Tag: People

Who Reads My Books? Cameron Mackay.

Posted on by Neal Asher

My brother got me into SCI-FI by passing a pile of books on to me after he had read them. Amongst the pile was a few by Neal. Gridlinked made a special impression with me and I was hungry for more. I would eagerly await notification of the latest release from my brother but now I am linked (gridlinked?) through the medium of the internet to Neal’s blogs and facebook pages, the notification is almost instant.

So who am I?. My name is Cameron Mackay. Born in 1968 and a complete geek. Living in Tewkesbury with my Wife Sue and my right hand man in the shape of a hyperactive but obedient Border Collie called “Trouble”. I joined the RAF in 1986 and flew fighters in the ground attack and reconnaissance role for 10 years and now earn my keep as an airline pilot flying the Boeing 777. In my spare time I am studying for an Open University degree in Physics and Astronomy. Mostly that keeps me from sloping off to the pub of an evening but essentially, my studies are borne of an interest in all things related to space travel and the very nature of our existence; and where we all came from. So far I have discovered we all started in relatively young stars that were large enough to produce heavy elements in their core. The next stage in our existence is a little less clear, but Neal’s books give us all some food for thought on the nature of our consciousness and where we fit in to the universe we inhabit. Maybe one day we will see Reifs, Golems and subminds. but either way, I know when on I’m on my deathbed and expecting “lights out” I will be seriously disappointed they haven’t been invented yet!

So that’s about it. An amateur at SCI-FI but enjoying the glimpse into a possible future that I will never get to see.

Tanith Lee

Posted on by Neal Asher

When, after over a quarter of a century of scrabbling up the writing ladder I was finally taken on my Macmillan, I started to get invites to ‘author events’. At these I met various authors, but generally they were fairly new ones who I didn’t really know. At one such event (I believe it was the launch of Cecelia Dart-Thornton’s ‘The Ill-Mad Mute’, but I could be wrong) Caroline and I installed ourselves in an upstairs room of the pub The Princess Louise (nice history there – it was, so I was told, Dennis Neilson’s hunting ground).
We were quite new at this game and quite nervous of it all. We sat chatting to some people, but I couldn’t help but notice one guy who sat up at the bar by himself: very slim, looked to be about seven feet tall, long black hair down his back – if you wanted to get contemporary about it he could have been a member of the Jacob’s gang in Twilight.
After a little while, he came over with my boss at the time, Peter Lavery. We chatted and he was very pleasant and all I learned at the time was that his name was John. Peter later informed me that his full name was John Kaiine and that he was Tanith’s Lee’s husband. He’d come over to chat to us because we seemed to be some of the few people in the room not disappearing up their own bottoms.
Subsequently, when invited to Peter Lavery’s Victorian abode on the South coast I got to again meet John and to meet Tanith for the first time. Extreme fan-boy moment. Tanith Lee is a writer whose work I’ve enjoyed for most of my reading life. Here was a giant of fantasy fiction, a quick glance at her Wikipedia entry gives you some idea of what I’m talking about:
She is the author of over 70 novels and 250 short stories, a children’s picture book (Animal Castle) and many poems. She has also written two episodes of BBC science fiction series Blake’s 7.
I got hooked into her writing by The Birthgrave, probably not so long after it was published in 1975, and I read her stuff constantly ever since. I list Volkhavaar as one of my top ten fantasy books (on the Guardian website I think) and really, I don’t see it ever dropping out of that list. Her books are ones I’ve returned to in later years and found have lost nothing by either them aging or me aging. I recommend you check some of them out. All of her Tales From The Flat Earth are good, I can also recommend books like Elephantasm, Vivia, The Storm Lord, East of Midnight, Heartbeast … actually I’ll stop there. Better to say that I haven’t read one that I haven’t enjoyed.
An enjoyable time was had by all, involving copious quantities of alcohol and then a curry. All the time I still could not dispel that ‘Wow, that’s Tanith Lee sitting there.’ At later events I’ve met and briefly chatted to Harry Harrison and Michael Moorcock and, even though those too were fan-boy moments, they weren’t quite like the first time.
Anyway, John and Tanith could not have been nicer, despite what they were going through at the time and which she’s now revealed on her website. It seems even the immortals cannot avoid cancer, though it has been knocked back.

Who Reads My Books? Will Basset.

Posted on by Neal Asher

G’day Neal,

My name is Will Bassett and I’m a 25 year old Sci Fi fan from down under. I’ve been a big reader ever since my early teens when my father found a box of his old books and let me take a look through them. I grew up reading through the works of Richard Adams and Aldous Huxley and as I grew older I continued reading and stumbled across an expanding range of genres and really started to enjoy science fiction after coming across some Philip K Dick collections in my local library.

I left my small coastal town in the Australian state of Victoria after graduating high school in 2002 to join the Army and a few years in I was sent to Sydney on a mine warfare course where on the few days we were granted leave from base I went in search of an author I had heard great things about from a fellow digger. “You should really give it a go, if you like your cyperpunkish space opera.” Cyberpunk? Space Opera? How intriguing. So off I went and searched the city bookstores to no avail. Being Australia, often when you go looking for something even in the larger bookstores all that meets your questions are blank looks and “how do you spell the authors name again?”. Eventually I was able to pry the copy of Brass Man from my friend, and looking back at that moment he did me a great favour by introducing me to the world of the Polity. After reading Brass Man over the course of about a week in my spare time at base I was captivated. Being Australia though, I did have to wait a few weeks until I was off base and back in my home city, then another few weeks patiently waiting for Gridlinked and the Line of Polity to arrive in my local bookstore from overseas.

