Category: Articles

The Perfect Husband — Lisa Gardner

Posted on by Neal Asher

Jim Beckett was everything she’d ever dreamed of … But two years after Tess married the decorated cop and bore his child, she helped put him behind bars for savagely murdering ten women. Even locked up in a maximum security prison, he vowed he would come after her and make her pay. Now the cunning killer has escaped—and the most dangerous game of all begins.

My mother left a copy of Hide by the same author with us in Crete. I picked it up, knew in about two pages that it was a good one, and wasn’t disappointed. It’s always great to discover another author who already had a long list of books to her name. Back here in Britain I picked up three for the price of two at Waterstones and started with this one since, of the three, it was the earliest published. Again it was a book I polished off very quickly and really enjoyed. Touches here of Minette Walters and Karin Slaughter. Recommended for those who like police procedurals and serial killers.

Who Reads my Books: Kerri & Guy Slaney

Posted on by Neal Asher

Hello Mr Asher,

My name is Kerri Slaney and my husband Guy and I are both big fans of your books.

He’s a civil servant working for DFT in Transport Security and I’m a commercial scheduler for a few niche channels like CBS Reality & the Horror Channel.

Guy’s been a fan of your for many years and is more interested in sci-fi whereas I’ve always been more of a Pratchett girl. That said a couple of years ago on holiday in Scotland he’d bought along Prador Moon and Alastair Reynolds House of Suns, so I read both and adored them. I read Prador Moon twice that week and have enjoyed all the series, particularly Brass Man.

We’re really a geeky couple, so I’ve attached few pics of our library of books and Guy’s Mr Crane character from the Champions Online which I think is rather spiffy.

Best wishes and Merry Christmas to you & your family.

Kerri

Who Reads My Books: Huan Tan.

Posted on by Neal Asher
Here’s Huan Tan — he’s the one on the right!

I thought I had better give you a short Bio. Currently living in Ireland and working for the Irish Sea Fisheries Board as a Fisheries Technologist. What that means is that I get to try and introduce new technology to the Fishermen. That could be as simple as another net design or as complex as sticking satellite tags into giant bluefin tuna and seeing where they go.

I have been working for this company for the last 12 years but before that I was a fisherman for 10years, I fished and drove boats around the world, Japan, Australia, Tahiti, Solomon Islands, Guam and New Zealand and the Flemish Cap were all places that I fished or delivered boats through. This gave me a great interest in marine life and is partly why I enjoy the Spatterjay series so much. There is plenty of weird stuff in the sea that hardly ever gets seen by people other than fishermen or avid documentary watchers. Especially the real deepwater stuff >1000m.

I also spent time as motorbike mechanic, a short order cook and a plastic double glazed window maker.
These days I like to spearfish, ride motorcycles and shoot firearms.

Funnily enough nearly all photos of me in the last 20 years or so have of me holding a fish….. Goes with the territory I guess. The backstory to this pic is that it was taken aboard a Norwegian research vessel called the G.O.Sars, way up past the arctic circle. We were doing some mad experiments to see if we could develop fishing gear that had a reduced environmental impact. Since then people have discovered that trawling is actually beneficial to some bottom types, a bit like ploughing a field I guess.

That cod was a big one, and went to make lots of pieces of boiled cod for the crew.

I hope this helps

regards

Huan Tan
County Cork
Ireland

Paul Cornell on E-books

Posted on by Neal Asher

Thanks to Neil Mullins (Skar) for directing me to this. Paul Cornell has some quite apposite things to say about the e-books market and piracy etc. Here’s the first two of his nineteen bullet-points:

1: Publishers have always thought that when you buy a hardback, what you’re paying more for is the chance to own it on the day of publication. Paperbacks are cheaper because they come out a year later. The reading public, on the other hand, always thought what they were paying more for was the extra physical mass and quality. (Actually, a hardback costs, one publisher told me, only from 50p to a couple of pounds more to make.) So obviously publishers think an e-book, out on the day of publication, should cost the same as a hardback. And obviously the reading public think it should cost less than a paperback. From this difference in perception stem all subsequent horrors.

