Article 18: Who Threw That?

Here's an article I wrote quite some years ago. I probably did it at around about the time films like Armageddon were doing the rounds since it seem likely the reporter or the news story concerned was looking for something 'topical'.

WHO THREW THAT?

So, on February the 1^st 2019 there is a chance, cosmically speaking, of a large lump of rock slamming into Earth. According to ‘expert opinion’, so the media told us on the morning of this announcement, this thing is a mile and half wide and will impact with enough force to wipe out a country the size of Britain. This was then upgraded, within an hour, to be one capable of wiping out the USA – a change I put down to both media hype and a dearth of information. Of course experts will vie with each other to predict greater and greater disasters to get themselves on television, so you can expect by the time you read this that the asteroid will destroy all life on Earth. But then maybe it could. What happens if it hits the oilfields, what changes might it make to the weather, might it perturb Earth’s orbit enough to sling us into an ice age or turn everything to desert? I’m not an expert, so I can’t really say.

At present, measurements are not yet accurate enough to tell us precisely what will happen. The asteroid will probably miss us completely and go round for another try in ex-thousand years time. What is certain is that measurements will become more and more accurate as the asteroid draws closer. Personally, I hope that they show, in the near future, that the asteroid is certain to impact. This is not because I am a nihilist, but because such a state of affairs would impel the kind of hard technological advances not seen since the World Wars. We have the time and ability to stop this thing, but we would have to get off our arses to do so. Such a threat could pump huge amounts of cash, heretofore blown on military spending and idiot bureaucracy, into giving us a firmer foothold in space. Resultant developments would be hugely beneficial and solid – we would not be able to afford the dipstick mistakes that have wasted the last few Mars’ missions – and I can see that how once the rock is blown off course there’ll be no turning back. Suddenly we’ll be dwellers in a huge and hostile universe, not post-Copernican Earthlings. And even those grandads saying, “Well, we didn’t have those new-fangled asteroid thingies in my day,” will have to sit up and take notice.

For the SF writer there are other situations to extrapolate. Taking the phrase ‘capable of wiping-out the USA’ it is almost inevitable that the Bin Ladens of this world will say that it has been sent to do just that. Let me predict that they’ll name the asteroid ‘The Fist of God’, and that fundamentalist terrorists will do everything they can to sabotage any project to change its course. Because there will be no guarantee that the project will be successful, a more careless attitude to life and liberty might prevail. Maybe the Western World would take this opportunity, in the purported interests of humanity, to flatten the Middle East and take control of the oil. Don’t doubt this possibility. It’s worth being reminded that the firepower of a couple of nuclear submarines could do the job. Have people already forgotten what atomic bombs can do, and more specifically, neutron bombs? Perhaps Pakistan and India will take this opportunity to settle their differences – end-of-the-world scenarios being an excuse for all sorts of mayhem. Will China just sit back and watch all this? And, there is always the most unlikely possibility: this could be a unifying influence on the entire planet.

Taking an even larger and more tongue-in-cheek view, one might even wonder about the timing. Consider how fortunate we were to have a moon that strips away atmosphere thus preventing this planet going catastrophically greenhouse and ending up like Venus – a moon that also gives tides so that life developing in the water will certainly also end up on land. Previous impacts wiped out life forms that would not have led to us. The asteroid that drove the dinosaurs extinct ended the 160 million-year reign of creatures that showed no signs of growing brains larger than peanuts. Aptly-timed ice ages then led to the survival of creatures with an interest in banging rocks together. A hundred years ago we would have been unable to do anything about the approaching cataclysm, moreover, probably would not even have detected it.

This is all obviously the determinist 20/20 hindsight of the bible-thumping trench survivor: “God loves me, that’s why the shrapnel took the top off of Harry’s head and not mine.” But it’s just as obvious that the aliens sent this rock, and that we have seventeen years in which to prove ourselves fit to join the galactic community.

Science Fiction Laser Beam Nonsense!

This was passed onto me from my brother Bob. It's on Tom's Guide.

In September, we reported that Boeing successfully defeated a ground target using its Advanced Tactical Laser aircraft. Now the company has shown its laser prowess again by tracking and destroying small, unmanned aerial vehicles in the air. A single laser beam, fired by the U.S. Air Force-sponsored Mobile Active Targeting Resource for Integrated eXperiments (MATRIX), shot down five UAVs at various ranges.
Squids in space next maybe?

