Category: Articles

Jupiter War – Publishers Weekly Review

Posted on by Neal Asher
This just in from Skyhorse Publishing. I haven’t seen the full review but there’s an excerpt below.

This dizzying and unusually thoughtful space opera, which concludes the trilogy begun in The Departure and Zero Point, shows the tyrannical forces of Earth trying to stop a lone genius from fleeing the solar system. Serene Galahad, Earth’s psychotic dictator, is willing to kill most of the “human scum” and genetically alter the rest in order to mend the damage of overpopulation. Alan Saul has been mechanically augmented until he is much more than human, and he now questions whether preserving the humans aboard his stolen space station is worth the bother. These two very clever opponents, armed with mind-stretching super technology, feint and parry as they struggle for supremacy. Mordant commentary interspersed throughout the action reminds readers to observe how the different definitions of “humanity” influence the conflict and the question of who—if anyone—is in the right. The result is a challenging, extremely satisfying read.(May)

Full of Illusions

Posted on by Neal Asher
On June 3rd of last year there was only this post that might have given anyone a hint that something was wrong:
Well, how odd that my last post concerned health systems. So, without going into personal detail, what do you think of the likelihood of this happening on the NHS: getting to see a doctor, without appointment, in quarter of an hour; less than an hour later getting blood and urine taken for testing at a microbiology lab; then an ultrasound scan shortly after that, but only when your bladder is full enough – being sent away by the technician to drink beer and water; then being sent by the technician to a specialist doctor for further check-ups and another scan (though having to wait for half an hour because the doctor was busy); and the next day – at midday – getting an MRI scan; and, in every case, being greeted by the professional concerned with, “Yes, I know who you are.” Actually, I wonder if this would even be possible in England if you went private. Quite a lot of this is to do with numbers of people.

Of course this was about Caroline who, though she felt fine at the time, had noticed some blood appearing where it hadn’t since before her (early) menopause. I wrote some more for this blog, but she didn’t want me to post stuff about her and, as things steadily went from bad to worse I just didn’t write about it any more. Writing is often cathartic. In this case it just wasn’t.

But why the title of this blog post? Well, here’s one of those unpublished posts from a week after the one above.


June 10th

Well, it’s been a traumatic week, hence the lateness of this blog entry. The hospital stuff I related last Monday concerned Caroline who, it turns out, has a cluster of growths eleven-and-a-half centimetres across in one of her ovaries. The internet being the perfect hunting ground for the hypochondriac, in that it is a place where you can relate any set of symptoms to some lethal malady, we were having fun looking at ovarian cancer. If she had that her chances were not much different to those of my brother Martin i.e. she could survive for five years, with treatment, but it wouldn’t be life. However, there are no growths outside of her ovary, her lymphatic system is showing no signs of anything nasty and it seems that these growths are benign. That being said they have to go.
A number of years ago we would have gone running back to England but now we know better. If we went back it seems likely that months of hospital and doctor visits would ensue, with lengthy waits between each, followed by another lengthy wait for an operation. Screw that – we’re going private here. What else are savings for if not for something like this? The gynaecologist is booking Caroline into a private clinic in Iraklion for an operation within the next ten days. Hopefully a result of that will be that she’ll lose all those twinges and back-aches, and regain her waistline – much to the irritation of many women here who already think she’s far too slim.
…
We were wrong about the tumours being benign, wrong about the survival time, wrong about staying in Crete for treatment, wrong about the kind of cancer it turned out to be … in fact it was from this point onwards that our illusions were steadily destroyed – the ground cut from underneath us week after week. But yes, she did lose her large belly after the oophorectomy and hysterectomy she had here in England and, of course, there’s nothing quite so slimming as something called cachexia.   

