me. Maybe, as some reviewers have opined, they’re too dark and cynical. Maybe they’re too intelligent. Whatever. I think they are far more deserving of plaudits than so many we’ve seen on the shortlists of various awards over very many years.