TheGreyArea.

I’ve been a bit wary of including some people in my ‘friends’ list on myspace. There seem to be many bands on myspace and, really, I’m not going to include people just to up the number of my friends in this weird cyberspace popularity contest. To get included on my list a person needs to at least show some interest in SFF, writing or even better, have my name down in his or her books section. When this guy contacted me I thought, especially upon seeing a complete lack of a book section on his page, ah, another band-on-the-make, but he soon disabused me of that notion by directing me to his ‘Influences’. Miguel Vella TheGreyArea. He, his daughter and his wife Wendy then turned up at my Forbidden Planet signing where they got one of the staff to take this picture (I’m the ugly one on the left ... and see that big stack of books to the left of me?). Both of them are fans, and on this occasion he sprang this as a surprise on her, since she didn't even know why he’d taken her into the store.

Cheers guys – nice to see you!

Lakeside Waterstones.

Ahah, Caroline was out on a reconnoitre of Lakeside for me today as this mobile phone image proves...

Article 3: Cities in Flight.

CITIES IN FLIGHT.

There seems a belief, ascribed to by many of those writing short science fiction today, that nothing of importance happens unless it is set in the ‘mean streets’ of some city. On the whole the works stemming from this will be based on some student or other urbanite living a squalid existence in a seedy flat, while experiencing either relationship problems, or angst about an inability to have a relationship at all. Often, the writers are displaying a lack of imagination by casting themselves in the lead role in the only setting they have experienced. From the other side, there are many writers of fantasy who cannot step away from the image of their characters questing through the wilderness or some agrarian idyll, though that usually stems only from the secondhand experience gained throught the books they have read. Getting back to the cities though: are the writers of much urban science fiction nowadays suffering from the same delusion as the fantasy writers?

Cities and the country bleed into each other. There are towns, villages, single houses and an infinite combination of everything inbetween; industrial sites in the country; city parks; wastelands being reclaimed by nature; connecting rivers and transport systems; and, fuckit, urban foxes. And of course in both directions there is a continuous exchange of people: wide varieties of commuters and ‘overspill’ and many so-called ‘country’ people moving into the cities to work. The dividing line, unfortunately, is near illusory, perceived mainly by resentful minds. Cities no longer have impenetrable walls around them with gates that are closed up at night and the countryside is no longer filled with Barny Hayseed clones chewing on straws and muttering about ‘tham thar towny buggers’. This perception displays the same blinkered vision as the present urban government, which legislates for cities and against the country – damaging those millions dwelling in between and polarising the attitude of many others – or of those dwellers in a time warp, the fox hunting lobby, who manage to piss off all camps.

Britons live in a huge and wonderful variety of environments. Along our coasts there are many people who have tried to opt out by living in their boats, others divide their lives between boats and often much neglected coastal houses, there are huge transitory populations on the sea on oil rigs and in container ships, many millions inhabit suburbs, large populations live in villages where their only real connection with the countryside is that they notice it from their car whilst caught behind a tractor on their weekly visit to Asda, there are inclusive island populations who don’t even think about any division between city and country, there are towns where the countryside is only a step away and in which the residents truly live their lives in both.

Of course, everything I’ve just written is also blinkered, for I’m describing Britain today. Maybe, an SF writer should be thinking of tomorrow’s Britain or an alternate one, or both. Also, Britain contains only a small fraction of the world’s population – there are actually other countries, and some very different ways of life. As for our urban environments? Even now the computer revolution is beginning to decentralise white collar professions, so what need to live in the city? Robotic manufacture is whittling down the required work force so what future need of industrialised towns? And the financial imperatives that originally made urban dwelling a necessity, will they last? Umph! Still today, still parochial!

What about undersea dwellings, orbital communities, nomadic populations, cave dwelling morlocks, people adapted to live under the sea, people loading their minds into VR, even nomadic minds leaping from artificial body to body? Ach, I could go on and on, but the point is made: urban SF writers, lift up your heads, take a look around and try to imagine yourself somewhere else. Oscar Wilde quipped about how he may be lying in the gutter, but he’s looking at the stars, some people, it would seem, are lying face-down in that same gutter.

Death Ray Magazine.