The Engineer ReConditioned

Posted on by Neal Asher
So, anyway, someone complained on Twitter that this short story collection The Engineer ReConditioned wasn’t available as an ebook. I got onto John Betancourt at Wildside Press who publish this and pushed to have it done. He mulled over the idea of a bit of a relaunch whereupon I suggested he get Jon Sullivan in to do the cover picture. Here then is the result:

Mysterious aliens … ruthless terrorists … androids with attitude … genetic manipulation … punch-ups with lasers … giant spaceships … what more could you want? This great collection of 10 short stories by the author of Gridlinked, The Skinner, In the Line of Polity, and many more is a great read!

Note: The Engineer ReConditioned is a revamp plus some additional stories of the book below, which means it contains stuff a minimum of 16 years old.
Oh, and if you can find copies of this, I’ve seen them going for $125 on Ebay.

The Broken Empire Trilogy – Mark Lawrence

Posted on by Neal Asher
I had a brief exchange on Twitter about me writing episodes of Dr Who, to which my reply was something along the lines of, ‘The Doctor would be dead a few seconds after his first encounter with a Dalek’. I find it very annoying when a person or a thing is made out to be dangerous and doesn’t live up to expectations … which, in a rambling roundabout way brings me to Jorg Ancrath in Mark Lawrence’s trilogy.
  

Jorg is a ruthless, highly capable and vicious character who will let nothing stand in his path. Great, I would have thought if someone had told me that before I read the books, and then I would have been expecting disappointments. You see I’ve heard it all before. I’ve come across these ‘ruthless, vicious, unstoppable’ characters before and every time they never quite measure up. Jorg Ancrath does.

On the whole I’ve had a ball with these three books, with their magic and fantasy sitting on a bedrock of science fiction. There’s some quite beautiful writing here, especially when the pauses between storms are described. There are moments of utter horror that even made me wince, relentless plot with some nice convolutions, and plenty of surprises. I’ll say no more than this – I don’t need to.

These are a worthy addition to my book collection. Recommended.

Writing Update

Posted on by Neal Asher
On my last writing update I prefaced the post with an apology for my absence and here must do so again. I’ve got some horrible stuff going on in my life at the moment that’s put me severely out of kilter, and I can’t say much more about it than that. These particularly shitty events are also why you won’t be seeing a video clip from me answering your questions for … well, until I’m ready.
So back to the writing. The above has slowed me down quite a bit but I have now managed to work my way backward through all the Penny Royal books. To re-iterate: I read a book backwards a paragraph at a time (not a word at a time!) so I don’t get involved in the story and am more likely to pick up errors (and it’s incredibly boring). While doing this I also made 26 notes on stuff I needed to go back to. I’m now working my way through those.
And now, as in that other ‘writing update’ I’m going to insert picture that has nothing to do with the subject of the post. Here is an image from the new Jon Sullivan cover for The Engineer ReConditioned. A cover so good, incidentally, that the publisher Jon Betancourt of Wildside Press, might be issuing a special trade paperback to celebrate it.
Each note on the Penny Royal books has required me following plot threads that have sometimes extended across all three books, or sometimes across the three books just focusing on one item. Take for example note 2: Consistency in the kind of space suits they are wearing. I’ve had to make sure my characters are wearing the right suits, whether they are ones with collapsible helmets or ones that can be removed, visors that slide into the helmets or down into the neck rings, shimmershield visors, suits that are motorised or not etc. Other notes have required me writing additional sections. The note I’ve been working on today has required me writing one additional section concerning the theft of three runcibles, extending a couple of other sections, and now going through the rest of the books to make things match up with what has happened in the new stuff.   
Once I’ve got all these notes sorted out I then have to get onto the editorial notes that Bella Pagan has given me for the first book. I’ve no doubt that when I get into that it will create further work in the ensuing books! It’s been an interesting experience writing the books as a bloc like this and it makes me wonder how the hell the Cormac series managed to mesh together so well.
Now onto the names of things: I think we have now settled on the series being called Transformations I, II & III. The first book will (don’t hold me to this) be called Dark Intelligence … beyond that things are still a little up in the air. Plenty of time to get that sorted out.