My Books in America

A comment on the previous post is one I've been reading a lot from American readers. It is, apparently, difficult to obtain my books over there. The first reason for this is that Tor US doesn't publish them all, it's a shame, but what can I do?

However, some while ago someone directed my attention to The Book Depository which states on its website Free worldwide delivery on every book. If you go on there and stick my name in the search you get most of my books, and they're even discounted. For example, you can buy a copy of Gridlinked, in its nice new cover, for £4.75 including postage and packing. Still suspicious I checked out the 'to these location' bit and the USA is there. In fact there's a huge list of countries there. They also use Paypal.

Now, I haven't used The Book Depository myself so don't know how good it is or how true the promises on the website. I believe others have used it and been satisfied. Please, if any of you reading this do buy books through them, let me know how it went.

More Books!

Having seen my previous post Dave Robotham tells me I may be biased as I am a huge fan of your books but I go out of my way to make sure we have all of your backlist in stock and sent me the picture below from a week ago to prove the point.




Dave is the assistant manager of both branches of Waterstone's in Woking and tells me that since this picture The Engineer Recondition is back in stock as well as Runcible Tales, and that Cowl is flying off the shelves in its new jacket. So, if any of you reading this are in the Woking area, go buy books in Waterstones!

Books!

Whilst down this way last summer my brother Bob took a photo in Waterstones in Chelmsford. He thought I might like it. The bugger knows me too damned well; of course I like it!

The Departure.

Okay, a little while ago I finished The Departure, wrote a couple of synopses and some blurbs for it, then sent it off to Macmillan. Good response from the commissioning editor (bloody marvelous). Here’s one of the blurbs for you:

Like Wellsian war machines the shepherds stride into riots to grab up the ringleaders and drag them off to Inspectorate HQ for adjustment, unless they are in shredding mode, in which case their captives visit community digesters, or rather whatever of them has not been washed down the street drains.

Pain inducers are used for adjustment, and soon the Committee will have the power to edit human minds, but not yet, twelve billion human beings need to die before Earth can be stabilized, but by turning large portions of Earth into concentration camps this is achievable, especially when the Argus satellite laser network comes fully online…

Alan Saul has taken a different route to disposal, waking as he does inside a crate on the conveyor into the Calais incinerator. How he got there he does not know, but he does remember the pain and the face of his interrogator. Janus speaks to Saul through the hardware implanted in his skull, sketching the nightmare world for him. And Saul decides to bring it all crashing down…

Not sure if this is what will be appearing on the back of the book, but it gives you a taste of what it’s all about.

Water on the Moon.

Remember NASA dropping spacecraft on the moon with the intent of analysing the dust plume created? It was all very disappointing for those accustomed to Hollywood CGI mega-bangs and received a fair bit of ridicule in the papers. Well, it was an experiment whose importance and results is immediately apparent to anyone like me, and readers here.

A small NASA spacecraft and its companion rocket did indeed strike water when they slammed into a permanently shadowed crater at the moon’s south pole, NASA announced November 13.

Water available on the moon means the possibility of a base like the one depicted in that old series Space 1999. And we're not talking about a bit of damp here:

But analyses since then reveal that the impact kicked up at least 100 kilograms of water vapor and ice, or 25 gallons. LCROSS project scientist Anthony Colaprete of the NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif., reported the finding during a briefing at Ames.

Go read the whole article at Science News.

Friday 13th

Well, Friday 13th this year has lived up to its reputation. All through the day the weather was grey, miserable, pissing down and then, in the afternoon, a knock at the door. Our next door nieghbour Heidi was stopping off to tell us that she's had her cat, Basil, put down. This is the cat who, the moment he moved in next door, clambered over into our garden and came to say hello. Thereafter his visits were constant; every morning we'd find him waiting at the back door. So, coming back from Crete on the 10th we were looking forward to seeing various people, and him. We did see him, but he was a bit slower, looked a bit older. Little did we know we were going to see him for such a short time. He had pancreatic cancer that had also spread through his body - no real escape from that one, I know since it was what got my father. Damn, bugger and fuck, which is probably a mere fraction of what Heidi is feeling now.

Fallout.

