Author: Neal Asher

5 Desert Island Reads – Andy Oliver

Posted on by Neal Asher

Here are another five desert island reads (once again demonstrating that my fans can’t count) for you to pore over and discuss whilst I bugger off down to Hastings for a few days to eat fish and chips and drink red wine.

Hi Neal,

Here are my desert island books. Sorry for the poor quality photo – was taken on my phone as I cannot find our camera, and also for for my dog’s ass – he would not move out the way!

Like others have found I really struggled to cut the list down so I also have cheated slightly. Rendezvous with Rama & The Stars My Destination are both quite small you see – so I figured that they would only take up the room of one larger book (self justification, self justification).

I walked along my shelves and could easily have doubled the number I ended up with, but I made a deliberate choice to not have books others have chosen (with one exception, more on that later), so there are no Asher, Banks or Baxter, however the choices for those would have been the Skinner (first Asher book I read and look where that got me 😉 ), Banks would have been possibly Player of Games, but that would have been a difficult choice, and for Baxter well, god knows. As someone mentioned – he turns his hand at everything and is pretty damn good at it all!!

So, onto my choices:

Rendezvous with Rama (and the follow up Rama books too) – Arther C Clarke – 2001 may be a seminal work and it truly is a good book but the Rama sequence is an epic journey of a story. I this when I was about 17 ro 18, and it has shaped my reading ever since, I very quickly had to read the following trilogy of Rama books. I was always drawn to SF, but I think this book sealed the deal.

The story follows an alien cylinder which enters the solar system so we send an crew to find out what it is. We follow the crew through there exploration and slow understanding of the vessel only to be left wanting more at the end. Then followed a series (3 more) of books which take you onto a universal scale tour finally exploring the true meaning of our place in the universe.

Epic.

The stars my destination (Tiger Tiger) – Alfred Bester – my only double of someone else (I think), but I had to have this here. I read this in one night, I was just lost in the story. The story of Gully Foyle is intense and dramatic. Revenge and murder are both beautifully shown in the story. Our protagonist develops from a feckless nobody into a one man killing machine with high intelligence and, more than a desire, a necessity, to succeed in his mission.

The Descent – I read this before the movie came out, again when I was 19 or 20. Its the story of an underground world of ‘monsters’ who became more advanced than us, but then lost the skills and smarts (or just stopped learning) while we on the surface kept on expanding. If I remember correctly a group of explorers go wandering, get into trouble, then it escalates with the army becoming involved. There is war, massive scale death, ambushes and deception.

Hmm, haven’t read it in quite a while so need to re read it – I’m struggling to remember the finer details of the story, but it made enough of an impression for me to choose it here.

Altered Carbon – the first of Richard Morgans Kovac’s trilogy, and also Morgans first novel. Its a fast paced blitz through a short period of Kovacs life. He is a former Envoy – a special forces solider – who has been forcible ‘hired’ by a man who is part of the long lived ‘Meths’ (Methuselah), This man was killed but everyone has a cortical stack which records the essence of the person. This can be backed (if you have the money) up so Bancroft only lost 24 hrs – now he wants to know why.

The only way to truly kill people is to blow out the stack and hope they don’t have a backup somewhere.

Inverted World – Christopher Priest, I had not read any Priest stuff before but this definitely makes me want to (he also wrote the Prestige which was a film with Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman). The story here follows a city which travels along tracks to stay ahead of time. The residents of the city have to build the tracks ahead of them, and rip them up from behind. Along the way they encounter ‘natives’ from outside the city who the occasionally trade with. Often the trade involved the ‘loan’ of women who are used for breeding to ensure the city’s population remains topped up.

The story follows one man growing up and becoming an explorer who helps to produce the route that the city must take. These explorers age artificially quickly, due to the nature of the world. Big revelations and a fantastic slow reveal twist make this a brilliant read.

Yellow Blue Tibia – Adam Roberts. This is an excellent, comedic tale that starts with Stalin calling together a (dozen perhaps) SF authors from across Russia to write a story about alien invasion and domestic terror. This is to be used to replace the waning threat of America so that Stalin can keep the Russian citizens under control.

