Czech Line of Polity.

Here we go, this is the Czech version of The Line of Polity - they've used the original Macmillan wrap-around cover and used it entire on the front. This the third book of mine Polaris have published, after The Skinner and Gridlinked, the first of which won the Salamander Award in that country (best SF book published there in the relevant year) and the second of which was shortlisted for it. I really must get out there one day and pick up that award from them - I'm all for tax-deductible holidays.

First Hilldiggers Review.

Here's the first review of Hilldiggers over at fantasybookcritic by Robert Thompson.

I shall probably do a bit more of this now - linking to reviews and interviews as they appear.

Death's Head.

Well, I know I’m enjoying a book when everything else stops until I’ve completed it. This had its faults, but probably the same faults as mine in that the reader is too hooked into the action to take in all the detail. I was confused about the political set-up here until the end, and the snake heads were right out of Stargate Atlantis, but none of this was enough to distract me for long.

David Gunn’s Death’s Head started off loaded with violent action and horror and continued in that vein, so I was hooked from about page two, then hooked landed gutted and fried in batter as soon as the talking gun put in an appearance. Yeah! Fuck the literarty-farty crap in the SFF world that has the self-proclaimed arbiters of taste creaming their panties. Take those oh-so-worthy tomes and shove ‘em where the sun don’t shine. This took me right back to the fun I had reading E. C. Tubb’s Dumarest saga, Edgar Rice Burroughs John Carter on Mars or the old Robert E Howard Conan books!

Only those were books I enjoyed as a teenager … um, perhaps I haven’t grown up … do I want to? Nah.

Nice to read unpretentious solid cover-to-cover entertainment without any concessions to the pc-focus-group-bullshit age we live in. Nice to read something that isn’t a dreadfully sincere allegory on our times, or a sophomore comment on this that or the other political, social, racial, religious or environmental situation by some prick having an attack of literature.

It's often the way when describing books to compare them to other books, or films - whatever. This I would call Starship Troopers meets Commando.

Great fun.

Prador Moonrise.

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.

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 7^th July 1 - 2pm
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 6^th July.

To pre-order your signed copy of 'Hilldiggers', please view Neal Asher's range of signed books.

Olympic Logo.

Here then is the 2012 Olympic logo. A mere snip at £400,000. Ain't it great to know your money is being spent so wisely? It's animated too. I believe it is supposed to be a cubist representation of a fat pink and naked John Prescott giving head to a similarly naked Tony Blair.

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.

Amazing Grace

Interesting. Keying off of that post below about the barbecue police and my repetition of that ‘don’t believe what you read in the papers’ I should add ‘don’t believe what you see on the big screen’. This weekend back we went to see Amazing Grace which was enjoyable and certainly plucked at the heart strings. However, at the start of the film it states that the British Empire was built on the backs of slaves. No mention there of the ‘jewel in the crown’ … y’know, that place called India. And, hang on, what was this film about? It was about that same fucking empire banning that trade (Wilberforce did not singlehandedly do it). That would be the British Empire that blew more wealth on later suppressing the slave trade than it earlier made from it.

A few days after the film, not being able to remember the name of the guy played by Ioan Gruffud i.e William Wilberforce – the guy the film was all about (it’s our age you know) we looked him up in a biographical dictionary and discovered some interesting facts: Wilberforce died a month before the emancipation bill was passed, so he wasn’t there in Parliament, and Pitt the Younger, who in the film apparently dies just before said act was passed, died 27 years before it.

Dramatic licence or Hollywood rewriting history as it tends to? I mean, we’ve already learned from the dream factory that American troops single-handedly thrashed Germany in the World War II…

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

Prador Moon back cover.

When I received the image of the full dust jacket of Prador Moon I noted that the picture on the back was from Hilldiggers. It was only when I noted it was also on the spine that I queried this. That image was only a mock up so I could see what the front of the book was like. Now, as you see, I’ve received the back cover image for approval. Damn, this is good. I’m thinking now that it really ought to be this one on the front!

Myspace

Well, being the publicity tart that I am, I've now started doing a few bits with a Myspace account I got about two years ago. The profile URL is: http://www.myspace.com/nealasher and the blog Url is: http://blog.myspace.com/nealasher I'm not entirely sure where I'm going to go with this that'll make it any different from what I've already got (I've already copied blog posts across). Anyway, it gives me another excuse not to get on with writing...

Hey, come and be my friend - I'll look a bit sad if there's only one or two listed.

Galactic Empires

Couple of bits here:

Over the last year or so I’ve only written two short stories … or rather novelettes. One of these is called Alien Archaeology which is to be published in Asimov’s sometime hence. I look forward to that one especially, because Brian Beiniowski of that magazine was asking me for a description of a gabbleduck. Apparently they were looking at using the image of one for the front cover, though whether that will happen I don’t know yet.

The other story was called Owner Space. This is set in a future covered by none of my full-length novels, but will be familiar to those who have read The Engineer or The Engineer ReConditioned, for it is the same setting for stories there called Proctors, The Owner and (only in the latter collection) Tiger Tiger. Owner Space has now been accepted by Gardner Dozois for his anthology titled Galactic Empires. Excellent stuff.

And finally, there’s now an interview with me up on fantasybookcritic.

Macmillan Prador Moon.

Time for a pretty picture, which I had hell's own trouble converting from and adobe file. Here then is the cover of the Macmillan British version of Prador Moon. Not sure yet whether it'll be in hardback, but it certainly looks cool!

Update:
What a silly sod I am. The picture here was taken from a picture of a full dust jacket, so of course there's going to be a hard back. Damn, I must drink less wine - brain cells dribbling out of my ears.

If you're religious, cover your eyes now!

I found this joke submitted to the Normal Bob Smith site (link down on the right) by one of his fans. Not to everyone's taste, but I laughed.

Four Nuns die in a car accident and are waiting to get into heaven through the pearly gates.

St Peter, being the gatekeeper, asks if any of them have had anything to do with a man’s penis.

“Yes,” says the first, “I've seen one.”

“Go wash out thine eyes in the holy fountain and yea may enter the gates of heaven.”

“Well, I've touched one,” says the second nun.

“Go wash thine hands in the holy fountain and yea may enter the gates of heaven.”

St Peter now turns to see the last two nuns beating the shit out of each other, so runs over to separate them and demands to know what’s going on.

“Well,” says the third nun, “I want to gargle before she washes out her arse.”

Orson Scott Card on Global Warming.

Here's the raw truth:

All the computer models are wrong. They have not only failed to predict the future, they can't even predict that past.

That is, when you run their software with the data from, say, the 1970s or 1980s, and project what should happen in the 1990s or 2000s, they project results that have absolutely nothing to do with the known climate data for those decades.

In other words, the models don't work. The only way to make them "work" is to take the known results and then fiddle with the software until it finally produces them. That's not how honest science is done.

-- Orson Scott Card


You can read the whole thing here, and very good it is:

http://www.ornery.org/essays/warwatch/2007-03-04-1.html

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