Here's a couple of books I read recently, both with generally the same theme: those who once considered or a certain political persuasion discovering that they no longer recognize their own political club. Their club has become authoritarian, turned the word 'liberal' into a dirty word and has devalued the word 'racism'. Following through on its hate of Western civilization (though mainly America) and an ill-defined guilt about being born there, it also now supports, by making it an offense even to criticise them, fascist fundamentalists who oppress women, would kill homosexuals and aim to crush us all under a hellish theocratic regime. Through multiculturalism it has created divisions in society, reinforced by positive discrimination, which is 'discrimination' still. All those battles fought by the lib/left for women's rights, homosexual rights, for freedom and against racism, all turned on their head and thrown away.

Of the two I find the Andrews' book clearer and more cogent. Both books, however, have the power to make you angry by neatly collating and slapping down in black and white those things you probably already know. Unless you're still a member of that club, that is.

Jain Technology in Action

I received an email from one Fredrik Fottland some while ago and only recently got round to looking at the link he provided.

"Just watched this shortfilmish, and could not help thinking about Jain technology"

Here then is a link to Steel Life by Mathieu Gerard.

More Orbus Stuff

There were a few reviews I had intended to mention here before but, operating out of an Internet cafe for the last eight months, I found it difficult to put together the information to post here. Next year I'm going to definitely have Internet out in Crete, despite the cost.

Okay, first up has to be this one over at Walker of Worlds (Mark Chitty) . It being 10/10 I guess you can understand why I like it. Then there's Meirion's review over at Book Geeks which is gratifying because here's a first-time reader of my stuff.

But, if these are far too nice for you, go find the Strange Horizons review of Orbus, for the 'this is shit because he's not politically correct, the book is bloated and he's a crap writer'.

Conflicts.

Ian Whates, who edited the Subterfuge anthology published October 2008 will be producing another one called Conflicts due for publication in April. Here, as of two weeks ago is the provisional running order:

Psi.Copath – Andy Remic

The Maker’s Mark – Michael Cobley

Sussed – Keith Brooke

The Cuisinart Effect – Neal Asher

Harmony in My Head – Rosanne Rabinowitz

Our Land – Chris Beckett

Fallout – Gareth L. Powell

Proper Little Soldier – Martin McGrath

War Without End – Una McCormack

Dissimulation Procedure – Eric Brown

In the Long Run – David L. Clements

Last Orders – Jim Mortimore

Songbirds – Martin Sketchley

Maybe there’ll be another of those signed limited editions as there was with Subterfuge. I’ll let you know more about this when I know too. But maybe Ian is a bit busy since he acquired John Jarrold as an agent last year and is involved with Ian Watson producing The Mammoth Book of Alternate Histories…

Art Competition

Here's some more for the art competition both from Ivan Halen Semeria in Montpellier France.

Just a note on all the pictures submitted over the last year: I'll be taking a fresh look at them all at the end of the month and choosing the winner and runners up. Cheers!

Nova War

Righto, Macmillan kindly provided me with a copy of Gary Gibson’s Nova War. It should be enough to say that on the first day of picking it up I was busy and only read it for an hour or so, but on the second day I polished off the rest of the book. There’s a prison sequence in this that did seem to drag a bit, but not enough to make me abandon the book, nowhere near, otherwise it kicked along very nicely. For those of you that read and enjoyed the book before this, Stealing Light, here’s more of the good stuff. The title should give you a clue about how Gibson has upscaled the demolition. For those of you that haven’t read Stealing light, and who enjoy massive, violent balls-out sensawunda space opera, I suggest you go out and buy it, then read Nova War.

Here you have the Shoal, who control FTL technology and consequently rule a large portion of the galaxy because other races, without FTL, have become their clients. But these deep sea fish lied about being the only ones with FTL, of course they did, lying seems par for the course with a race whose arch manipulator has named itself ‘Trader in the faecal matter of animals’ (bullshit to the uninitiated). Now the Emissaries are on the scene and it’s beginning to look like Nova War is unavoidable. Oh bugger.

More Art Comp Pictures

Prador Second Child here from Mayo.

Orbus Reviews

Orbus seems to have been well received. Nice to see it sitting at the top of the Amazon New and Future Releases chart (Science Fiction) for a couple of weeks, and nice to see the response on Amazon from various fans. There will, of course, inevitably be a one star review on there from Mr Bitterly Disappointed of Tooting Beck, or from Mr Why Won’t They Publish Me You Bastard! But I’m used to filtering the bile for odd nuggets of gold.

In SFX Dave Langford says of Orbus:

As usual, Asher delivers a satisfying space opera full of adrenaline highs. Orbus may get the title role, but Vrell and wise-cracking Sniper steal he show. Fast-paced fun.