I must get hold of a copy of Death Ray Magazine. Here's either part or all of a review in it of Hilldiggers:

"Asher has an axe to grind, but what a shiny, well-honed and beautifully weighted axe it is... He's on top of his game with this one and his confidence entwines a fibrous thread throughout the plot. Multiple narratives occurring in different time frames, shifts between first-and third-person perspectives, a detailed and convincing description of planetary ecosystems...In lesser hands, a rambling wayward text could well result. What we have instead is a wonderfully rich and complex tale that happily flips between giving the mind something weighty to mull over and pleasing its baser, thrill-seeking desires... Asher's skill is making it all seem wild, wonderful, politically provoking and fresh."

Very nice.

Article 2: Censor Censorship.

CENSOR CENSORSHIP.

We live in a very strange society in which it is considered more dangerous to display an erect penis on television than it is to show, for example, someone having his throat cut. This is just one symptom of the strange disease that afflicts the so-called great and the good, bringing about in them a myopia in which they come to see sex as somehow a more heinous sin than violence. Certain words are not allowed because of their shocking sexual connotations, yet it is alright to show people being shot and knifed. The sex act itself must be ridiculously disguised, yet the scene in which someone is burnt to death is as realistic as possible.

This is just one of the crazy inconsistencies of this madness called censorship. If we are to suppose that films on TV cause children and the weak of mind (neither of which are likely to pay licence fees) to emulate them, this begs the question: which of the above would you want your children to emulate? The censors would of course want the lot censored and to feed us on a diet of gardening and cookery programs. I can only say that this would only lead to people turning off the television and seeking their entertainment elsewhere, perhaps out mugging pensioners to get the money to rent a decent video tape or two.

I hate censorship and would throw more weight behind the argument calling for it to be removed. It is wrong. It is another mishandling of power that takes responsibility away from the individual and in effect makes individuals more irresponsible. I wonder just how many really scientific studies have been made of the effects of TV violence on the individual. None I would warrant, simply because it would be impossible. For one thing there is no possible control group for any experiment or study. All that has really been done is the kind of statistical analysis that comes up with the result that 'violent people watch more violence on television than non-violent people', which goes nowhere in revealing why those people were violent and renders the analysis meaningless. Still though, censorship persists, and grows.

In the literary world that hideous creeping fungus called 'political correctness' is walking censorship in through the back door of children's books, and I have to wonder how long it will be before it reaches adult books. How long before this force that has emasculated our teaching profession and police starts turning all fiction into an inane mush? How long before 'conflict' is removed from fiction because it is too … confrontational.

But how about a reversal?

There is a school of thought that believes TV violence to be cathartic, and that the people who watch it are likely to be more relaxed and less inclined to violence than they might have been. In Jung Chang's Wild Swans she describes China, during the cultural revolution, as a pressure cooker without the relief valves of spectator sports or violent films. Now there, I think, is a woman more fit to judge morality than many. The same applies to literature: recently, an interviewer pointed out how the body count in my most recent book started high and continued to rise, yet my last encounter with violence left me feeling sick to the stomach because I had been involved in something really sordid. Those who are the spectators of violence are perhaps less inclined to take it up as a pastime – probably because they really know what it is. If violence is removed from all our forms of entertainment then people will lose a valuable learning resource and wander naively into truly dangerous situations. We cannot wrap everyone in cotton wool – because there'll always be someone out there with lighter fuel and a match.

Unfortunately, the censors are very often precisely the people to whom we must perforce complain, and complaining to them about censorship would be the same as writing to an MP with the opinion that you consider politics unnecessary. Entrenched self-interest is as difficult to excise as a verruca. And the censors will never admit any argument that might reduce their power.

Seagulls.

Tonight I watched The One Show (I know, but there was nothing else on and I was feeling indolent) in which they did a bit about towns infested with seagulls. Apparently one of those suffering the worst from these flying sea-rats was the inland town of Gloucester (though the description ‘inland’ has to be used rather ironically lately). The seagulls, apparently, feed on the local landfill, then nest on the town’s buildings. Certain measures are being taken. There’s a guy going round putting false eggs in their nests so they incubate them all year rather than laying new ones. Then there’s another guy with an eco-beard and probably recycled underpants, who feels the problem needs to be studied at length. Obviously an ecological balance needs to be struck. Certainly, it would appear, the residents need to learn to live with and love these birds.

