Righto, Macmillan kindly provided me with a copy of Gary Gibson’s Nova War. It should be enough to say that on the first day of picking it up I was busy and only read it for an hour or so, but on the second day I polished off the rest of the book. There’s a prison sequence in this that did seem to drag a bit, but not enough to make me abandon the book, nowhere near, otherwise it kicked along very nicely. For those of you that read and enjoyed the book before this, Stealing Light, here’s more of the good stuff. The title should give you a clue about how Gibson has upscaled the demolition. For those of you that haven’t read Stealing light, and who enjoy massive, violent balls-out sensawunda space opera, I suggest you go out and buy it, then read Nova War.
Here you have the Shoal, who control FTL technology and consequently rule a large portion of the galaxy because other races, without FTL, have become their clients. But these deep sea fish lied about being the only ones with FTL, of course they did, lying seems par for the course with a race whose arch manipulator has named itself ‘Trader in the faecal matter of animals’ (bullshit to the uninitiated). Now the Emissaries are on the scene and it’s beginning to look like Nova War is unavoidable. Oh bugger.
Tag: Books
More Art Comp Pictures
Orbus Reviews
Orbus seems to have been well received. Nice to see it sitting at the top of the Amazon New and Future Releases chart (Science Fiction) for a couple of weeks, and nice to see the response on Amazon from various fans. There will, of course, inevitably be a one star review on there from Mr Bitterly Disappointed of Tooting Beck, or from Mr Why Won’t They Publish Me You Bastard! But I’m used to filtering the bile for odd nuggets of gold.
In SFX Dave Langford says of Orbus:
As usual, Asher delivers a satisfying space opera full of adrenaline highs. Orbus may get the title role, but Vrell and wise-cracking Sniper steal he show. Fast-paced fun.
Whilst Shaun Davis in SciFi Now is less complimentary with his three star review but finishes with:
… but battle-hardened readers will be having too much of a blast to mind the odd slip into tedium. This is because each battle is, especially the final one, is written in a crazed fashion. Rail-guns rattle off, pulse rifles fire out shots and explosions ring out. This is what Asher does best, and in that respect Orbus succeeds in reaffirming the importance of Spatterjay in his body of work.
Nice enough, but have to wonder how this reviewer can describe Orbus’s past as dull…
Oh, and by the way, I haven’t seen many more entries to the Art Competition, which I’ll be judging in November. Art comp link: https://www.nealasher.co.uk/2009/03/06/calling-all-artists/
Dead Tomorrow
I’ve just finished reading Dead Tomorrow by Peter James. I was introduced to this guy when his then editor Steph Bierwerth handed over a copy of Dead Simple whilst I was visiting the Macmillan offices in London. That first book was one of those that leaves you out of breath by the time you finish it and I enjoyed it immensely. I passed it on to my father-in-law who also enjoyed it and has been buying subsequent books by him. Caroline has also been enjoying these ‘Dead’ books, the ‘Roy Grace Series’ but agreed with me that a couple of them seemed a little flat which, from other reading, I see can be a problem when a writer confines himself to one location and one set of characters.
This is definitely not the case with Dead Tomorrow. There were no moments of ‘get on with it’ as James racked up the tension and kept me focused all the way through. The story, concerning organ trafficking and viewed from every angle – from the unwilling donors, the recipients and from the police, had an ugly fascination. A reminder that we are actually entering the kind of world hinted at in some SF books (Larry Niven’s Organleggers spring to mind). Recommended.
Later I’ll be taking a look at a book I’ve been looking forwards to, and which Macmillan have just sent: Nova War by Gary Gibson.
Tennis Playing Cyber Monkeys!
Bugger, despite my promise I’ve failed to write in here as often as I should. I have failed, for example, to mention the Guardian article in which I’m included as one of the ‘New British Space Opera’ crowd with a great line in tennis playing cyber monkeys (I forget the exact wording). So what’s impelled me to write in here now? For the first time with any of my books I’m in an Amazon number one spot — new releases/science fiction. Every damned time before I’ve been in second place to Banks, Pratchet (who shouldn’t be in SF) or some Dr Who tie-in. This time Orbus has done it for me, so celebration time!
Writing News Update.
Sorry not to have written here for so long, and I promise to try to do better in the future. Things have been getting in the way, like, as well as writing books I’ve been doing lots of work on our house here: making new doors; chiselling out and repointing the front wall which, under the about a half inch thick of old pointing, is mostly held together with mud, making a concrete skirting along the bottom of the wall, making trellises and a grape arbour, oh, and swimming and drinking too much wine.
So, over the last few months I’ve completed the first draft, at 150,000 words, of the next book and finally settled on a title. It will be called The Departure and will be the first book in The Owner series (whose length is yet to be decided). This tells the the story implicit in the title of the Owner’s early years (short stories about the Owner are to be found in The Engineer ReConditioned) in which he begins his gradual climb to godlike power.
Finally having managed to get this printed off I’m leaving it to Caroline to read through before I again take a look at it. Hopefully by then I’ll have distanced myself from it enough to be able to see the glaring errors.
