My Other Stuff -- Updated

Further additions here you’ll find down near the bottom. Two books published by Ian Whates of Newcon Press. The publication of Lockdown Tales was where I also discovered the excellent artwork of Vincent Sammy, who I got to do the new covers you’ll find here. 

Since being taken on by Macmillan I’ve published over 30 books, but not all of them are from that publisher. I’m not a writer who had instant success with a big publisher. As I have noted elsewhere, I climbed every step of the ladder, sometimes with people stepping on my fingers. I’ve had numerous short stories published in magazines that no longer exist now, novellas and collections similarly launched by ‘small presses’ that went to the wall, and others that didn’t and are still selling some of my old stuff.

All of this happened before the advent of Kindle and Amazon’s POD (print-on-demand) books. I went from sending stuff by post along with return postage to that excellent invention called email. Wow! I could send stuff without having to print it out! Though, admittedly, at the time small presses insisted on hard copy before any emailing happened. Then, as now, there were many wannabe writers who would have created an email deluge.

Anyway, since being taken on by Macmillan I’ve published a fair bit of this earlier stuff on Amazon. Recently, because I could, I published a 21,000 word novella called The Bosch, and again discovered there are plenty of fans who don’t know about ‘My Other Stuff’.

I’ll go through, kinda, in order of original publication. The first that was not a short story was a novella I originally titled To Die But Once. I’d found out about a press aiming to sell airport short reads called ‘Club 199’ and sent this effort of to them. It surprised the hell out of me to get an offer for it of £1,000 and I snatched it up. The novella (45,000 words) was duly published but then, not long after and (I think) due to changes in the ‘Net Book Agreement’, Club 199 went down the pan. I didn’t much like their title change to Mindgames:Fool’s Mate either because it reads like an observation. Up in my loft I have about twenty or so of the originals in shrink wrap – bought from a distributor who tracked me down in later years. I may sell them off one day.

Mindgames: Fool’s Mate

Jason Carroll, an ex SAS soldier and contract killer is convinced he will die in action. It is thus embarrassing when he is run over by a bus. It is even more embarrassing when he, an atheist, realises there is an afterlife…Resurrected on a huge flat plain, he is forced to play a deadly game. Moved as a pawn to the whim of the Gods in a fight to the death with warriors from all ages of earth’s history. Killed again and again only to be resurrected.

The General, the Grim Reaper and Anubis are some of the strange beings who direct this grisly entertainment. Is it real or only in his decaying mind. Who is the Clown? It there anywhere to escape to?

While this was being published I was banging out stories to those small magazines when a new small press called Tanjen took an interest. First up they published a 40,000 words novella called The Parasite. After that they published a collection of short stories called The Engineer. Tanjen was another of those small publishers that went to the wall. The Engineer is still published by Wildside Press in the US (available here too) but under the new title The Engineer ReConditioned with a couple of extra stories. The Parasite I published myself – again in a generic cover.

The Engineer ReConditioned

After mining complex ices deep in the Solar System, Jack Smith is concerned about his profit margin, but is it him who doesn’t want to face quarantine or something squirming inside him? The Cryon Corporation Director, Geoffry Haven, is also concerned about the bottom line and might consider Jack an expense he can no longer afford, though perhaps suitable for a starring role in a snuff movie. Meanwhile, the human and unhuman agents of World Health must investigate. Perhaps it’s time to deploy vat-grown killers and an anti-photon weapon, because the parasite is coming to Earth, and it’s hungry.

The Parasite was first published by Tanjen Ltd as an illustrated novella back in 1996. Tanjen closed down a number of years later and since then the novella has been difficult if not impossible to obtain. There are copies out there, but checking recently I haven’t seen one for below $50.00, which is a hell of a lot for something only 130 pages long and perhaps only for completists. I’ve edited it again, thought I haven’t been too heavy-handed since I didn’t want to deliver something that had completely ceased to be the original. This is my first attempt at self-publishing through Amazon Kindle. I hope you all enjoy it!

“Once again, Neal Asher gives his reader a meal of such exquisite taste that you’re left like Oliver, desiring more.” – Authortrek

The Parasite

Mysterious aliens … ruthless terrorists … androids with attitude … genetic manipulation … punch-ups with lasers … giant spaceships … what more could you want? This great collection of 10 short stories by the author of Gridlinked, The Skinner, In the Line of Polity, and many more is a great read!