Fuck, right, off.

There is no need for study. The birds fill themselves up from the mounds of discarded food at the landfill, then they come into the town to rip open dustbin bags in pursuit of their preferred diet, to fuck noisily, nest on top of the buildings and drop half a pound of shit on the nearest parked car, and each year their population increases. I know. I’ve stayed in Hastings and listened to them shrieking while they shag at four in the morning, I’ve seen the torn-open dustbin bags and my car, parked for two days, must have used half a gallon extra of petrol when I drove home with the extra weight of guano.

What is needed here is a very simple approach, with a shotgun. But of course that’s never going to happen with councils and government involved. The simple expedient of slipping a local farmer a few quid to bring down the gull population would never happen in over-managed and fucked-up Britain. Risk assessments would need to be made, the HSE would have to be involved, the local animal-rights dicks would be there with their placards and fire-bombs addressed to the farmer, a manager or two would need to be employed the perhaps a police cordon set up while the farmer did his work.

It’s all so unutterably tiresome, and when anything ever does get done it costs twenty times as much as it should. To the people of Gloucester I say, try to find and employ some ex-army guy fresh out of Afghanistan with a night-sighted rifle, and after he’s shot your council and the animal-rights protesters, get him to start on the seagulls

Article 1: Leeches.

For no apparent reason (well, other than being lazy and not getting on with some writing) I started reading through some of the articles I wrote for various publications. These are accessible on my website http://freespace.virgin.net/n.asher but since that place is all cobwebby and rarely visited, I thought I might start putting a few of them up here. The first is one I did for Outland, a magazine published by Ottakars (do they still publish it) to advertise The Skinner.

LEECHES.

If you want to find a plausible alien, go turn over the nearest rock and see what wriggles out, but to that I’ll add the proviso that you need to have some idea as to what put that squirmy thing there in the first place. Create an alien and you must have some conception of the ecology it arose from. It’s no good imagining some flesh-eating monster on some barren planet with nothing for it to eat but the human explorers who have just arrived (the get-out in the film that comes to mind is that the monsters were brought to the barren planet in a spaceship). However, that’s easily said and not so easily done.

“Gerrit off! Gerrit off!”

A four-foot long leech had attached itself to his hip. He fell in the sand and grabbed hold of the horrible thing in both hands to try and prevent it boring in even further. Jane grabbed up the line and began hauling in the rhinoworm while Ambel tended to Peck. He did the only thing that was possible in the circumstances: he grabbed hold of the leech in both hands, put his foot against Peck’s leg, and hauled with all his might. Peck let out a scream as the leech pulled away with a fist-sized plug of his flesh in its circular mouth. Ambel bashed the creature against a rock until the lump came free, then after trampling the creature to slurry he handed the piece of flesh back to Peck. Peck screwed it back into his leg, then wrapped a bandage from his pack round it to hold it in place.

Two of my favourite subjects are combined by the ecology of Spatterjay: immortality and flesh-eating monsters. The idea for this life-system was conceived in the short story (excerpt above and below) of the same name in my collection The Engineer (Tanjen) and there was fairly simplistic, but complete – skeletal. The story, along with another from the same collection (Snairls) formed the basis of what became The Skinner.

What’s in a name?

Names given to life forms can be misleading, and equivalent characteristics identified by untrained observers have led many to be misapplied. In America a hemlock is a tree whilst here in Britain it is a poisonous herb, so how the hell did that come about? How much more might be people’s misapprehension of alien life? Take leeches. These creatures are pretty horrible here on Earth, and when seeing something of similar habit and appearance oozing along a stream bed on an alien world it would be easy to reapply the name. Unfortunate then to discover their feeding habit is to take out lumps of flesh, that they can grow to the size of a hippopotamus on land and that of a whale in the sea, and that they can make you immortal.

“How old are you, Ambel?”

“Oh, a bit.”

Ambel rolled down his shirt sleeve and looked shifty.

“Come on. This is really important.”