2: British publishers are faced with an additional cost for e-books in the form of V.A.T., Valued Added Tax, currently set at 17.5% of the sale price going to the government, set to rise to 20% next year. This tax doesn’t apply to printed books. I asked Ed Vaizey MP, the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Culture, Communications and Creative Industries, if this was going to change, and was told there were no plans to alter the V.A.T. rate at the moment.

Railgun Launched Scramjet

Posted on by Neal Asher

Here’s another interesting one from my brother Bob:

In April, President Obama urged NASA to come up with, among other things, a less expensive method than conventional rocketry for launching spacecraft. By September, the agency’s engineers floated a plan that would save millions of dollars in propellant, improve astronaut safety, and allow for more frequent flights. All it will take is two miles of train track, an airplane that can fly at 10 times the speed of sound, and a jolt of electricity big enough to light a small town.

Of Interest to Gamers.

Posted on by Neal Asher

Recently got a couple of emails from Andy Bryenton that might be of interest to gamers here. The first is this one:

I just thought I’d add to the already bulging overflow in your inbox (damn those ‘gentlemen’s pills’ dealers!) with a request for some minor assistance. Oh, and the usual congratulations on an ever-growing series of post-cyber-awesome novels so sharp you can use them to peel diamonds..

As an unrepentant geek, I’m compiling a ‘Codex’ (a rulebook for the popular* tabletop wargame Warhammer 40k) for the Prador. My hope is to enable Warhammer players, of whom there are more than could be deemed healthy for any society, to download this resource for free and enjoy a bit of cross-franchise slaughter. There’s quite a bit of crossover between your fans and players of 40k, and the need for models is easily addressed with enough sculpting putty, resin, plastic guns and superglue.

Of course it’s my intent not to utterly mangle your creation in the process! So if there are any links you can think of to relevant images, rest assured that I’ve trawled through all your books for data about weapons, tactics, technology and limitations of the Prador in battle.

I just thought it’d be nice to tell you that relatively hard-working geeks are busy expanding your universe in a very strictly not-for-profit, just for the fans kinda way!

I won’t bore you too much with details, at least until it’s done. And at that point, you’ll probably wonder how the hell my little crew got it so wrong…

Just rest assured that very soon, somewhere, some Space Marines are gonna get eaten.

*popular, at least, with the kind of guys who will fight for the honor of Darth Vader in a pub argument, tend to grow ill-advised goatees, and wear t-shirts which say ‘You don’t have to be the Kwisatz Haderach to work here but it helps’.

I supplied a little bit of info (basically graft a spider’s visual turret on top of a fiddler crab. Maybe you guys here have your own ideas? Then I asked if I could publish his emails (well, not the next one, but I don’t suppose he’ll mind).

Go for it! I’d like to make the final codex available to everyone for free, and the more people who can participate in this bizarre little experiment the better!

Due to the way the tabletop game works (and you may have seen those strange GW stores full of tiny, spiky models), I’ve had to use a little artistic license in shuffling First, Second and Third Children into units like ‘Heavy support’, ‘Basic Troops’, and ‘Elite warriors’, which in the ‘real’ Kingdom they are unlikely to have. For sheer shock and awe it is my intent to make an ancient Adult available as a commander, even though from what you’ve written such a being would be infinitely cunning and cautious, thus unlikely to leave its sanctum. Damn thing’s gonna have armor that you could crack tanks open on!

Armament is running to variants of railguns, with various nasty particle beam weapons as heavy tank-busting clout. Once again, the constraints of putting the pure idea of Prador into the framework of a 60mm model game are kind of like straining single malt through a gym sock… there may be a slight change of ‘flavor’.

Pictures, I assure you, will be forthcoming!

And thanks for taking an interest in the old, obligatory ‘what me and my mates did on our holidays’! If and when the modeling part of the project produces a resin-cast Prador First-Child Warrior with twin-linked Decimator railguns, I’ll send you one…

What do you think about this?

Gary Gibson on E-books.

Posted on by Neal Asher

Here’s another way of looking at the whole issue … with tongue firmly wedged in cheek.

I would like to make ‘a modest proposal’ concerning the ebook market, given that I agree fully that authors should get paid for their work. I should know, I’m one of them, and yet according to some we are about to be inundated by a vast wave of piracy that will see artists and creators of all types rendered destitute.

Now I must confess some of my sins.