Category: Articles

Peter Watts Necrotizing

Posted on by Neal Asher

Peter Watts, author of the superb Blindsight and the pretty shit hot Starfish, Maelstrom and Behemoth, has NOT been having a good time. Last year he was getting roughed up by border police and now he has something called necrotizing fasciitis. Do not click on this link if you are squeamish. Seriously.

Best wishes to you Peter, and get someone to put a harpoon in that vicious fucking gremlin that keeps following you around.

His blog is here. Avoid the ‘Moving Pictures’ post if you want to enjoy your lunch.

And go and buy his books. You won’t regret it.

Before They Are Hanged — Joe Abercrombie

Posted on by Neal Asher

Okay, Joe Abercrombie has got me. I’ll keep buying his books so long as he keeps producing excellent tales like this. Before They Are Hanged is easy reading full of enjoyable characters that change in ways you like to see them change, throughout a stonking story. The subtext added by the torturer Glokta’s thoughts as he carries out his ‘duties’ raises a chuckle at such (understandable) cynicism. I enjoy Luthar’s climb out of naivety and Logen’s pragmatic wisdom, and I love every one of the other northern ‘named men’ who have already crept up into the region of legend in my mind: Black Dow, Dogman, Harding Grim, Threetrees and Tul Duru Thunderhead. Honestly, reading this book has made me realize that I didn’t go off fantasy over the last couple of decades, I just wasn’t getting hold of any of the good stuff.

This is the good stuff.

Incidentally, his blog is worth a look too.

My Hidden Shallows

Posted on by Neal Asher

Huan Tan put me onto a discussion about me over on this bulletin board. There are some nice things being said about my stuff there but also some of the usual ‘it’s not literature’ and ‘it’s not high-brow’ and ‘it’s a bit pulpy’. In a general sense I don’t particularly have a problem with these descriptions, since ‘literature’ and ‘high-brow’ are usually defined by literary snobs and ‘a bit pulpy’, from what I know about the pulps, is something of an accolade. However, I do get bugged by their condescension and that attitude of, ‘I enjoy reading them but don’t want to be seen reading them’.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not going to change any time soon. I don’t want one of you reading this to one day pick up one of my books, ready to relax into some sensawunda, weapons porn, weird monsters and high-tech violence, and end up scratching your head because I’ve decided to explore the deep social implications of cock-transplant technology – as seen by a miserable can’t-get-laid psychology student living in a garret.

But I do wonder if I’d started out claiming to write deeply meaningful socially relevant stuff about the effect of technology on identity, the meaning of death when its borders are blurred and the drawbacks of immortality, if the memes about me would have been different. Perhaps, for example, in interview and so forth, I should have focused on how with the Prador I was exploring the implications of a social structure based on utterly alien biology, rather than on their tendency to eat people and blow stuff up? Perhaps I should have pontificated about the subjective contraction of time in the mind of an immortal, rather than on how an old captain can rip off your head?

Now, removing my tongue from my cheek, I wonder if perhaps it is the case that if I fob people off with, ‘Nah, I’m just about the explosions, mate,’ many of them won’t explore my hidden shallows any further?

What do you think?

5 Desert Island Reads — Todd Sanders

Posted on by Neal Asher

First…curse you Neal Asher for limiting it to five books.

That out of the way I am subverting your rules slightly in order to pick ‘some’ of my most favourite books – ones I’d always want to have with me. Let’s pretend 9 is 5 in new math.

Crown of Infinity – John Faucette: For some reason I come back and back to this book. It has elements of Cordwainer Smith in it, early grand ‘today-style’ serious grunge space opera (echoes of Reynolds, Asher, Mieville and Banks within), with cybernetic human/machine/ship amalgams and a story of revenge that takes millennia. I do not know much about Faucette other than he is paired with a number of other authors in many of my Ace Doubles.

Stars My Destination – Alfred Bester: SF Grandmaster with good reason. This book currently seems in fad again with everyone calling ‘teleporting’ – ‘jaunting’. While based on a classic French novel – The Count of Monte Cristo – it is a fundamental building block to many later cyberpunk tropes. For me it is a guilty pleasure if I need a quick and bracing read.

Rynemonn – Terry Dowling: I quickly fell in love with the tales of Tom Tyson when i first found these stories collected in 4 books and a few anthologies. One part Cordwainer Smith, one part Moorcock, one part lowtechpunk, one part just damn fine literature. This is the ‘current’ final story collection in the series and collects many of my favorite stories, the last one of which “Sewing Whole Cloth”. I have read probably 20 times and, each time, I find the ending strikes me in a different way.

Use of Weapons – Iain M. Banks: As I look at the books I’ve picked I find most of them have a common theme of revenge and love. This is certainly no exception to that. It is my personal favorite Banks novel. I thought the ending stunning and it still moves me.

Time Enough For Love – Robert Heinlein: I’ve read all of Heinlein’s works over and over (and though I know he is currently out of favor for many of his views he is still and forever will be one of the founding fathers of SF). This book strikes me as him at the top of his game in the long novel form. I feel for Lazarus in this as he watches those he loves grow old around him. The chapter with him and his wife being held hostage by rapists and Lazarus’ subsequent solution to that dilemma is still exciting even though I know what will happen. This is one of the few books in my collection with a cracked spine and well-worn pages. And that is saying something for me.