“Don’t rightly know. Been on the ships for a while.”

Erlin wasn’t having that. “You do know. Don’t fob me off!”

Ambel looked uncomfortable.

“No one believes me,” he complained.

“I will.”

Ambel got up and headed for the door, as he opened it he mumbled, “Spatterjay Hoop was a crazy git.” He went out onto the deck.

Erlin sat down on the chair and shook her head. They were all crazy gits, and Ambel was no better. If he thought she was going to believe he knew Spatterjay Hoop, the man after whom this strange little world had been named a thousand solstan years ago, then he was probably worse. Ridiculous idea. Wasn’t it?

Erlin’s discovery that the bite of a Spatterjay leech transmitted a form of viral immortality, made that world a definite place to head for once the Zimmer frame was imminent. However, those seekers after eternal life became less enthusiastic upon discovering a world not cosseted by the Human Polity, where the incredibly tough and ancient hoopers might inadvertently tear off your arm, and where the leeches would continue to feed upon the hosts of the viral fibres – who were to them a reusable food resource.

Implausible?

Not really: why kill the whole animal when you can regularly harvest its flesh?

Oh come on…

Here on Earth, under that rock, you’ll find similar strategies. Pick up a veterinary book on helminthology (the study of parasitic worms) if you want to find some real horrors. One parasite’s cycle includes both sheep and ants. Inside the ant it alters the function of that insect’s brain so it climbs to the top of a grass stalk and there clings with its pincers, waiting for a sheep to come along and eat it. There’s another that gets inside a snail and so adjusts that creature’s physiology that it grows a thicker shell, thus protecting both parasite and snail. The downside being that the snail no longer has the resources to breed, whilst the parasite breeds inside it. There’s always a downside:

She had nothing left to throw up when she followed them into the basin in the top of the hill. She just retched a little. The rest of Peck was jammed, writhing about and making horrible noises, between two rocks. Erlin followed them down and watched in horror as they dragged him out and dropped him on the ground. All his muscles she could see, all his veins. His lidless eye-balls glared up at the sky. She advanced with her laser switched on. It was the only merciful thing to do.

“No!” Ambel knocked the laser from her hand. “Don’t you think he’s got enough problems? Find his clothes.”

Erlin dropped to her knees, not sure if she wanted to cry or laugh. No, this was not happening ... but it was. When she looked up, Ambel and Boris were putting Peck’s skin back on him, tugging the wrinkles up his legs and pressing the air bubbles out ... and Peck was helping them.

Do you wanna live forever?

Of course you do, but not if it hurts.

And what do you reckon is the most valuable thing on a world where money is worth buggerall, and life might be eternal?

Death.

The small leeches hang in the peartrunk trees and drop on any who might brush against the those fat trunks. Larger leeches squelch along the ground and sometimes take to the water where they wait with thread-cutting mouths agape for an unwary foot. On land they can grow as large as a hippo and taking a chunk, with a mouth the size of a bucket, from a hooper human can have some untoward effects unless that individual gets plenty of dome-grown food. It wouldn’t be much fun to have another skinner running about…

Reaching the size at which they can no longer support the weight of their slimy bodies the leeches take to the sea and grow ever larger. There the hoopers must hunt them for the treasure their bodies contain because, out of necessity, it is there that the oceanic leeches change in a very particular way. It’s the mouth, you see, when it finally becomes so large that harvesting flesh is no longer an option, the leech has to eat its prey whole, and obviously there are dangers in swallowing something in no particular hurry to die. Oceanic leeches begin to produce in themselves, in their bile, a poison that kills the immortality-imparting virus, and thus their prey. From this bile, by centrifuge and crystallisation, is refined a pure poison called sprine, which is worth more to hoopers than gold or gems.

Death.

All treasures are difficult to obtain – that’s the nature of the beast.

Win Hilldiggers.

And here's a chance to win a copy of Hilldiggers at Fantasyhotlist.

Stealing Light -- Gary Gibson.