Whilst Shaun Davis in SciFi Now is less complimentary with his three star review but finishes with:

… but battle-hardened readers will be having too much of a blast to mind the odd slip into tedium. This is because each battle is, especially the final one, is written in a crazed fashion. Rail-guns rattle off, pulse rifles fire out shots and explosions ring out. This is what Asher does best, and in that respect Orbus succeeds in reaffirming the importance of Spatterjay in his body of work.

Nice enough, but have to wonder how this reviewer can describe Orbus’s past as dull…


Oh, and by the way, I haven’t seen many more entries to the Art Competition, which I’ll be judging in November. Art comp link: http://theskinner.blogspot.com/2009/03/calling-all-artists.html

Dead Tomorrow

I’ve just finished reading Dead Tomorrow by Peter James. I was introduced to this guy when his then editor Steph Bierwerth handed over a copy of Dead Simple whilst I was visiting the Macmillan offices in London. That first book was one of those that leaves you out of breath by the time you finish it and I enjoyed it immensely. I passed it on to my father-in-law who also enjoyed it and has been buying subsequent books by him. Caroline has also been enjoying these ‘Dead’ books, the ‘Roy Grace Series’ but agreed with me that a couple of them seemed a little flat which, from other reading, I see can be a problem when a writer confines himself to one location and one set of characters.

This is definitely not the case with Dead Tomorrow. There were no moments of ‘get on with it’ as James racked up the tension and kept me focused all the way through. The story, concerning organ trafficking and viewed from every angle – from the unwilling donors, the recipients and from the police, had an ugly fascination. A reminder that we are actually entering the kind of world hinted at in some SF books (Larry Niven’s Organleggers spring to mind). Recommended.

Later I’ll be taking a look at a book I’ve been looking forwards to, and which Macmillan have just sent: Nova War by Gary Gibson.

Tennis Playing Cyber Monkeys!

Bugger, despite my promise I've failed to write in here as often as I should. I have failed, for example, to mention the Guardian article in which I'm included as one of the 'New British Space Opera' crowd with a great line in tennis playing cyber monkeys (I forget the exact wording). So what's impelled me to write in here now? For the first time with any of my books I'm in an Amazon number one spot -- new releases/science fiction. Every damned time before I've been in second place to Banks, Pratchet (who shouldn't be in SF) or some Dr Who tie-in. This time Orbus has done it for me, so celebration time!

Writing News Update.

Sorry not to have written here for so long, and I promise to try to do better in the future. Things have been getting in the way, like, as well as writing books I’ve been doing lots of work on our house here: making new doors; chiselling out and repointing the front wall which, under the about a half inch thick of old pointing, is mostly held together with mud, making a concrete skirting along the bottom of the wall, making trellises and a grape arbour, oh, and swimming and drinking too much wine.

So, over the last few months I’ve completed the first draft, at 150,000 words, of the next book and finally settled on a title. It will be called The Departure and will be the first book in The Owner series (whose length is yet to be decided). This tells the the story implicit in the title of the Owner’s early years (short stories about the Owner are to be found in The Engineer ReConditioned) in which he begins his gradual climb to godlike power.

Finally having managed to get this printed off I’m leaving it to Caroline to read through before I again take a look at it. Hopefully by then I’ll have distanced myself from it enough to be able to see the glaring errors.

Meanwhile I’ve started on Gabbleducks – the third book of this latest three-book contract for Macmillan. Thus far I have the only living survivor of a hooder attack trying to recover his sanity. Polity medical technology would be able to sort him out in a trice, were it not for the fact that the AIs are reluctant to meddle with his mind since the hooder that attacked him was a near mythical creature called The Technician, and it did something to him that even they don’t quite understand. Also there are other circumstances surrounding this attack, which happened during the rebellion against the Theocracy on Masada, like the presence of a gabbleduck at the scene, and how it may or may not have been involved.

I’m having fun with this one. With the an odd character called Chanter who pursues The Technician in his mudmarine, trying to understand the grotesque sculptures of bones the creature makes with its victim’s remains, trying to understand its art… And, since the whole investigation of all this involves insanity, who better to head the investigation than a war drone who has experienced this condition and now takes great interest in it – a war drone with the shape of a scorpion, and who may be accompanied by a black AI previously thought to be dead.
He must explore the insanity of a race called the Atheter who apparently sacrificed civilization and intelligence to avoid becoming victims of an alien technology, and the insanity of a man called Jeremiah Tombs, an erstwhile Proctor – one of the religious police of Masada – who refuses to remember what happened to him, refuses to even believe the Theocracy has fallen, and has a very strange interest in the Euclidean patterns on the shells of the penny molluscs of that world…

Don’t ask me where all this is going. If I knew I wouldn’t have so much fun writing it. I can promise excessive weirdness and violence, however.