I also, at some point, did a couple of longish stories called Africa Zero and The Army of God and the Sauraman. These were first published in a magazine, but are now published under the single title Africa Zero by Wildside Press. Only available in paperback I think.

Africa Zero

The novellas Africa Zero and Africa Plus One in one book. The Collector rampages across a far future Africa populated with gene-spliced vampires, resurrected mammoth, and nutters with APWs. But he can handle it.

In the late nineties, still looking to find homes for my stories, I came across a publisher called Piper’s Ash and sent them a few stories. They published five short stories under the title Runcible Tales and kept on selling this little chapbook even after I was taken on by Macmillan. When they too finally went to the wall I stuck that on Amazon too:

Runcible Tales

  

This is a ‘chapbook’ of five short stories so not very long (about 30,000 words). It consists of: Always With You – Webster engages on a mission to destroy a Prador planet breaker. It helps if you have Horace Blegg on your side, and an internal medic, but are these enough to overcome overwhelming odds? Blue Holes and Bloody Waters – marine biologist Karl finds that humans haven’t quite adapted enough – or have they? Features the first mention of the retro Anti-Grav cars featured in “Gridlinked” that I have come across Dragon in the Flower – Ian Cormac’s first encounter with Dragon – this is printed word-for-word in “Gridlinked”, so this should be the Runcible Tale most familiar to Neal Asher readers The Gire and the Bibrat – Telepath John Tennyson is given more than a helping hand by Agent Prime Cause in his search for the location of a scream… Walking John and Bird – John Walker consults Horace Blegg and Dragon with questions concerning his link with Bird, a seemingly invincible entity. Trouble is, especially where Dragon is concerned, he may not like the answers.

Another small collection was Mason’s Rats. These three short stories were first published in a magazine, then published in the form of a booklet the editor of that mag distributed at an SF convention for publicity. Yup, those too, though you can only get them on kindle as the amount of text is too small for POD.

Mason’s Rats

With the above I’d about caught up with the novellas and collections. However, I still had (and still have) numerous short stories that need a home. To that end I put together a collection of them called Owning the Future – this title because some are set in the ‘Owner’ universe of my books, some in the Polity and some elsewhere.

Owning the future

I have a varied collection of short stories in my files and, of course, the temptation is there to dump them on Kindle, take the money and run. However, though I think some of them are great, some aren’t, and some are profoundly dated. I am aware that there are those out there, who will just buy these without a second thought, so I have to edit, be selective, and I damned well have to show some respect for my readers. Kindle in this respect can be a danger for a known writer, because you can publish any old twaddle and someone will buy it. Time and again, I’ve had fans, upon hearing that I have this and that unpublished in my files, demanding that I publish it at once because surely they’ll love it. No they won’t. A reputation is like trust: difficult to build and easy to destroy. I’ve therefore chosen stories other people have published here and there, and filled in with those I really think someone should have published. Here you’ll find some Polity tales, some that could have been set in the Polity (at a stretch) and some from the bleak Owner universe. Enjoy! Neal Asher 04/06/18

One outlier people may not know about is a short story, published in my collection for Macmillan The Gabble, that they put out for publicity by itself. This is Snow in the Desert.

Snow in the Desert

In the parched, arid wastes of this far-flung Polity world, Snow is being hunted. With a prize on his head and his life in danger, trust is a luxury he can’t afford. Hirald, pale and deadly in the blistering heat, is an ambiguous presence. But who is she? What does she want from him?

Mankind has sought Snow’s secret for thousands of years, and blood will flow in the desert before it’s revealed.

Snow in the Desert is compelling, brutal and lingers long after the final word: the perfect introduction to Neal Asher’s Polity universe fiction.

Next up is that novella I mentioned above The Bosch. This was a story that sprang from a weird dream followed by picking up a Hieronymus Bosch art book in the early morning before I’d properly woken up. The dream state transfers over somewhat to the writing.

