Fantasy au Petit-Déjeuner 15
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Tag: Science Fiction
Neal Asher Video Clip 7/3/10
Graphic of the Polity Timeline.
Tanith Lee
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.
Skype Interview
I just did a voice-only Skype interview with (I think) an English lecturer and a few of this students at the University of Wisconsin. They are the producers of this (please correct me if I’m wrong on any of these points – if you check here Wisconsin people). As usual I babbled as I tried to get my points across (if I had any) and was noticing a tendency to forget the question before I’d finished speaking. Ah, the depredations of age. Anyway, I’ll let you know when the interview becomes available.
Graphic of the Polity Timeline
Order of the Books
Since this is a question I’m frequently asked and since there are new visitors here all the time, I thought it might be a good idea to put this up again:
Order of the books.
The Cormac series:
1.Gridlinked 2. The Line of Polity 3. Brass Man 4. Polity Agent 5. Line War
The Spatterjay series:
1. The Skinner 2. The Voyage of the Sable Keech 3. Orbus
Stand alones:
Prador Moon – the start of the Prador-human war and set before the above two series.
Shadow of the Scorpion – Cormac’s early years just after the Prador-human war.
Hilldiggers – a novel set after all the above
The Gabble – a collection of stories in the above future
The Engineer ReConditioned – a collection of short stories.
Runcible Tales – six short stories in a chapbook
Cowl – time-travel novel (completely separate from the above)
The Technician – book set after the rebellion on Masada (The Line of Polity)
Who Reads My Books? Will Basset.
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!
Orbus Review — Alex Cull
Nice review here of Orbus from Alex Cull.
Ever since reading Neal Asher’s The Skinner back in 2003, I have thought that the Prador (a race of enjoyably nasty and warlike crustacean-analogues from deep space) are among some of the best SF baddies to emerge since Terry Nation invented the Daleks. Furthermore I have believed it was high time that they had a whole novel to themselves, more or less, without any danger of the planet Spatterjay’s entertainingly horrible and ruthless oceanic fauna stealing the show. Asher’s 2006 novel Prador Moon came close to accomplishing this, the one caveat being that it was all too short, but at 438 pages, Orbus hits the bull’s-eye.
Interesting Post Chain
I just had a look at Whatever, John Scalzi’s blog which often has interesting stuff about the business of writing. I read this and was intrigued, so went over to the post by Charlie Stross. This then led me to further interesting posts. You can learn a lot here about the processes involved in getting a book into your hands.