Quite quickly the group is disbanded and told to forget everything they have thought of ‘or else!’

Years later the story they wrote appears to be coming true. The story is excellently written with some fantastic laugh out loud sections, (the torture section where our protagonist turns the questions around on his questioner – I had to read twice because I kept laughing!), but its not all jokes. There is a very good twisting story that keeps moving from start to end.

Definitely recommended – as is ‘Dragon with a girl Tattoo’, a recent Roberts book parodying a certain Swedish novel that has recently been making waves!

What’s left…

Oh, that’s it – I’ve finished my list!! Doh

I can certainly recommend all the above for people to read. Hope that above has made good reading.

Cheers

Andy (Osh on the comments section occasionally)

Bugger – just remembered about Joe Haldeman – Peace and War (forever war series), another I would happily have on my island, but thankfully that’s been covered by someone else!

Oh – and any spelling mistakes have obviously occurred while Neal put this on his blog as opposed to during my typing!! Honests…

Norman Spinrad

Posted on by Neal Asher

Seems Norman Spinrad is dipping his toes in the ebook market. I smell revolution in the air.

I’ve made backlist novel titles and even a couple of original collections available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble as ebooks, and so am familiar with the deal and its numbers. You can set your own prices, but they can’t be lower than $2.99. That’s not a high price for a novelette, about the cost of two lousy beers or one good one in the store. And the writer gets 70%. Try to get a royalty rate like that with a traditional paperbound publisher!

Disaster.

Posted on by Neal Asher

I laughed uproariously last night. Apparently, according to a BBC reporter, the Fukushima ‘disaster’ is in danger of overshadowing the surrounding tsunami disaster. Um, hey Mr BBC reporter, don’t you think you might have had something to do with that?

Define disaster. Let’s see, 10,000+ people killed, whole towns wiped out, 10s of thousands made homeless, and now running out of food and water as opposed to, say, nuclear plants badly damaged and maybe having to be sealed in concrete, a handful of workers injured, and one killed in a crane accident.

Of course, no problem now. The imposition of a no-fly zone over Libya has apparently suspended the Japanese nuclear holocaust.

Mindgames: Fool's Mate

Posted on by Neal Asher
Prior to 1990 and maybe a few years afterwards, before my hair started to turn grey and before I becamesuch a cynic, I was a member of an ‘SF folio’ – a postal workshop. This consisted of a group of writers scattered about the country mailing each other their work for criticism. The postal folio contained a list of addresses, when I received it I inserted a chapter, or a short story or some other piece of writing, wrote criticisms of each other piece in the folio, then posted it on to the next person on the list. By the time it came back to me I had received criticisms of my piece from every other writer. I then took out my previous piece of work and inserted my next, and so the process continued.

Note: I can’t remember all the names of the authors in that folio, but do know that one of them was a guy called Conrad Williams, who you might be familiar with. Also, for those wannabe writers reading this, you can now find Internet versions of the above.

I wrote a novella during this called ‘To Die But Once’ and also began to have a smattering of successes in the small presses – for which payment was usually just a free copy of the magazine concerned – and I was always searching for new markets. I used to read ‘Writing Magazine’ and in there I found out about a new publishing company called Club 199 who were looking for novellas of about 40,000 words for which they gave a flat payment of £1000. I duly scrubbed up the aforementioned novella and sent it off. When I received the phone call telling me my piece had been accepted, I fell on the floor. Wow! I was being paid real money for my work!

Trying to be professional I then immediately went on to write another 40,000 word novella for the same market. This was The Parasite. Meanwhile Gordon McGregor’s Club 199 decided on a better title for ‘To Die But Once’ and changed the title to ‘Mindgames: Fool’s Mate’. It was published, I got my money, and then a short while afterwards Club 199 went skint. Having by then managed to make a small name for myself in the small presses I got The Parasite published with Tanjen, followed that with The Engineer and continued my climb towards Macmillan. I am, I think it’s safe to say, a ‘time served’ writer.

