Well, here’s some nice news. According to Jason Williams of Night Shade Books, my gore-fest-of-flesh-eating-aliens book, Prador Moon, is their second-best selling title. I immediately inquired who was their best seller. I don’t mind … I don’t mind coming second best to Ian M Banks. (hur hur) Oh, and here’s another thing that’s been brought to my notice: The Top 10 SF writers of the 00’s. I’m not sure this list means much, but it’s nice to see that someone thinks like this! Final bit of news. I’ve handed in Line War to Macmillan and am now turning my attention to another –short– book for Night Shade’s. This one will be about Cormac’s early years.
Tag: Science Fiction
Cyrillic Gabbleduck.
Here’s the cover of the Russian magazine containing Softly Spoke the Gabbleduck. I can’t remember the name of the mag. Anyone fancy leaping in with translation services again?
Ivan Yakubovich has stepped forwards (comments) to tell me the magazine is simply ‘If’ and is one of the country’s better known and oldest periodicals. Of course I’d been told all this by the editors, but couldn’t find the emails – I really must organize my mails better. Thanks Ivan!
This picture is the one that goes with the story, and is pretty much right too.
Forbidden Planet Signing.
NEAL ASHER
HILLDIGGERS
RRP: £17.99
Our Price: £14.99
Saturday 7th July 1 – 2pm
London Megastore,
179 Shaftesbury Avenue, London WC2H 8JR
London Megastore,
179 Shaftesbury Avenue, London WC2H 8JR
Neal has been writing sci-fi and fantasy since he was 16 years old. He has gained great success and acclaim for his books including the Hadrim trilogy, Gridlinked and The Voyage Of Sable Keech. Hilldiggers continues Neal’s tradition of writing fine space dramas, full of ideas and suspense. This has everything: war, alien technology, destruction and battles for power. What more could you ask for?
All Orders must be placed before 12pm on Friday 6th July.
To pre-order your signed copy of ‘Hilldiggers’, please view Neal Asher’s range of signed books.
More Foreign Covers.
Here’s a couple that were sent to me before we went away. The first is the German Polity Agent — they’ve really caught up there. The title translates as ‘The Gate of Time’ which is maybe easier. The second cover is the Russian version of The Line of Polity. I haven’t attempted to translate it since I’m lacking a Cyrillic keyboard.
Back Again.
Well, we’ve been away for a month on Crete, both holidaying and working, which is one of the great things that you can do when a book can be written anywhere with anything upwards of a pen. Whilst on that wonderful island I did occasionally check the Internet when I got the chance, but felt utterly no inclination to rant here or go mucking about on message boards. There was sun to be soaked up, Retsina to be drunk and a sea to swim in … also there were those ‘shrimps’ out there that back here we call king prawns.
Anyway, whilst checking the Internet I picked up on a couple of bits of news. The first is that I’ve conquered another country. The publisher Eridana in Lithuania is taking on Gridlinked and The Skinner, so that pushes the total of national borders my AG tanks have floated over to a round 10.
Another bit was an email from Gill Mariner. She is a reporter for our local paper The Maldon & Burnham Standard who often does articles about my various achievements. Those articles are always spot-on accurate even if taken from a babbled phone call. This is something you can’t expect from the national papers. Gill sent me the picture here, along with this email:
…so there I was, trekking through the wilds of India, arriving for a couple of days’ stay, weary and covered in dust, at the remote hill fort of Kuchaman (now a fairly rudimentary hotel), towering hundreds of feet up a treacherous zigzag track above the unforgiving deserts of Rajasthan.
I entered a small cave-like room to be greeted by the friendly guardians of the fort.
In that room was a bookshelf offering a small selection of literary offerings to ease the tired minds of the weary travellers . . . and waddaya think?
Yes, The Voyage of the Sable Keech was among them!
Every word of this is true.
Here’s the picture to prove it.
It is, don’t you think, an increasingly small world we live in. There she was in India, there I was on Crete…
Line War First Draft.