And yet another one! I enjoyed Gary Gibson’s other books, Angel Stations and Against Gravity, so was looking forward to this. I wasn’t disappointed. It’s big meaty space opera combining many of the elements I enjoy. It’s dark, wide-screen, concerns survival-of-civilization events and is populated with the kind of smart and often nasty characters that have become a staple of present day space opera, with the addition, when it comes to the Shoal, of some particularly Banksian aliens. I particularly like how he has dealt with implants, religion, AI and just the whole set-up of this future. And there’s exploding spaceships! I picked up this near 500-page book and roared through it in no time. Nice one, Mr Gibson.

Oh, and unfortunately, this isn’t available until October, but you can pre-order it.

New Printer Required.

I’ve got an Epson R200 printer that’s just died on me, or rather I snuffed it. I’d been using refillable cartridges and the printing had started getting a bit crappy i.e. the head just wouldn’t clean properly. I took the head out and cleaned it up then replaced it, with the result that the printer won’t even power up. Now, don’t make the mistake here of pointing a finger and going, “It’s all your own fault not using Epson cartridges etc.” Frankly, I’ve saved the cost of about ten sets of five cartridges by refilling this way and that’s a large lump of money, in fact, if I’d been buying Epson replacements at full price, somewhere in the £600 region.

Now, which is the best and cheapest printer that’s easily refillable without paying a fortune for the brand-name ink cartridges? Is there a printer out there that you can just fill with ink rather than buying cartridges (or am I just dreaming of a perfect world). Is there, really, a way of printing without being thoroughly ripped-off? Is there a printer out there without the usual built-in obsolescence and built-in facility to screw you over?

Anyone got any advice?

Over to you…

Don't Forget!

NEAL ASHER

HILLDIGGERS

RRP: £17.99

Our Price: £14.99

Neal will be signing copies on 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.

Another Signing.

OK, I’ll be doing another signing at 6pm Thursday 9^th of August at Waterstones in Lakeside Thurrock, so if you’re in the area, come and buy some books, say hello, get books you’ve already bought signed! See you there.

Amazon SF Bestsellers.

Ah, it’s nice to see, as of right now, that Hilldiggers has been sitting at no. 3 in the science fiction bestsellers on Amazon.co.uk and that now Polity Agent is in there at no. 9. Checking further back I see that The Voyage of the Sable Keech is at 27, whilst Prador Moon is at 39.

Old Man's War -- John Scalzi

I’d read bits and pieces about this on the Internet and knew the name John Scalzi so when, on a recent visit to Macmillan, Peter Lavery handed over a copy of Old Man’s War I was happy enough to take it away and give it a go. The comments on the book from other authors were pretty good and here are the ones I think most relevant: ‘His dialogue is suitably snappy’ – Paul DiFillipo, ‘It’s Starship Troopers without the lectures’ – Cory Doctorow, ‘vivid characters’ – Ken McCleod. This book was also shortlisted for the Hugo award. Now, I always take such comments with a pinch of salt, because there are too many crap books out there lauded by an author’s author buddies and, as for awards, the opinion of a few voters or committee I feel is less important than that of those who actually go out and buy the books, and it strikes me that too many awards are political and nepotistic. I won’t tell you how wonderful was this aspect or that aspect of this book. Suffice to say I picked it up a couple of days ago and didn’t want to put it down, and I’ll certainly want to read its sequel The Ghost Brigades.

Fantasybookcritic.

Here you go, you can win a free set of my books HERE!

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

...

Ian M Banks.

Along with Caroline and my mother I went to see and hear an all time favorite author of mine at the Mercury Theatre in Colchester. As one event in the Essex Book Festival, Ian M Banks was there to do a reading from his latest non-M book, be interviewed, then take questions from the audience. I was surprised to see that he seemed quite nervous to begin with, but in retrospect I shouldn’t have been, since I doubt that the feeling ever goes away. Once he’d got into his stride, however, he was entertaining, amusing and came across as a likeable chap.

One fly in the ointment was the assumption by the interviewer that since we were all there to see Mr Banks then we all had to be lefty liberals. Mr Banks claims to be a committed socialist who when given a chance always votes for the most left-wing candidate. I was stifling my cynicism since only a few minutes before he’d been telling us about the two Porsches and the Landrover Discovery he’d sold now he was going ‘green’. Mmm, right.

