Here are Alex Morris’s book shelves. It gave me feeling of nostalgia to see precisely the same collection of E. E. ‘Doc’ Smith books I once had before they were sacrificed during a library down-sizing. I’ve still got a similar number of those old Michael Moorcock books, however – the Champion Eternal ones, not that boring English Assassin stuff.
The first Iain Banks book I read, as opposed to Iain M Banks, was The Wasp Factory, which I thought was brilliant and which I must buy myself a copy of and read again. Later reads of his non-SF books I found disappointing so didn’t bother any more. However, when I saw this in a local charity shop, and remembered catching and enjoying some of the TV production, I thought ‘what the hell, I’ll give it a try’.
The Crow Road is an amiable right of passage and light murder mystery which rambles through some interesting insights into life North of the Border, and it is packed with the likable, the tragic and sometimes the annoying. Surprisingly less annoying to me is the utter adherence to the line: ‘Thatcher is from hell and all Tories are evil – socialism and a swing to the left will save us all!’. Ah, ‘uni’ students, don’t you just love ‘em? All this stuff is almost a cultural history, the toxic results of which are presently running our country. I just wonder if the righteous faith of such people – that they are on the side of the angels – has been ‘challenged’ by the last 12 years in Britain.
The protagonist, Prentice McHoan, is a 22 year old history student taking his first steps on the road of life and, as the blurb tells us, ‘he is deeply preoccupied: mainly with death, sex, drink, God and illegal substances’. You want to know what happens to Prentice, but he’s also a character you often feel the need to slap, especially concerning his relationship with his female friend Ashley. But then, who wasn’t so blind at that age? Starting with the sentence ‘It was the day my Grandmother exploded’ this is a book I didn’t want to put down, for despite its ambling pace the whole thing was thoroughly engaging, and despite their foibles I enjoyed the characters and wanted to know where Banks would leave them.
The murder mystery kicked in very slowly and was only one facet of the main concern here, The Crow Road, Death, but I feel it tied in perfectly at the end with that final image of Rory. Some quite beautiful writing here but, of course, no surprise about the politics of the villain of the piece, I’m just surprised he wasn’t shown whipping peasants from horseback. Ah well.
Here then is the image that might appear on the back of Orbus. It’s pretty much correct in that it shows the King of the Prador’s ship much as described. This thing is fifty miles from top to bottom, but is suitable transport for a rather large monster in need of some personal space. Oberon, the Prador King, is a creature with a tendency to extreme and destructive irritation in personal encounters, and the result is usually messy. When his ire extends to worlds, this ship’s weapons are more than sufficient.
Damn but I’m losing my marbles. I got sent this cover quite a while ago and completely forgot about it. Here then is the cover for Orbus, available for pre-order on amazon, along with one of the blurbs. Both are likely subject to change…
Now in charge of an cargo spaceship, the Old Captain Orbus, flees a violent and sadistic past, but he doesn’t know that the lethal war drone, Sniper, is a stowaway, and that past is rapidly catching up with him. His old enemy, the Prador Vrell, mutated by the Spatterjay virus into something powerful and dangerous, has seized control of a Prador dreadnought, slaughting its entire crew, and now seeks to exact vengeance on those who tried to have him killed.
Their courses inexorably converge in the Graveyard, the border realm lying between the Polity and the Prador Kingdom, a place filled with the ruins left by past genocides and interplanetary war. Secure in that same place the Golgoloth, a monster to a race of monsters, is recruited by the terrifying King of the Prador into the long cold war between his kind and the humans. It is imperative that Vrell be hunted down and killed, for what he knows and what he might become.
Meanwhile, something that has annihilated civilizations is stirring from a slumber of five million years, and the cold war is heating up, fast.
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I liked and actually cared about the characters (including the talking gun). I enjoyed the action, the visceral violence and sordid sex. This is no nonsense entertainment and really you get what it says on the tin. If this were a tome delivering deep homilies about the horror of war, sexual and racial inequality or environmental issues, I’m guessing it wouldn’t be called Death’s Head Maximum Offence. I’m also guessing Gunn had his tongue firmly wedged in his cheek while writing it, probably to stop him laughing out loud with enjoyment. Once it grabbed me at about page 30, I polished off this book, with similar enjoyment, within a day.