There we go, at 5.30 tonight I put ‘ENDS’ below what I’d been labouring over all day, then, despite the fact that I haven’t been particularly abstemious this week, I wandered up the shop and bought a couple of bottles of wine to celebrate. The first draft of Line War is finished and it weighs in at just over 140,000 words. After I’ve finished editing, swapping bits around, extending other bits, cutting bits and generally hacking it into shape the book will almost certainly be larger. It’ll be about the size of either Brass Man or The Skinner. It’s a cause to celebrate because, even though further work lies ahead, the thing itself is done.
I hope you’ll like it.
Asimov's June 2007.
Okay, my story Alien Archaeology is being published in the June 2007 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction. In that story you’ll find a gabbleduck, as depicted on the cover here, prador and homicidal humans – some of them working for the Polity – and what I hope is a ripsnortingly enjoyable tale. In my opinion Asimov’s is one of the very few magazines that delivers a good proportion of the same (but then I would say that). Get over onto their website and take out a subscription!
French Cowl
Excellent, Pocket/Fleuve Noir of the UNIVERS POCHE Group are buying Cowl to publish in France next year. They’ve already bought Gridlinked and The Skinner, the latter of which they’ve already published, but they’re missing Gridlinked to do Cowl, then intend to go with the Polity series afterwards. I look forward to seeing what they do with the covers, since the French cover image for The Skinner – by Stephan Martiniere — is the best yet, I think you’ll agree.
Asimov's Science Fiction.
Here’s some of the blurb from the Asimov’s Science Fiction site for the June issue of the magazine. I’ve yet to see the cover with it’s picture of a gabbleduck, but certainly I’ll post it here the moment it appears!
Popular and prolific British writer Neal Asher gives us a ringside seat for a fast-paced, suspenseful, and violent game of intrigue, double-cross, and double-double-cross, as a hunt for a stolen alien artifact of immense value forces a former agent out of retirement and into a tense chase across interstellar space into hostile landscapes where wiser humans would never dare to venture, with life or death hanging in the balance at every turn, for some hard lessons in “Alien Archeology.” This one is a full-blown, flat-out, unabashed Space Opera, and a thriller of the first water, so don’t miss it! http://www.asimovs.com/_issue_0704/nextissue.shtml
Voyage of the Sable Keech
Okay, time for a pretty picture. This being an author’s blog I’ll start with my most recently published book.
And now the blurb:
It’s highly entertaining and brilliantly imagined stuff, and there can be few readers out there who will fail to enjoy this, and pretty much every other aspect of Asher’s writing. — John Berlyne (SFRevu)
I was ready for a break from real life, and Asher whisked me away without delay. — J. J. S. Boyce (Green Man Review).
No, once you’re plugged in to ‘The Voyage of the Sable Keech’, you’ll want to stay there as long as you can. — Rick Kleffel (The Agony Column)
hardback, trade paperback, mass-market paperback.
The reification Sable Keech, a walking dead man, is the only one to have been resurrected by nanochanger. Did he succeed because he was infected by the Spatterjay virus, or because he came late to resurrection in a tank of seawater? Tracing the man’s journey in a ship also named after him, Taylor Bloc wants to know. He also wants so much else – adulation, power, control – and will go to any lengths to get it. And he has brought the means.
An ancient hive mind, almost incomprehensible to the human race, has sent an agent to the world. Does it want to obtain the poison sprine – effective against those made virtually indestructible by the Spatterjay virus? Janer must find it and stop it.
Erlin, still faced with the ennui of immortality, has her solitude rudely interrupted by a very angry whelkus titanicus, and begins the strangest of journey’s. Captain Ambel’s own journey, from Olian’s – where the currency of death his kept in a vault – is equally as strange. But he must reap the harvest of Erlin’s mistake, and survive.
Deep in the ocean the virus has wrought a terrible change that will affect them all. Something dormant for ten years is breaking free, and once again the aftershocks of an ancient war will focus on this watery world. And Sniper, for ten years the Warden of Spatterjay, finally takes delivery of his new drone shell. It’s much better than his old one: powerful engines, more lethal weapons, thicker armour.
He’s going to need it.
Bear with me here … I’m learning.