With this Kindle route to publication now available I’m once again going through ‘Fool’s Mate’. There’s a fair bit of work to do since the file is one that I converted from Wordstar on a 5.25 inch floppy disc – perhaps both of these are things that some of you have never even used. When I first converted it I had to employ find-and-replace to change words that had become hieroglyphs back into words again. Now I have to sort out formatting that’s all over the place, and of course plenty of crappy English. The novella is stunningly naïve, but fun. I’m not going to hammer it too much and when it’s ready it’ll be another one for Kindle publication.

Fukushima Again

Posted on by Neal Asher

But this time with a science fiction connecton swiped directly from The Next Big Future, which is an excellent site. Here is part of Jerry Pournelle’s take on the Fukushima thing:

The radiation plume of 400 milliseiverts is from a small area of certainly no more than 100 square meters. If we assume that the Fukushima Daiichi reactors collectively manage a plume the size of a square kilometer, then to get comparable numbers we need to multiply the 400/hour by (24 x 365) to get a year’s worth. Assume uniform distribution and divide by 500 million (global distribution). That comes out to .007 milliseiverts / year. I know of no scenario in which the Japanese reactors could sustain an emission rate of 400 milliseiverts per hour for a week, much less for a year, nor how there could they generate radioactive fallout uniformly over a square kilometer.

I am told that I am off in my calculations above, but off in the correct direction, which is to say the levels are too large. That’s unfortunate in that I don’t like to be wrong, but it also emphasizes my point, which is that the absolute worst case has no more global effect than did an event that many weren’t even aware of, and which didn’t have any great global effect.

The important lesson from Japan is that we took obsolete reactors with old designs and safety features, and subjected them to a 9.0 quake and a very large tsunami, and the damage to the planet is an unfortunate but hardly decisive event.

Go read the whole thing.

Then we have this:

Energy Source Death Rate (deaths per TWh)
Coal – world average 161 (26% of world energy, 50% of electricity)
Coal – China 278
Coal – USA 15
Oil 36 (36% of world energy)
Natural Gas 4 (21% of world energy)
Biofuel/Biomass 12
Peat 12
Solar (rooftop) 0.44 (less than 0.1% of world energy)
Wind 0.15 (less than 1% of world energy)
Hydro 0.10 (europe death rate, 2.2% of world energy)
Hydro – world including Banqiao) 1.4 (about 2500 TWh/yr and 171,000 Banqiao dead)
Nuclear 0.04 (5.9% of world energy)

And more here at The Register.

I really think there should a ‘cry wolf’ award for TV reporters.

5 Desert Island Reads — Phil Middleton

Posted on by Neal Asher

Hello Neal,

Well, that was a challenge and if you give me another ten minutes I’ll change them all again.

One thing I have now noticed is that most of the books I read these days are multiple volume stories. There are many authors I could include, ASHER, Hamilton, Clark, Reynolds, Banks but it’s always nice to have some variation. Of course if I washed up on a desert island with my luck the only other survivor would be the crate of Mills and Boon!

Jack the Bodiless by Julian May. After borrowing The Saga of the Exiles from a friend and thoroughly enjoying it I moved on to this, The Galactic Milieu series. Mankind’s telepathic abilities awake and while they argue and fight among themselves the rest of the galaxy watches, for a while anyway. I just liked the concept and as most of the story was set in modern times you can relate to it a little more. Unfortunately Mays later books did nothing for me.

Illium by Dan Simmons. Now here’s an author that can knock out a mean book. Dan, as already mentioned by Rob Darby, is probably best known for The Hyperion books, which I have read, but my preference is for Illium/Olympus. The siege of Troy mixed with sentient robots and strange goings-on on planet earth, what more could you ask for. Dan is one of these authors who can turn his hand to anything it appears; SF, detectives, horror.

Evolution by Stephen Baxter. Where does this man get his ideas from? Mammoths, alternate history, “human” civilizations existing at the micron size, to name but a few. I have yet to find a Baxter book I didn’t enjoy. I would have to place him as my second favourite author…………..can you guess who’s first?

The Gap into Conflict by Stephen Donaldson. This, of course, represents the whole Gap series. Having read “The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant” and being very impressed by a fantasy that didn’t obviously rip off the Lord of the Rings I think Donaldson made an exceptional debut in scfi. He has since chosen to revisit Thomas Covenant but hopefully he may write some more scfi in the future.

