Tag: People

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!

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’.

Guns, Germs and Steel.

Posted on by Neal Asher

Having heard about the book Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond (I think it was Richard Morgan who recommended it) I managed to pick up a copy from a local charity shop. However, when I tried to read it my eyes started glazing over and I ended up sticking it to one side. It then ended up in that pile of books destined to be sent to a charity shop under the label ‘Life’s too Short’.

A number of weeks ago I then noticed a Channel 4 documentary with the same title and recorded it. Just yesterday, feeling knackered after having to get up at 4.15AM to drive my mother to Gatwick, I decided to do something less mentally taxing so sat down to watch it.

The essential question posed was, ‘Why have the Europeans always been the winners?’ Why have they generally been ahead of the rest of the world? Jared Diamond’s reasoning is essentially this: most of the animals that can be domesticated are only found in Eurasia, which took farming in this region beyond the subsistence level thus freeing up human resources for technical and social development e.g. the smelting of metals like steel and really, the building of civilization. This domestication of animals also led to an increase in the diseases the Eurasians suffered and subsequently gained some immunity to. So, armed with steel, rapidly developing technology and a shitload of diseases they went off and conquered the world.

This is, of course, a simplification. The documentary itself was almost certainly a simplification of the book.

A particular case cited is that of the Conquistadors. Armed with steel, experience of warfare and mounted on horses, Francisco Pizarro and his men first defeated the Incas in battle (mainly because of the naïve stupidity of their emperor), then the small pox the Spanish carried finished off the job. Yes, historical fact, but was it necessary to imply in this documentary that the small pox was somehow deliberate?

The logical thread of this is very attractive and certainly has much truth. However, the continuous use of the liberal buzz-word ‘inequality’ throughout should have clued me in to how specious some of the reasoning was. The first hiccup was with that domestication of animals and non-subsistence farming. This happened in the Middle East and with a bit of hand-waving and talk about how it spreads latitudinally, it magically became the big advantage to the people of Europe. One then has to ask the question: why wasn’t it the middle easterners with their ‘guns, germs and steel’ conquering the rest of the world? I’ll take the forgiving view that this is all a bit more complicated than portrayed in the documentary, so perhaps I really should read the book.

Next we go to tropical South Africa which the Europeans struggled to conquer because their farming methods didn’t work and because the diseases were on the side of the Africans. However, the Europeans did win there because the steel was on their side – mainly the Maxim machine gun, then the train. Okay, I get that – more historical facts. But what got my back up here was the glorification of the native and the life style of the ‘noble savage’. And please stop it with the implication that the Europeans destroyed some wonderful agrarian idyll and that a return to that life style might be a good thing. Yes, the life-span in the place depicted is about 40 now, but did those ‘noble savages’ live any longer? Did the women enjoy popping out baby after baby until dying of it? Did they all enjoy labouring every day just to put food in their mouths?

Diamond then moved away from his central contention to claim that the similarities between tribal languages indicated a previous single underlying language and an African civilization, on the bones of which the Europeans built their African empire. I can see the point of the language thing when we look at the ‘romance languages’ and the like. If you want to you can contend that the Europe we know is ‘built on the bones’ of earlier civilizations (The Greeks and then the Romans). Thing is, we’re still digging up those bones. Nothing remains of this particular African civilization because they built nothing long-lasting and invented no more than had already been current in the Stone Age, which is a curious and highly convenient definition of civilization.

It would have been better if this had stuck to Diamond’s original contention about ‘guns, germs and steel’ rather than straying into the apologia and fatuous fact-twisting of political correctness.

In the end this documentary was another of those liberal self-flagellation fests; another deep revel in white guilt and the present practically Luddite attitude towards technology. It was highly selective of its ‘facts’, quite good at confusing correlation with causation (another common one nowadays). Yes, I perfectly understand the point that no single race possesses some underlying superiority, but I damned well disagree with the idea here that because luck and circumstance put the Europeans on top that they should feel guilty and be all apologetic. The reality of this documentary is that those who produced it don’t really understand their own proposition of underlying equality, which is that if the ‘guns, germs and steel’ had arisen elsewhere in the world, it would have been the Europeans who got the kicking.

Strange isn’t it, how the politically correct revel in a guilt that stems from their own assumed superiority.
Noblesse oblige.

Those Wicked Tory Cuts.

Posted on by Neal Asher

I’d quite forgotten how much I enjoy reading Richard Littlejohn. Here’s a sample or two from his recent article:

“For the past 20-odd years, this column has made a decent living documenting the insanity and waste in Britain’s Town Halls.

If all else failed, there was always the Guardian jobs pages on a Wednesday to dig me out of a hole.
The recruitment of five-a-day enforcers, lesbian bereavement counsellors and assorted real nappy outreach co-ordinators was guaranteed to raise a giggle.”
…
“So they cynically close libraries, day centres and swimming pools and give P45s to school dinner ladies and lollipop men. When it comes to the pain, it’s women and children first.

