I read 28 (I think) books of the Dumarest saga but gave up because I thought it unlikely he would ever find Earth. Todd informs me the saga does end and has now given me the evidence. I must start searching dealers in second-hand books for these:
Tag: Science Fiction
Who Reads My Books: Todd Sanders.
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
Romanian Covers
Future Reading
The Technician — Review
Nice review of The Technician here. Interesting in that it is from someone who is fairly new to my books:
As a relative newcomer to the Polity universe, with this only being my second Asher book, I wasn’t sure how well I’d be able to follow the story. I was in for a pleasant surprise. Although the story does take a while to get started and I struggled a little with the technology of it, I thoroughly enjoyed the read.
Audio Books
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.
Another Book Collection
Here are Phil Middleton’s books:
As part of my book collection is now organised, (the hardback/paperback part) I thought you might like a photo. I’m shocked to see how few I have now they are all in one place but we decided awhile ago it’s not possible to keep everything forever so the local PDSA gets regular boxes from us.
Orbus etc.
Neal Asher is another of those British writers of far future high tech space opera, like Iain M Banks, Ken Macleod, Alistair Reynolds, & Charles Stross (about whom I hope to write later). He’s constructed a particularly interesting & nasty future history of a distant & much changed humanity & what it meets in the far reaches of the universe. In his various novels, the star spanning Human Polity, run by massively intelligent AIs, has met an enemy species, the Prador, who apparently look a bit like huge & armoured crabs or lobsters. Asher has written a number of novels about the Polity Agent, Cormac, a few about other aspects of the Polity, & 3 about the effects of the planet Spatterjay & a peculiar genetic virus found there (which affects both humans & Prador). Although the Polity & the Third Kingdom of the Prador have ended a long war between them, there are still lots of border battles & lots of spying, etc, all of which come into play in Orbus.
And I can’t remember if I linked to Alex Cull’s review of Orbus. I particularly like the last comment:
As you have probably realised by now, I had a lot of fun reading this novel; and yes, I’m rather a fan of Neal Asher’s books, generally. Orbus isn’t The Catcher in the Rye, or Anna Karenina, but then it never sets out to be. There are indeed days when I prefer to read something like Anna Karenina. And there are other days, mostly after having done my level best to help prop up this country’s ailing economy for another twenty-four hours, when what I really, really want to read about – and nothing else will do – is aliens trying to murder one another with absurdly powerful military hardware.
Lensmen Movies
The old E. E. ‘Doc’ Smith books are no longer in my collection any more, having fallen foul of one of my general clear-outs, but I do recollect enjoying them when I was a teenager (Lensman and Skylark series). I think I dumped them because I was allowing myself to be influenced by the opinions of others at the time. They were also old, as in ‘astrogator calculates course with a slide rule’ old. It’ll be interestng to see what kind of a movie these will make, since this was BIG space opera:
The internet movie database has the Lensmen movie listed as sometime in 2011.
Writer J. Michael Straczynski said in 2009 he’s finished his second draft for Lensmen, and producer Ron Howard and Universal are happy with it. He said it’ll be very character-based, typical of Howard’s work, and yet the special effects will be cutting edge. And it’ll keep the massive scale of the original novels, as much as possible.
The Babylon 5 writer and Ron Howard? Seems promising…