The Silkie by A E Van Vogt. This I’ve had for a long time so it must have something going for it. If I remember correctly it’s about genetically modified humans. I don’t know if I’ve read any more of his books and certainly can’t name any. This obviously needs more investigation

So there you go, hardest bit of work I’ve done all week!

Sláinte

Best regards

Phil Middleton
Purchasing and Logistics Manager

Parasite Blurb

Posted on by Neal Asher

Thanks Stu for the slightly altered cover here (which needs a bit sliced off the top). Will get round to a contents list at some point.

The Parasite on Kindle.

After mining complex ices deep in the Solar System, Jack Smith is concerned about his profit margin, but is it him who doesn’t want to face quarantine or something squirming inside him? The Cryon Corporation Director, Geoffry Haven, is also concerned about the bottom line and might consider Jack an expense he can no longer afford, though perhaps suitable for a starring role in a snuff movie. Meanwhile, the human and unhuman agents of World Health must investigate. Perhaps it’s time to deploy vat-grown killers and an anti-photon weapon, because the parasite is coming to Earth, and it’s hungry.

The Parasite was first published by Tanjen Ltd as an illustrated novella back in 1996. Tanjen closed down a number of years later and since then the novella has been difficult if not impossible to obtain. There are copies out there, but checking recently I haven’t seen one for below $50.00, which is a hell of a lot for something only 130 pages long and perhaps only for completists. I’ve edited it again, though I haven’t been too heavy-handed since I didn’t want to deliver something that had completely ceased to be the original. This is my first attempt at self-publishing through Amazon Kindle. I hope you all enjoy it!
– Neal Asher

“Once again, Neal Asher gives his reader a meal of such exquisite taste that you’re left like Oliver, desiring more.” – Authortrek

Fukushima Hysteria

Posted on by Neal Asher

I am getting heartily sick of some of the reporting on the nuclear reactor thing going on in Japan. Trying to wean facts from hyperbole and hysteria is getting very difficult. A recent news report I watched started off with groups of Japanese crying then segued into a shot of another group of them standing about in masks, in the rain, holding up umbrellas. Apparently the first group of people were very upset about what was happening with the reactors, whilst the people in the second group were protecting themselves from potential fall-out by donning masks and putting up umbrellas.

Of course the reporter concerned did not state this outright but rather used mealy-mouthed language to imply it. Now, there’s been an earthquake, a tsunami, thousands of people have lost their homes, thousands have lost their lives, thousands have lost relatives … could this be the reason some are crying? Also, did you notice the early reports about all this from Tokyo? Even during the earthquake people were wandering about with paper masks on their faces. Now this strikes me as odd and perhaps the Japanese have been far to enamoured with Michael Jackson, but they were wearing masks before anyone even mentioned those scary words ‘radiation’ and ‘melt-down’. And, just a thought here, could they have had umbrellas up because it was raining?

Upwards of ten thousand people have been killed and I suspect that when the final figures comes in it is going to be multiples of that. Tens of thousands are homeless, without water and power, struggling to get enough to eat, might at any moment be hit by another tsunami, yet the TV news focus is moving away from that. Now we have chest-beating reporters telling us about reactor buildings exploding and coming apart just like they are designed to, about ‘melt-down’ in reactors built to contain it, about a hysteria-driven safe evacuation of people probably way beyond what is necessary.

But yes, everything that is happening with these reactors is news, but really there should be more sense of proportion. The Fukushima nuclear power station ‘disaster’ is serious, but campared to everything else all around it, it’s like a few shell bursts amidst the Somme.

If you want a real perspective on this go here, and read the updates. And let me finish with a quote from the same source:

The lesson so far: Japan suffered an earthquake and tsunami of unprecedented proportion that has caused unbelievable damage to every part of their infrastructure, and death of very large numbers of people. The media have chosen to report the damage to a nuclear plant which was, and still is, unlikely to harm anyone. We won’t know for sure, of course, until the last measure to assure cooling is put in place, but that’s the likely outcome. You’d never know it from the parade of interested anti-nuclear activists identified as “nuclear experts” on TV.