Letters to Athens News

Here's some I've letters sent to Athens News, a paper in English focusing mainly on Greek news:


Dear Sir,

A previous writer to this paper expressed disappointment at the ‘windows’ in the coming smoking ban here in Greece. This person was apparently looking forward ‘with bated breath’ to the time when he or she could go into a taverna, bar or club without the result of ‘stinging eyes, my clothes and hair stinking and the air suffocating me’. I have to say I read and heard much of the same sort of hysterical nonsense prior to the British smoking ban: many non-smokers shouting about their ‘right’ not to have these dirty, evil smokers inflicted upon them. These vocal anti-smokers also happily repeated the propaganda of the government and organizations it funds, like ASH, which stated that there would be no loss of trade to pubs and clubs because the smokers leaving such establishments would be replaced the non-smokers flocking back. However, we see the true results of the British ban now.

Prior to that ban, in 2007, the rate of pub closure across Britain was four every week. After the ban it rose to twenty-seven every week as all those belligerent anti-smokers failed to return to the pubs. Many bingo halls and working men’s clubs have also gone to the wall, and tens of thousands of those previously employed in all such places lost their jobs. Many pubs even lost non-smoker customers because they didn’t want to go to places now empty of their smoker friends. For those who have hung on we even have the ridiculous situation of non-smokers following smokers outside so they will still have someone to talk to. And perhaps they are right to go outside because, as many discovered, the smells from the toilets and the stale beer are now no longer disguised by the smell of cigarette smoke.

Outside, of course, they might also spot the owner of the pub who, having paid hundreds of thousands for the place, now cannot smoke a cigarette on his own premises. Such blanket bans are totalitarian – the bar owners should be the ones to decide whether or not they will allow smoking. The justification, of course, is ‘health’ and the lies about passive smoking. The reality is that only politicized ‘science’ came up with any figures on passive smoking and, as has already been proven by bans elsewhere, they in no way reduce the number of smokers. And those inflicting such bans are utterly two-faced, as we know by the smoking room at the London G7 Conference, and the failure to enforce non-smoking in the European Parliament.

The smoking ban in Britain was an unmitigated disaster for the pub trade and, if enforced in the same way here, it will kill tavernas, clubs, kafenions and restaurants. No arguments: people will go out of business, jobs will be lost, the government will lose revenue and more freedom will be destroyed by an autocratic state.

Sincerely

Neal Asher

Crete.

Dear Sir,

A blossom from a hot pink bourgainvilla blew in through the front window and settled in my lap. It was dried out like ricepaper and it almost seemed to me that Crete was saying, “Sorry, this is the only consolation I have to offer.” Before considering that this might be a keepsake – something as insubstantial to remember this restaurant by as the promise of a politician – I ground it to dust on the tablecloth. None of the owners or waiters saw or complained, since they were sitting at one of the few outside tables smoking cigarettes they weren’t allowed to smoke on their own property.

Yes, the smoking ban has arrived in Greece, and the bansturbators have won another battle for totalitarianism. I wrote a letter to this paper before about it and there they were, whingeing about their clothes smelling of cigarette smoke after they’ve been in a bar, totally ignoring the point that in many cases their choice is likely to be a bar that allows smoking or no bar at all.
So, there you have it: until such a time as I see ashtrays back on the tables of this restaurant I have enjoyed for a couple of years, I won’t be eating there. It’s a shame but what can I do? Just as so many pub owners (or rather, erstwhile pub owners) have discovered in Britain, a lot of people don’t protest loudly enough, but given the opportunity always vote with their feet.
I wish I was living in a British or a Greek democracy but, really, in Europe democracy drew its last terminal-smoker asthmatic breath about twenty years ago as the EU project built up momentum.

Understand this, Cretans, in five years time there will be no smoking licences and there will be no exceptions, and the bansturbators will be after your raki next. Do you for one moment think all those stills, all that unregistered, unmonitored and most importantly, untaxed fun is in any way part of the EU plan?

Sincerely,

Neal Asher