The Bosch

Being ahead of my publishing schedule a few years back I turned to writing short stories again, but found on the whole they were turning into novellas. For most of them I had plenty of time on my hands because I was writing them in the midst of lockdown. It then seemed a good idea to publish them as a collection called:

Lockdown Tales

Of course the fucking lockdowns went on for a lot longer than they should have, well, in fact they shouldn’t have happened at all. In that time I wrote some more novellas which, inevitably, because the collection:

Lockdown Tales II

And still, after all this, I had loads of stuff left in my files. I’m known for science fiction and that work ends up as a book or in some story collection. But as over the years I scrabbled around to find my opening I also wrote fantasy and other stuff that doesn’t comfortably take a label. These stories were mouldering on my hard drive for years and it was time to scrub them up and put them out there. I included in this the three Mason’s Rats stories because in themselves they’re not enough to make a POD book, and the story Bad Travelling – these you may have seen on Tim Miller’s ‘Love, Death and Robots’ on Netflix. In all the collection is not just SF or just fantasy, but it is:

Fantastical

So there we are up to date. I have no doubt I’ll be updating this again in the future when I start churning out something more than my books for Macmillan. Not for a while, however, I’m stuck into writing a huge trilogy at the moment.

Cheers!

Where do I Start? - Updated

As the number of my published books has climbed people have often asked me, ‘Where do I start?’ to which, over the last few years I’ve been answering with the original version of this article. Things have moved on now and there are books I have to add. With the total now at plus 30 books I guess it can be a daunting prospect for the new reader, but I understand why many want to start when they see the enthusiasm of those who have been reading for some time. And it is to those long-time fans I turn to for anecdotal guidance.

But first let me give you some idea of what these books (also novellas and short stories), are all about. Many of the books set in the ‘Polity’. This is a future in which AIs control the ‘Human Polity’ – a vast civilization taking up a large portion of the galaxy. Books about this future form the main body of my work, which consists of series, trilogies and ones that stand alone. I have also written books outside of the Polity set in other futures, but there are not so many of them. These are The Owner Trilogy – a dystopian near future – a one-off time-travel book called Cowl, and a few novellas published before I was taken on by Macmillan. The only books where you will find these futures are mixed together, is in some short story collections.

The Owner Trilogy

 

My fans often tell me of which books introduced them to my work. Quite often they will have picked up something in the middle of a series and, enjoying that, moved on to the rest to discover the order of the books. Others, who read my books from the beginning, prefer publication order, but publication order is not the series, or chronological order of this future. For example, publication order of the first books with Macmillan was: Gridlinked (Cormac book 1), The Skinner (Spatterjay book 1), The Line of Polity (Cormac book 2), Cowl (stand-alone time-travel), Brass Man (Cormac book 3) and The Voyage of the Sable Keech (Spatterjay book 2). So you can see they’re a bit all over the place. To add confusion, while these were being published, I also wrote and published two books for Night Shade Books in the US, which were later published in the UK. These were Prador Moon (A Polity prequel) and Shadow of the Scorpion (A Cormac prequel).

Cowl

Now, putting aside the fact that some prefer The Owner trilogy to the Polity books, or prefer Cowl, I’ll concentrate on the Polity books because with those is where confusion arises:

The consensus of opinion I have gleaned from social media, is that you should start either right at the beginning with Prador Moon and then follow through chronologically, or you should read the first two series I wrote. The latter means: starting from Gridlinked and reading the Cormac series, then starting with The Skinner and reading the Spatterjay series. Actual chronological order I’ll put below.

However (there’s always one of those), in the chronology of the Polity future, the Spatterjay trilogy comes after trilogies I wrote later – Transformation and Rise of the Jain. But some feel it better to read the Spatterjay trilogy (after the Cormac series) before moving onto Transformation and Rise of the Jain because my writing has changed over time and you will have a better grasp of the ones written later by reading those written earlier.

Sorry if that confused you – I’m trying to be as clear as possible.

So here, for your edification, is the chronological order of the earlier books as they lie in this Polity future, but not the order in which I wrote them. I am leaving out three that can be inserted into this order until the end of this article for reasons I’ll detail then:

Prador Moon

A war between the Polity and the alien prador is often referred to in the later books. This prequel tells a story about its beginning. It’s a short action read and a good introduction that does not have the complications of the later books.

Shadow of the Scorpion

This prequel tells the story of Ian Cormac growing into adulthood. He goes from childhood to military service in the ruination left by the prador-human war, is haunted by memories of his missing father and by the mysterious intermittent presence of a scorpion war drone.