Meanwhile their lavishly-remunerated public relations departments synchronise the campaign against the ‘Tory cuts’ — aided and abetted by the Labour Party and the BBC, which pumps out a relentless bombardment of anti-Government doomsday propaganda.
This was, of course, exactly what Gordon Brown intended when he beggared the British economy to create a giant client state.
He set a bear trap for any incoming Conservative government, just as he did with the 50p top tax rate. Brown knew he could rely on the BBC to blame the ‘cuts’ on his successors. And he gambled that most people are so stupid they would fall for it. The indications are that he was right, up to a point.”

Recording at Audible

Posted on by Neal Asher

So, yesterday we took the 11.05 train from Althorne to Wickford then went from there to Liverpool Street. Whilst we were travelling I kept adjusting my short introduction to the Spatterjay novels and was looking over the lists of questions I’d put together for this interview/conversation with William Gaminara. The questions for him to ask me I’d taken from various interviews I’ve had, whilst those for him to answer were from the surprising lack of information about him on the Internet. I’m guessing that despite being a well-known actor in Britain he’s probably a very private individual.

As it was I had even less time to fret. Initially we’d agreed to meet Stacy Patton Anderson (Acquisitions Manager for Audible) for lunch near Liverpool Street, whereupon we were going to go for a wander about, then head at 5.00 to the studio being used for the recordings. However, it turned out that Mr Gaminara was going for an audition (he still has to audition?) so the recording time was moved to 3.00.

We met Stacy, a pleasant American lady, in ‘Canteen’ in Spitalfields at 1.00. This seemed to be a slightly trendy place i.e. it had acoustics that severely hampered conversation, communal tables, uncomfortable backless chairs and expensive but average food. I’d brought along a selection of books for her that I handed over, and then, after eating, she took a further look at my intro and suggested some changes, which we made. After that we took a tube to Edgeware Road whereupon Stacy tracked down the Lisson Street studio with some sort of app on her phone.

Approaching the glass doors we immediately recognized Mr Gaminara inside – it’s that thing about actors: you recognize them like people you’ve known for years, but of course you don’t know them at all. On about three occasions whilst in London I’ve turned to say hello to someone I know, then stopped myself because I only knew that person as Inspector Burden from Wexford, Neil from the Young Ones or Prunella Scales from Fawlty Towers. You feel such a fool but, of course, they are used to it, and are immediately aware that they’ve been clocked.

I said hello to William, thanked him for his reading of my books, said hello to Vicky Bennett (Assistant Producer) and the sound editor John Moreland, whereupon we all trooped upstairs to the studio and generally had a chat. Apparently William hadn’t read any SF since Asimov many years ago. Still, I handed over some books – if not to lure him in then hopefully so he can start thinking about how he would read the Cormac series! Anyway, he seemed like a nice guy: professional and intelligent, paying attention to everyone around him and not in the least egotistical.

Just a note here: funny how though the people in the studio kept referring to him as ‘Willy’ I can’t bring myself to use that name here. Just goes to show how, maybe unconsciously, we so associate the actors with the roles they play. Damn it, he’s not Professor Leo Dalton!

We both went into the recording room which was a bit like a radio studio with spectators, producer and sound guy on the other side of a viewing window (In the picture Gaminara is the guy with only one chin and a face undamaged by acne rosacea). Whilst they were sorting out the sound levels I tried one of my questions to him and immediately made a cock-up, saying he’d written the scripts for The Lakes, and being corrected by him. In fact the series was created by and mostly written by Jimmy McGovern, with co-writers of some episodes being William Gaminara and others. Shows you how you can go wrong on the Internet.

When we got into the interview/conversation we hardly referenced the questions at all. Vicky Bennett occasionally asked us to focus on this and that and, at one point, according to Caroline, gave up because she couldn’t get a word in edgewise. Afterwards I was told it all went well, but I always take that with a pinch of salt nowadays. William then went off to do his audition – and will be back in the studio recording the audio version of the John Christopher Tripods series today. It might be interesting to get hold of that since, as I recollect, the TV version was never completed. Stacy also went off to some sort of meeting. In both cases, because studio time was limited and they wanted me in to record the intro, I forgot to sign their books. I went through the intro, repeating the bits I screwed up so it could be edited together later. As I stepped out it amused me to hear Vicky say (the first time anyone has said this to me in my life), ‘That’s a wrap’.

Leaving the studio we wandered around for a bit looking for somewhere to get a drink – I was wired – then got fed up with that and headed home. Caroline immediately brought me down to earth by getting me to take the rubbish out, then I made a dent in a bottle of Edradour I got for my birthday whilst we watched Taggart and some more episodes of The Shield.