Seems Owen Roberts likes Prador Moon:
Short. Punchy. Multiple eviscerations. Neal Asher is known for his violent action scenes, but he takes gory and disturbing writing to a new level in this novel. This has at least as many entrail-littered pages as The Skinner. Tops.
Nice review of The Gabble here at NextRead…
Neal Asher has an amazing imagination combined with a strong understanding of science and its potentials for evolution. Or at least that’s the impression that I’m left with after reading the tales that make up The Gabble and Other Stories. The wonderful thing about this collection, unlike most, is that the stories share the same universe. So several elements are free to reappear like the Gabbleduck and the Gabble, along with AI and golems and several other unique, fascinating or amazing ideas. This is my first exposure to both Neal Asher and the Polity Universe and it won’t be the last. He’s a talented storyteller that doesn’t let the science take away from the fiction he’s writing. He makes it a part of the plot and explains it such a way that it’s understandable and vital to the action and not dumbed down at all.
I’ve just been reading some highly entertaining posts on John Scalzi’s blog. The first is What to Know When You Ask Me to Read Your (Unpublished) Work which certainly raises a chuckle or two and is now highly relevant to me. At one time I used to do this but, now, it’s just not worth the aggravation, the bottom line being, why should I forgo paid work to do this when the result might well be a wounded artiste bleeding all over me? And no, I’m not going to pat you on the head and say, “Good boy!” The second post is Ten Things Teenage Writers Should Know About Writing which is again highly entertaining but in this case points a finger squarely at the me of about thirty years ago. This kind of post is often criticized for undermining the kind of self belief that enables someone to eventually become a successful writer, however, the ones who succeed are the kind who read something like this and simply don’t stop. I stuck a reply in there to that post (in the comment overflow), pointing out that the bar is set by those who have struggled for decades to get where they are, and only rarely does anyone leap that bar without equivalent effort and determination. It’s a rule, I feel, that can be applied to success in just about any walk of life.
Just got this contact on Myspace…
Can you supply a movie cast for the Polity novels? I’ll
bet your fans can… Hello, Neal.
We have a fun, free website (www. storycasting. com) where readers can create and post a “fantasy cast” for their favorite fiction, and we’ve put your books on our site, ready for casting!
Readers select a work they’ve read, choose main characters, and then fill the roles with current movie and TV stars. We also offer a special free “author account”, where authors come on the site, cast their own works “authoritatively”, and then send their fans to cast. Each cast is a vote for an actor in that role, and with each cast the favorites rise to the top.
We’ve put all your books on our site, plus links to your website and Amazon. Go take a look at the site, see what authors and readers are doing, and maybe try it out. If you’d like your free author account, so you can cast your books (Pat Rothfuss did), let me know, and we’ll get you set up.
Additionally, we are giving away free “CAST THIS BOOK” bookmarkers to our authors, to use as freebies during signings and appearances. If you email me, I will send a JPG of the front and back, so you can see what they look like. Just let us know how many you can use between now and June, and we’ll ship them to you.
We hope you enjoy the site, and decide to join the Storycasting community of casting authors.
Regards,
Righto, I’ve finished the initial editing of Orbus and now await its return from the copy editor. Next, I’ve written an article for the BSFA, The British Science Fiction Association, which is
…currently producing a series of special pamphlets for its members. Previous pamphlets include a small press sampler.’ Martin Lewis would like to produce one consisting of brief articles of SF writers on SF films. The idea is that each contributor writes an 750 word piece on a SF film which means something special to them. It might be your favourite film, it might be a guilty pleasure, it might be a film that was your gateway into the world of science fiction. I would be happy for contributors to use the broadest possible definition of science fiction and to be as popularist or obscure as they wished.
Bearing this in mind I chose Aliens, which is certainly one of my favourite films and which I might have described as a ‘guilty pleasure’ where it not for the fact I’m not pretentious enough to feel guilty about anything I enjoy. You certainly won’t get one of those film lists from me including something French with subtitles, or utterly obscure, or both, and the words ‘noir’ or ‘surreal’ will not be in evidence.
Next on the agenda is getting back to writing the ‘Owner’ story which still doesn’t really have a title. Presently I’m approaching 90,000 words, but I’ve been knocking the hell out of the story changing it from 1st person to 3rd, expanding the scale of the scenery and the scale of the problems faced by the somewhat nasty hero.
Back to work now.