Cormac Series

 

Cormac is now an agent of Earth Central Security. He starts being gridlinked i.e. had computer hardware in his skull linking him to the AI net, but is taken offline to recover his humanity as he investigates threats to humanity: separatists terrorists, a giant alien probe called Dragon, and ancient lethal alien Jain technology. The books are: Gridlinked, The Line of Polity, Brass Man, Polity Agent and Line War. 

The Technician

 

This stand-alone Polity book tells the story set on the planet Masada, which appeared in The Line of Polity. It concerns the Atheter race who committed a form of racial suicide by sacrificing their intelligence two million years ago, a biomech war machine they left behind and an even more dangerous mechanism left to ensure their choice.

 The Transformation Trilogy

A character in The Technician is the black AI called Penny Royal. This trilogy concerns a resurrected soldier from the war seeking to avenge an atrocity committed by Penny Royal during that conflict, restitution and absolution, and apotheosis.

The Rise of the Jain 

At the end of the Cormac series the haiman (a combination of AI and human) Orlandine is woken up by Dragon after two hundred years frozen. They have a job to do, which is to guard the Polity against an infestation of Jain technology in an accretion disk. Together they create a defence of thousands of giant weapons platforms, but Orlandine’s idea to hoover up the Jain tech using a black hole might not be the best one she had. . .

Spatterjay

Three travellers arrive on the oceanic planet Spatterjay, where humans are immortal and very tough by dint of a virus imparted by the leeches of that world, where living sails make contracts with the Old Captains on the ships and an ancient war drone called Sniper is growing bored. They are Janer, who carries the eyes of a hornet hive mind, Erlin who wants to find an Old Captain to teach her how to live, and Sable Keech a policeman who hasn’t allowed being dead for seven hundred years get in the way of hunting down villains. Things are about to turn nasty, what with the old enemy the prador and evil the Skinner arising.

Hilldiggers

A Polity ambassador arrives in a system where a terrible war once raged between the two rival planets where the human inhabitants have ‘adapted’ to their worlds. He knows that during their war, one side captured a bizarre object suspected of being a cosmic superstring and is investigating. It is stored in the four Ozark cylinders of a massively secure space station in orbit. A woman fell pregnant while conducting research on this alien entity they now call ‘the Worm’, and gave birth to quads. Grown up now, one of this exceptional breed seems determined to gain total control of the deadly hilldiggers – giant dreadnoughts used to end that war.

The Gabble

 

And here’s a collection of short stories mostly set in the Polity and often related to the events above. It can fill in some nerdish detail but it can also be a starting point if short stories are your thing.

Now onto those three books I mentioned earlier. Obviously, necessitating this article and with a mass of books like mine, the points of entry come at the start of series and trilogies and with stand alone books. I know from my publisher that with a series the sale of books steadily declines the further into a series you go. People pick them up and seeing ‘book two of so-and-so’ put them aside again. As a partial remedy to this I decided to write three stand alone books throughout my last contract. These points of access are scattered through the Polity chronology:

Jack Four

With this book I decided to get away from the highly technical, the clash of massive space dreadnoughts and invasive alien technology to tell the tale of a clone handed over to the prador for experimentation. It tracks his search for vengeance and identity and while including the usual weird alien life is on a more personal level. 

Weaponized

This is the tale of a colonization attempt that occurs just prior to the prador-human war. As such it falls at about the same time as prador moon. The colony world is a hostile one with a particularly vicious predator apparently missed in the initial survey, and is cut off by the start of the war. The colonists must adapt in ways that take them beyond the human and, while doing so, discover how they have been manipulated by Polity AIs.

                                                                       War Bodies

                                            

On his Cyberat home world, during a rebellion, Piper discovers the abilities his parents bred into him. These are also of interest to the Polity people who have arrived to close a back door into the Polity the prador might use. His destiny is to face a much more dangerous enemy than the Old Guard of the oppressive regime he grew up under. 

So there you have it. You can follow through chronologically or you can sort of go by publication order. I leave it up to you. I will add, that from a recent discussion on all this, that for many readers it did not matter where they started. I’ve seen those that started from the end of the Cormac series with Line War, others who started with Dark Intelligence. In general, if you enjoy my writing, it doesn’t matter too much. You will find your way.

Happy reading!