In the last few years since leaving the Army I have read many authors, many due to stumbling across them in anthologies such as The New Space Opera, and the New Space Opera 2 which I was very pleased to see an Asher appearance in. I now work in Air Traffic Control training, helping run the simulator that students are trained on at Melbourne International Airport, and I can safely say that I am always prepared for any downtime at work, with no less that two Neal Asher books sitting in my locker, just waiting for a re-reading.

Living in Melbourne is an experience of it’s own, a typical day here contains all four seasons, waking up to frost on the grass and ice on the car windows, to a hot and dry 36 degrees Celsius after lunch, only to be followed by high winds and rain. Luckily for those of us not too adverse to sitting down with a good book, we live in a city where even though you can be sunning yourself at the beach in the early afternoon, you’ll be rugged up with some great space opera as it pours down outside with the wind roaring. That’s if your local bookstore hasn’t forgotten to order in that Orbus book you keep ringing up about!

Ansible

Posted on by Neal Asher

I’ve been meaning to say something about this for some time. Many of you may know about Dave Langford’s Ansible – you’ve maybe read some of his articles in various magazines. I get this newsletter by email and get filled in on the various doings in the SF world. Particularly enjoyable are ‘How Others See us’ in which he records the ludicrous statements of those who don’t want to be accused of science fiction, and ‘Thog’, in which he points out some of the silly errors many fiction writers make (still waiting to be thogged). Dave Langford is an erstwhile weapons physicist, fan and fiction writer and recipient of an embarrassing number of Hugos.

Update: You can subscribe to the email newsletter or get the RSS feed up in the top lefthand corner here.

Wikipedia

Posted on by Neal Asher

It seems I don’t need to write an encyclopedia of the Polity. Here’s the start of a piece on the Prador over at Wikipedia:

Physical description

Prador are amphibious crustaceans with flattened pear-shaped shells with scalloped rims and a raised visual turret at the broad end that houses several pairs of red spider-like eyes, some of which are on movable stalks. Prador move about on six long legs, each terminating in a wicked spike. The rear pair of legs fall off when adolescent Prador make the transition to adults, exposing their sexual organs in the process. Along their underside Prador have four manipulatory arms, each ending in a hand described as “a complex arrangement of hooks and fingers”. These hands are highly dexterous and capable of fine manipulation, just like a human hand. It appears Prador can use all four hands to perform different tasks simultaneously, such as drawing and firing four different weapons at separate targets. Above these are the two heavy “working claws”; large crab-claw limbs that can easily cut through tough materials and crush human bones. Prador feed with a set of dangerous mandibles, capable of grasping, cutting and chewing flesh. Prador are carnivorous, and mostly feed on decaying flesh, primarily harvested from giant mudskippers farmed on their homeworld. Adult Prador are very fond of human flesh, however, and many humans are bred just for this purpose, although by the end of the book The Skinner, this practice has begun to decline. Prador shells are particularly tough, able to withstand impacts and small arms fire, but they seem quite vulnerable to energy weapons and heat, which can cause the shells to burst open.And here’s their entry about me.

Who Reads My Books? Kirby Ubben.

Posted on by Neal Asher
Recently you posted on your blog prior to 1999 you were shoveling shit. well, as fate would have it, same here.
I grew up on a farm in the central US, in the state of Iowa. Shoveling shit was considered one of the ‘good jobs.’ That’s not true, it’s not considered good, just available. I did however spend my formative years shoveling the proverbial and quite literal shit.
I didn’t fancy sports much, and living in the country, socializing wasn’t readily available, so it was books, and largely, those were fantasy and sci/fi. At 18 years of age, in the year of 1993, I moved to Seattle, and happened on a contract job working at Microsoft’s Redmond Campus, and my tastes in leisure time literature turned more strongly science/fiction: William Gibson, Bruce Stirling, Isaac Asimov, Kurt Vonnegut.
Over the years, as I moved about, as I went to university and continued the IT career, I always came back to sci/fi. I’d jaunt off on Japanese history, Japanese historical fiction, a good mystery series, but sci/fi has remained my baseline.
Currently (speaking of Dirty Jobs) I work as the in-house systems engineer, defacto IT director, for a small company back here in Iowa, which has been featured on Dirty Jobs. Remember the chicken sexing episode? Squeezing poop from chickens to determine gender? Yup, that’s us: McMurray Hatchery.
It’s all about poop here in Iowa.
I would guess about 2004, I picked up a copy of a book by a fellow I hadn’t read before, one Mr. Neal Asher, on recommendation from a friend in Seattle: Gridlinked.
blown
away
I absolutely fell in love with it; the world it portrayed, the characters, both protagonist and villain equally compelling… I registered gridlinked.net and have been using it for vanity email since.
Next came the epic hunt for all things Asher; minor collector nerd OCD happily at work. The pinnacle of my Asher collection, in my mind, is the copy of Mason’s Rats, the paper pamphlet original, closely followed by the US hardcover first edition of Gridlinked, amusingly signed by Mr. Asher himself.
Just another farm boy turned deep Linux nerd obsessed with British sci/fi and the epitome of said genre, Neal Asher.
Increase fanboy count by one, please.
k.