Meanwhile I’ve started on Gabbleducks – the third book of this latest three-book contract for Macmillan. Thus far I have the only living survivor of a hooder attack trying to recover his sanity. Polity medical technology would be able to sort him out in a trice, were it not for the fact that the AIs are reluctant to meddle with his mind since the hooder that attacked him was a near mythical creature called The Technician, and it did something to him that even they don’t quite understand. Also there are other circumstances surrounding this attack, which happened during the rebellion against the Theocracy on Masada, like the presence of a gabbleduck at the scene, and how it may or may not have been involved.
I’m having fun with this one. With the an odd character called Chanter who pursues The Technician in his mudmarine, trying to understand the grotesque sculptures of bones the creature makes with its victim’s remains, trying to understand its art… And, since the whole investigation of all this involves insanity, who better to head the investigation than a war drone who has experienced this condition and now takes great interest in it – a war drone with the shape of a scorpion, and who may be accompanied by a black AI previously thought to be dead.
He must explore the insanity of a race called the Atheter who apparently sacrificed civilization and intelligence to avoid becoming victims of an alien technology, and the insanity of a man called Jeremiah Tombs, an erstwhile Proctor – one of the religious police of Masada – who refuses to remember what happened to him, refuses to even believe the Theocracy has fallen, and has a very strange interest in the Euclidean patterns on the shells of the penny molluscs of that world…
Don’t ask me where all this is going. If I knew I wouldn’t have so much fun writing it. I can promise excessive weirdness and violence, however.
The Line of Polity New Cover
Twisted Metal – Tony Ballantyne
When robots make a child together the husband provides the wire for the wife to twist into the shape of their child’s mind. The wife can choose much of the shape she twists, much is inherent in her, unconscious, and there may even be fragments of the The Book of Robots in there too. The wealthy ‘free’ society of the Turing robots is threatened by the quite familiar collective of Artemesia, who believe there is only metal and the individual is unimportant (yup, the state is all). Artemesia is on the move, destroying societies, torturing and murdering citizens and then melting them down to make more citizens of its own, if not transplanting their minds into common machinery. Robots originally generated from deep in the ground and some still do so now. Or is that really true? You can feel sure that if there’s talk of watchmakers (or blind watchmakers) here the whole debate has been turned on its head.
So we’ve got nature vs nurture in the larger quandary about free will and predestination; we’ve got a Communist’s wet dream of a society because the one thing that can’t be changed in our world, can here, because the minds can be made to fit the ideology; we’ve got an inversion of the kind of arguments with which Richard Dawkins and the Intelligent Design crowd would feel at home, all set in a world populated by robots engaged in the familiar human pastime of murdering each other for power, but excusing it with dogma. Plenty of twisted metal here, usually in the smouldering ruins of of the next city state the Artemesians have torn apart. So what more could you want? The next book please Mr Ballantyne.
There’s so much implicit in the title of this book, which hints at the philosophical layers underlying but not undermining rip-snorting robot total war. A thumping good read.
Prince Caspian
When I was about eleven my mother was a junior school teacher of the kind who used to read stories to her classes. The kids always used to enjoy the Narnia books by C. S. Lewis and, when I read them, I enjoyed them too. Now these books are being turned into films and as with many other recent films, like the ones based on the Marvel characters, since as a child I used to read the comics, or The Lord of the Rings, I looked forward to seeing this stuff from my formative years up there on the screen. I enjoyed The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, enjoyed seeing the images I’d once seen in my mind translated into the ersatz reality of the big screen, but with some reservations about how the story was told. And yesterday, when we sat down to watch Prince Caspian, I began to enjoy that, until the very end, when Aslan appeared.
Wonderful special effects here, and excellent translation (as far as I can remember) of the book to the screen. The centaurs, minataurs and all the other creatures of Narnia were done superbly, nothing wrong with the acting too, though the children made me feel rather uncomfortable and I was thoroughly aware that this was definitely a children’s book. So what pissed me off? Well Mr Lewis was very definitely a believer, as his many Christian books will attest, and his religion came up through the story telling to smack me in the forehead like a mallet made from the true cross.
I guess the film producers really went with this because Aslan couldn’t have been more Christlike if he’d worn a crown of thorns and been bleeding from the paws. He came in at the end and sorted it all out – a deus ex machina Greek god lowered on his platform to sort out all the squabbles, an ending almost completely severed from the story that went before, moral message delivered: all you had to do was believe in me. Very disappointing, but then one should not try to revisit childhood. And, I guess, the original book was a piece of religious propaganda, and attempt at indoctrinating children, that just didn’t work with me.
Shadow Reviews
It seems there’s been a couple of nice reviews of Shadow of the Scorpion lately. It is one of Eric Brown’s ‘Choices’ (a name very much reminding me of the time when I was submitting to Interzone and getting regularly, but nicely, rejected) in the April 4th issue of The Guardian. He says it skilfully combines graphic action and sensitive characterisation and is Asher’s most accomplished novel to date though this is on top of a Despite some infelicities of prose. I’m still trying to figure out whether he’s talking about some shabby grammar, purple prose or whether my characters say ‘fuck’ too often.
In the Friday 1st of May issue of SFX the book is five star rated and ‘SFX Recommends’. Saxon Bullock, the reviewer says of it: Asking difficult questions while delivering plenty of full-tilt adventure and widescreen action, this is top-notch stuff from an author well and truly at the top of his game.
Thanks guys!
Now you’d think that all this praise would make me big-headed … and you’d probably be right!