The Confluence Trilogy – Paul McAuley: To me – a beautiful circular trilogy/bildungsroman about a boy growing to manhood and the mistakes he makes. McAuley had a wonderful mix of Ringworld style world building with a variety of cultures of different technology levels and biological types. Of special interest to me is that the 3 volumes are circular and end where they begin. I once read all 3 of these twice through and found the second immediate reading does change after you read all the books the first time and arrive at the circular point and begin again.

Last Legends of Earth – A.A. Attanasio: I think he remains little known as an author but I quite enjoy this book and have read it several times. It is the 4th in a series with massive overlapping of narratives in multiple instances of time and space. It has an Olaf Stapledon eon-spanning feel to it. Again another book of love and revenge and how the two intertwine.

Souls in the Great Machine – Sean McMullen: Australian air-punk (not even steampunk level tech allowed in this alternate Australian future) featuring living computers made of slaved mathematicians, a huge cast of Canterbury Tales style characters and a unique to me plot mystery solved over the course of the three books of the trilogy.

Elric – Michael Moorcock – still my favorite fantasy series. What more can be said?

New Virgin Galactic CEO

Posted on by Neal Asher

It’s always worth keeping and eye on what’s going on here:

George Whitesides has recently replaced Will Whitehorn as the CEO/President of Virgin Galactic. In an interview with Sander Olson, George Whitesides discusses suborbital spaceflight, orbital hotels, and the Government’s role in cultivating commercial spaceflight.

From the last answer George Whiteside believes we could see daily suborbital flights by 2020 and thousands of people will have flow to suborbit.

Poor Overworked Old Man, Enslaved and Oppressed.

Posted on by Neal Asher

So here we have Disco Stu’s blog where he displays my last two video clips and posts:

Only notice the date! 10 days have elapsed and this author still wears the same nondescipt t-shirt – no doubt not even being allowed to leave the room! His bleary eyes watery and aching from constant work. His legs wasting away and back deformed as he hunches interminably over his desk of confinement.

So now we see the truth of publishing! 10 days later and what was ostensibly a video blog can be seen for what it really is – a cry for help!

Can you not hear the clink of the manacles hidden below sight while I slave away at my desk – manacles that are tight around my swollen sledgehammer-broken ankles?
 
Bloody hell, I didn’t know it was a fashion show. I’ve now got to check which shirt I was wearing in the previous video clip when I do a new one. Or, alternatively, being me, perhaps from now on I should ensure I always wear the same T-shirt in future clips!

Pre-Order The Departure.

Posted on by Neal Asher

Thanks to whoever it was that let me know about this. The Departure (hardback) is now available for pre-order on Amazon. And on The Book Depository, which is does free world-wide shipping (that for US fans annoyed at how much they’re being charged elsewhere).

Like Wellsian war machines the shepherds stride into riots to grab up the ringleaders and drag them off to Inspectorate HQ for adjustment, unless they are in shredding mode, in which case their captives visit community digesters, or rather whatever of them has not been washed down the street drains.

Pain inducers are used for adjustment, and soon the Committee will have the power to edit human minds, but not yet, twelve billion human being need to die before Earth can be stabilized, but by turning large portions of Earth into concentration camps this is achievable, especially when the Argus satellite laser network comes fully online…

Alan Saul has taken a different route to disposal, waking as he does inside a crate on the conveyor into the Calais incinerator. How he got there he does not know, but he does remember the pain and the face of his interrogator. Janus speaks to Saul through the hardware implanted in his skull, sketching the nightmare world for him. And Saul decides to bring it all crashing down…

5 Desert Island Reads – Disco Stu.

Posted on by Neal Asher

I suggested a few posts back that maybe you reading this would like to send me a picture and a little narrative about your favourite 5 SFF books. In fact I’ll widen that to include any book. Also, please remember that all the other ‘get people involved’ stuff is still open. I still want a biography plus picture from people to go in the ‘Who Reads My Books’ posts, I still want pictures of your book collections, and pictures from local bookshops of displays of my books. My email is at the bottom of the biog to the right here.

Here are Disco Stu’s five books:

Revelation Space – One of my “fed up with fantasy” first buys a few years ago. A real slow burner. Reynolds draws the story together in a way that just drew me in. Its a pleasure to read and I savor his breadth of vision. I’ve found it splits opinion like marmite – people either love it or hate it.

Downbelow Station – I think my first space opera type read as a teenager. Devoured it. Picked up secondhand from a market in Nottingham. Never met anyone else that has read it – if you haven’t I highly recommend BUT, not read it since then so remembered through teen eyes. On my ‘to read’ pile now.

Forever War – (book pictured is the omnibus) – First military scifi that I read. LOVE the time travel nature of it. Remember being anxious (at about 13 years of age) whether Mandela would actually meet up again with his bint. (Watched ‘Somewhere in Time’ about then so I was exploring unrequited time travel romance it seems…8)…)

Nightwinds – A novel I obsessed about through my teen years! I was a big role-player (D&D, Runequest, Tunnels and Trolls, MERP etc, etc) and here was a novel that brought to life perfectly that kind of world. Wagner can be klunky in some of his work but I think this is the best of it for me. ‘Undertow’ STILL gives me goosebumps. Ah…happy days.

The Skinner – This book along with Revelation Space changed my reading direction. After them, I must have bored people silly by my repeated plea for them to ‘start reading some of these UK authors publishing NOW- and stop telling me you once read ‘I, Robot’ or the Foundation series years-ago whenever I talk about scifi!!!’…..ok, I’m calm.

This book made me keep saying ‘wow!’ every few pages. Good money spent at Ottakars in my opinion.

These books are my five ‘Desert Island Reads’.