Interesting interlude, but now back to the day job.

Who Reads My Books: Andy Plumbly

Posted on by Neal Asher

Andy Plumbly / Fader 209

Hey, my name is Andy and I’m a geek. I’m 26 and living in Norwich where I have been since forever. Reading sci-fi books, watching sci-fi movies and playing games takes up most of my free time when I’m not doing arty bits and pieces or writing.

Which leads me to when I first contacted Neal years back with a picture I did of some Frogwhelks after being inspired greatly by The Skinner. The lines were wobbly and it was a cartoon design but Neal kindly put it up on his blog and Myspace page which made me super happy.

Art and design was more of a hobby back then but over the years (after gradually gaining more skills & confidence) I realised I wanted to go into art and design as a job.

So here I am, trying to start up as an artist/graphic designer! It’s tough finding work (as it is in general for all unemployed at the moment) but I’m building up a portfolio in this spare time and doing work for free if friends need something done.

As mentioned at the beginning of this I would consider myself to be a geek. Been gaming since I was 3 when I first played Pac-Man on the Atari 2600. Chewing on the controller was also fun.

I have recently bought Pac-Man Championship Edition DX on the 360.…so yeah, full circle.

Chewing on the controller still sometimes happens.

Pics of my face, bookshelf and arty stuff included for your visual digestion!

Andy

Who Reads My Books: Todd Sanders.

Posted on by Neal Asher

Hi Neal,

I thought I’d take a few minutes to send over my library photos and a brief bio for your blog. It’s hard to stand back far enough in my library to take full photos of each wall so excuse the slightly pieced together shots. My modest library has a little over 3000 books in it at this time. It is a mix of about half science fiction/fantasy with the other half comprising French literature and poetry (original and in translation), other fiction/literature and poetry from around the world, a library of books on ancient board games and a large collection of research books on surrealism. I also have a large collection of first edition French works of literature in translation and maintain several sites about French writing.

westwall.jpg – my collection of french first editions and other rare books in barrister shelves.

eastwall.jpg – most of my science fiction collection including a complete edition of ace ‘doubles’ science fiction paperbacks from the 50’s to 80’s [all the ones with the blue and white striped covers]. William Burroughs first book ‘Junkie’ was actually a detective ace double. Your books are sandwiched there between Poul Anderson and Issac Asimov.

southwall.jpg – most of the fiction/literature/poetry in my collection as well as my surrealism reference books and books on ancient board games.

asher1.jpg and asher2.jpg show the ubiquitous asher titles in paperback and hardcover

The brief bio:

I live in pittsburgh, here in the US, where I wear many work hats. Originally I trained as an architect, but I am now a graphic designer, book publisher, artist and furniture designer. I have a small press – http://www.aanpress.com/ – which publishes my translations of surrealist poetry along with other one of a kind artist books I create. My furniture can be found over at http://www.locusgraphic.com/woodworking.

I’ve recently started designing board and card games, often with steampunk themes, influenced by Neal’s writing as well as Karl Schroeder, Steph Swainston, Alastair Reynolds and Benjamin Rosenbaum.

I have been reading and collecting books of all sorts all my life. My love for science fiction started at age 10 when I read ‘Star Boy’ by Andre Norton. I tend to prefer hardcovers and would never buy an e-reader unless really really forced to. I have an excellent bookdealer here in the city who finds me many of the gems I now own.

I’ve begun in the last few years creating artist books using the short stories of such authors as mary Robinette Kowal, Ben Rosenbaum, Ted Chiang and others, creating the book as an artifact of the world of the stories, and I am currently looking for a good Neal Asher one to use.

And yes, I’ve read every book in my library.

Thanks as always for the books you write.

Todd Sanders
 

Audio Books

Posted on by Neal Asher

They’re not up yet. I’m told:
                  

I’m sorry to say that although we planned that your series would be live tomorrow it appears there was some glitch in the upload on the US side. We have tagged this as ‘urgent’ for them, and they have promised to try and get it live by Friday. As soon as we release it we will promote it in all our social media channels. Also, if you’d like, we can provide a trackable link to the product page for the series for your blog.

In further news, look who’s narrated the three books: William Gaminara.

Before joining the cast of Silent Witness, William’s last major role was as Will in the dot com drama Attachments.

His other TV credits include The Law, People Like Us, Hope and Glory, and Dangerfield.

William played Dr. Richard Locke in the BBC Radio 4 drama The Archers. He previously starred as Casualty’s Dr Andrew Bower between 1989 and 1992, a character that returned in 2000 with Philip Bretherton in the role. William’s also played a doctor in The Bill.

As well as acting, William is an accomplished writer. His work includes episodes of This Life and The Lakes, and he recently adapted Ella and the Mothers for TV from Rachel Morris’ novel.