That aside it was still an enjoyable evening. At one point I was tempted to fire off a question at him after he said he hates and avoids research. I was going to ask if that avoidance of research extended to his book about whisky: Raw Spirit. I somewhat doubt that, since it certainly seems to be a passion with him. After he finished talking he sat at a table in the theatre lobby signing numerous books – the queue certainly looked satisfyingly long.

Deservedly so.

Adjustments.

Couple of things I need to update here. A while back I slammed the latest series of Battlestar Galactica and that criticism now needs to be balanced. After the first few crappy episodes set on New Caprica, the series improved hugely with only one or two turds in the punch bowl (‘punch’ being the operative word here with an episode I can only describe as ‘boxing and relationships’ – one of those marking time episodes). Certainly I’ve been enjoying Battlestar lately, though I do feel the Gaius Baltar/ Number Six thread is flapping in the wind and the behaviour of the zylons has descended into the ridiculous. Where will it all end? Will it end?

Smoking. Well, I’m still off the cigarettes, though I did lapse yesterday and have about three puffs on one. I have to say that the graph of cigarette cravings I put on here is complete bullshit. It’s claimed on the website that came from, and others, that cravings last only a few minutes and the worst of them are over after the first 72 hours. I got through the those first three days quite easily and it is now that I’m having difficulties. The few puffs I had yesterday (along with some nicotine gum) where the consequence of a craving that lasted hours.

Writing and so forth. Been a bit of a struggle lately what with the outfall of a death in the family and this attempt at stopping smoking (maybe, like the guy in Airplane, I just chose the wrong time) but I’m still putting down those words. Line War is now approaching 100,000 words with the endgame building to its climax. Nothing much else to add to that really, since the writing life is hardly romantic and consists of sitting staring at a screen for hours on end until beads of blood appear on the forehead (bit too dramatic that, but I couldn’t resist it).

First Class at Last.

Every time a new one of my books comes out a guy who lives over the other side of Maldon from me calls me up and arranges for us to meet in a local pub so he can buy me a pint and get my signature on my latest book. I don’t know how long Patrick Forsythe has been doing this, but I’m fairly certain he now owns signed copies of each of my books. Patrick is a writer of numerous business books (about fifty or so) but now he’s moved on to writing travel books, starting with First Class at Last.

When I read in the local paper that he was signing copies in a local bookshop I felt beholden to go along. I paid my money, got my signed book, but then came the dread of reading work by someone I know, because it’s a right bastard having to turn round and say (if asked), “Well, it was a load of rubbish really.” Fortunately I won’t need to say that with this book since I motored through it in no time and very much enjoyed it. It was almost Brysonish in places. Nice one.

Begins Dusting off Surplice.

Okay, here I am four days after ceasing to put any nicotine of any kind in my body and six days after stubbing out my last rollie, so I’m past the 72 hours mark mentioned here. What have I felt thus far? Have I felt any changes? Hell yes.

Time since quitting	Beneficial health changes that take place
20 minutes	Blood pressure and pulse rate return to normal.
8 hours	Nicotine and carbon monoxide levels in blood reduce by half, oxygen levels return to normal.
24 hours	Carbon monoxide will be eliminated from the body. Lungs start to clear out mucus and other smoking debris.
48 hours	There is no nicotine left in the body. Ability to taste and smell is greatly improved.
72 hours	Breathing becomes easier. Bronchial tubes begin to relax and energy levels increase.

This is not necessarily in the order of the table here (snaffled from the ASH website), but not far off. Within a day my sense of taste improved, within two days it had improved frighteningly and I saw the barriers preventing me becoming as large as Ayres rock just evaporating in the sunshine. However, something else has improved to counter that: I enjoy exercise a lot more. This isn’t often mentioned in the preachy give up smoking sites and perhaps should be. Yes, heavy smoking can result in you being out of breath, but in that respect light smoking isn’t so bad really. What the light smoker does experience is a complete lack of an endorphine rush from exercise – it is just perpetual hard grind to him. Cycling and weight-training have now become less of a chore and more of a pleasure to me.

I am also loaded with more energy to expend and just don’t seem to get tired during the day. Also, come night-time, I am tired and fall to sleep quickly, which is unusual for me.

Another noticeable effect has been a sharpening of my senses. I see hear and feel things a lot more acutely now, as if a deadening layer has been removed from all my nerves. This can be both a good thing and a bad thing. It’s definitely a bad thing if you try drinking the same amount of coffee you drank while smoking. Fingernail marks in the ceiling and the like.

Cravings? Yeah, enough of them, but I’m being bloody-minded about my addiction: “No, bugger off you mindless shite! You will not make me smoke!” The problem with the organism is its lack of intelligence when it come to behaviourism. The organism will certainly make the connection between the burning pain and the blow torch applied to the testicles, but has difficulty making the connection between that asthma attack in the middle of the night and the cigar you smoked the day before (on top of all those rollies).

And I shall soldier on!

Born-again Non-smoker

I don’t know what the precise statistics are, but most smokers really want to be non-smokers though have some problems getting over an addiction stronger than that to heroin. I myself am an expert at giving up. I’ve tried just about every year since before I was thirty and have given up for periods ranging from a day to a year. Surprising as some may find this, having read my ranting about smoking bans, I do know precisely what has its claws in me and precisely what it’s doing to me.

I know that before I gave up last time I was starting to need asthma inhalers and within a few weeks of having given up did not need them again, until, that is, I started smoking again. I know that if I smoke below eight cigarettes a day the pain in the left side of my chest fades away, and if I smoke more than ten cigarettes it comes back hard. I know that out of every fifty cigarettes I smoke there’s about half of one I actually enjoy, the rest I smoke just to stop myself feeling the misery of withdrawal. Exercise hurts when I smoke, is a pleasure when I don’t. I find it difficult to lie on one side while in bed and sometimes, when I’ve got up to go to the toilet, I return to bed out-of-breath. I assume this is due to all the crap in my lungs spreading out while I was lying down.

I know that all these symptoms, and others, will only get worse if I continue smoking. The latest one I’ve been getting is ear infections that then work their way into my eustachian tubes. Obviously the fags are not responsible for the bugs concerned, but they create and exacerbate the weakness they exploit. Working at giving up I’ve been trying to chew a piece of nicotine gum before a craving hits – a 4mg piece can normally keep me off the fags past midday almost cutting my cigarette consumption by half.

Prior to my father’s death I contracted another of those ear infections and it just lingered. Over the last week it travelled by eustachian tube from left to right ear, with a nice sore throat stopover in between, finally arriving at crushing eyeball station to play golf with my tooth nerves and attach a compressor hose to my sinuses. I was getting heartily sick of this until I discovered the virus that had arrived was only a scout. The whole army came next and poleaxed me. Flu, flu-type symptoms, bad cold, man-flu, call it what you will. I felt as rough as a pineapple. One day I felt so cold I had the heating at over seventy and additional to my usual garb wore a jumper, Arctic fleece, dressing gown and woolly hat. My throat soon felt like someone had wire-brushed it and I sat in a chair wishing it would all go away.

For three days I chewed nicotine gum in the morning and smoked five cigarettes in the afternoon and evening. I blame paracetamol and Strepsils – without them I might not have been able to smoke at all. This last Saturday I wondered what the hell I was doing and chewed a second piece of gum in the evening and smoked nothing. Same again on Sunday.

But it’s the nicotine I’m addicted to – a fact that was brought home to me by this website from which I’ve borrowed the graph shown. So today I haven’t used the gum since I want to get those 72 hours behind me, and there’s no avoiding them. And the same from now on in … never give up giving up.

Cobh, Cove, Ireland.

A few weeks back I visited Ireland for the first time. Caroline booked us into a guesthouse/B&B called Amberleigh in Cobh, formerly Queenstown after a visit from Victoria and now pronounced ‘Cove’ i.e. when Southern Ireland gained independence the residents changed the name to Cove but spelled it the Gaelic way so it means nothing in Gaelic and is nothing but confusing to English readers. Very Irish.

We took a Ryanair flight from Stanstead that Caroline had booked and paid for some time previously. For this she recently had to pay an extra £20 flight tax because the Anti-Midas Brown has found this new toy called ‘the environment’ that he can use to screw tax payers for further money to fund his legions of diversity managers, focus groups, spin doctors and general thumb-up-bum bureaucrats.

We booked in with hand luggage that then went through scanners along with jackets and belts. Caroline was searched again, but she often is. After this there was another set of scanners for our footwear. As usual, off to one side, there were bins filled with bottles of shampoo, gel, hairspray, deodorant etc.

The flight took one hour five minutes and since we had taken only hand luggage we were off the plane and heading out of the airport very quickly – seeing a taxi driver on the way in with a sheet of paper with ASHER written on it. He took us to Cobh in darkness and there were many of those ‘what?’ moments as we tried to adjust our Essex brains to the Irish accent. Only while being driven there did we discover that Cobh sits on a sort of island in the bay – with one road on and off. Finally our driver deposited us at Amberleigh Guesthouse – the place is actually a B&B but such a description seems inadequate.

Michael and Thelma were very welcoming. The guesthouse was a big Victorian building; high ceilings, spacious, furnished like a stately home and our bedroom, with its double bed rather than twin beds, overlooked the harbour – a view impressive at night, with lights reflecting off the water, and even better during the day.

With little time left we shot out for something to eat. It being out-of-season in Cobh there wasn’t a great deal open, and the restaurant M&T recommended was packed. We ended up eating in a Chinese restaurant, and very enjoyable it was.

The next day we woke to appreciate the wonderful views from Amberleigh. Downstairs we enjoyed a huge Irish breakfast, in my case: cereal with milk, orange juice, fresh coffee then bacon, eggs, sausage, black and white pudding, fried tomato and fried bread. I could feel my arteries creaking even as I ate. The harbour, which we could also see from the breakfast room was surprisingly huge to me, but as, over the next few days I began to learn something of its history (mostly from Michael), I again realised the truth in that ‘travel broadens the mind’. Michael was involved in saving an island, in the mouth of the harbour, from being again built on and was also striving to have it turned into a world heritage site. Spike Island has a wonderful old prison on it and more history per square inch than you would ever find at Alcatraz. Tourism in Cobh would of course benefit hugely.

After breakfast we took the Titanic Tour. Cobh was the last port of call of that massive ship and the history of it is scattered all over the town. Just as is history of many other vessels and events: the Lusitania survivors were rescued by people from Cobh and those that didn’t survive are buried there, something like six million Irish went through this port on their way to America … go right back and the Phoenicians were here. History drips from the gutters.

Our second Michael was very knowledgeable – you could tell by the way he answered out-field questions, in my case one concerning refrigeration aboard the Titanic. He was an ex-Navy guy and an avid historian – even having been consulted for the film. At the end of our tour we drank Guinness while Michael II talked a little more about the plaque from the people of Cobh he organized to be placed on the deck of the Titanic. He also showed us what the pressure down that deep does to a polystyrene coffee cup. Those who laid the plaque took one down in an onion bag, being returned to the surface it was lucky it didn’t fall through the bag’s mesh, since the pressure had reduced it to the size of a thimble.

About the Guinness: it is better over there, but I’ve come to the conclusion this has nothing to do with the water – it’s the frequency of use. Order a Guinness in Britain and because it’s not drunk here very often the pint you’ll receive has likely been sitting in the pipes for hours if not days. Order a pint of the same in Ireland and quite often you have to wait your turn. It comes out black as sin with a texture to the head like double cream on a floater coffee. Nectar.

We spent a few days in Cobh (it was for my birthday), then regretfully headed for home and chaos. Caroline was searched again and a tin of hairspray was confiscated from her bag – one the customs women missed on the way out.

Solaris Science Fiction.

Well, enough doom and gloom. Here’s the excellent cover of The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction edited by George Mann. Cool cover and, of course, a cool collection of short stories. To quote:

This is an eclectic collection of all-original science fiction stories from some of the foremost luminaries in the genre. Featuring new tales of far future murder, first contact, love and war from such well-regarded and award winning authors as Peter F. Hamilton, Stephen Baxter, Adam Roberts, Jeffrey Thomas, Eric Brown, Paul Di Filippo, Neal Asher, Jay Lake and Ian Watson, this collection is sure to delight all fans of good science fiction.