News and Stuff

[Neal Asher]

Luckily not, but now the chancellor of the exchequer has guaranteed all the money owed, by any bank, which rather seems like license for irresponsibility.

[Jon George]

Originally Posted by Neal Asher

I need to have a look at my screenplay writing stuff and maybe have a pop at it myself.

That road can lead to madness - read Adventures in the Screen Trade by William Goldman. Apparently it seems like you need to add an extra three hours to your normal twenty-four and have to dig a hole in the garden for your pride. Oh, and no-one knows what will be succesful. Take the money and run if you can.

[AE35Unit]

Excuse the ignorance of a newbie but

This one is a full-blown, flat-out, unabashed Space Opera, and a thriller of the first water, so don’t miss it!

sounds great to me!

Oh, could I get Asimovs in this country without going thru a difficult web order contract?

[Neal Asher]

Here’s a bit of an update on the writing and so forth:
My Czech publishers - Polaris - have offered for rights of The Voyage of the Sable Keech. Publication will be within 12 months, licence limited to 4 years.
Nightshade books are publishing Shadow of the Scorpion on May 1st this year. This is a book (longer than Prador Moon) covering some early episodes of Cormac’s life:
Raised to adulthood during the end of the war between the human Polity and the vicious arthropoid race the Prador, Ian Cormac is haunted by childhood memories of a sinister scorpion-shaped war drone and the burden of losses he doesn’t remember. In the years following the war he signs up with Earth Central Security, and is sent out to help either restore or maintain order on worlds devastated by Prador bombardment. There he discovers that though the old enemy remains as murderous as ever, it is not anywhere near as perfidious or dangerous as some of his fellow humans, some closer to him than he would like. Amidst the ruins left by war-time genocides, he discovers in himself a cold capacity for violence, learns some horrible truths about his own past and, set upon a course of vengeance, tries to stay alive.
As for writing done while in Crete: I completed the above mentioned book, a 10,000 word story for Gardner Dozois’s New Space Opera II and am more than a third of the way into Orbus, a follow-up to The Voyage of the Sable Keech:
The Old Captain, Orbus – a sadist in charge of a crew of masochists – became a reformed character at the end of The Voyage of the Sable Keech and took over the captaincy of the spaceship the Gurnard. Meanwhile, the Prador Vrell, mutated by the Spatterjay virus into something powerful and dangerous, had seized control of a Prador dreadnought, killing its entire crew, and was heading back to the Prador Third Kingdom to exact vengeance on those who tried to have him killed. Both these characters are heading for ‘The Graveyard’ (mentioned in Alien Archaeology – Asimov’s) a buffer zone between the Polity and the Prador Kingdom, the perhaps into the kingdom itself. Orbus has a few unresolved issues about the Prador and about Vrell in particular …

[Lord Soth]

I love the fact that im only 2 books (3 if you count Cowl) into this series and there is soo much to come!

[Neal Asher]

You can find two of my Mason's Rats stories in the The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction edited by George Mann.
And you can also listen to my story Acephalous Dreams on Escape Pod.

[AE35Unit]

Oh i never realised there was a volume 2! I have the 'first' one with your story Bioship in. I've not read it yet but its the second story in so its up next

[AE35Unit]

And i'm about to start reading it. Is it part of one of your universes?

[Neal Asher]

Mason's rats aren't part of the Polity stuff ... unfortunately.

[Neal Asher]

Ah well, I've just done a video interview for Robert Grant of Sci-Fi-London. He'll (hopefully) be editing out my ums and ers to put it up sometime anon. Not sure if I'll look at it myself. I've hated audio interviews I've done because I tend to gabble, lose track of what I was saying and generally don't 'perform' all that well. In the end, if I'd wanted to be a performer, I wouldn't have retreated to my bedroom all those years ago and started writing weird stories. That's the thing about this writing lark, it's not all about celebrity and being amusing and intelligent in front of an audience, it's about an utterly introvert pursuit in which you don' talk to people for hours on end.

[Neal Asher]

Sci-Fi-London Interview

Well, there's a video interview with me up on the Sci-Fi-London site now, which will later be added to the list of interview on their .tv site. I haven't yet watched it myself but Caroline tells me it's OK - not too many ums and ers.

SCI-FI-LONDON was lucky enough to meet Neal Asher at his Essex home to talk about his latest book, The Gabble & Other Stories, about writing and about 15 years of the Polity universe, David Fincher, Heavy Metal and the internet as a distraction from real work.

Now, I really really must get out of Christmas mode and do some of that real work.

[biodroid]

So Neal, by Heavy Metal do you mean the music? Not many writers like metal music, the only author I have heard of who likes metal to an extent is Stephen King.

[Neal Asher]

This is the 'Heavy Metal' being referred to: David Fincher's 'Heavy Metal' remake a no-go at Paramount | Showbiz News and Scoop | Studio and Network Dish | EW.com

[biodroid]

I thought it was something like that

[Neal Asher]

I’m noticing that scattering amidst the followers of this blog there’s quite a few artists so, bearing that in mind, do any of you guys or any others drifting through here fancy having a go at doing some pictures? Specifically I’m looking for scenes, characters, drones, monsters or anything else you can think of from my fiction. I’ve yet to see, for example, a depiction of a gabbleduck that matches up to what I see in my head. Here you can see two attempts at that, one the cover of The Gabble and the other from the front page of the Asimov’s that first published Alien Archaeology. Perhaps you’d like to do something from The Skinner, maybe a heirodont, ocean or land, maybe a glister or one of the varieties of whelks like the frog whelks here. Plenty of other things that can be attempted, maybe a sand hog from Brass Man with Anderson mounted up, or Mr Crane himself. There’s the spaceships too, like the Ogygian, the Jerusalem or the Cable Hogue. I leave that decision entirely up to you…


The pictures that turn up I'll display here with any links the artist wants and the three pictures (by separate artists) I judge best will each receive a free copy of Orbus when it comes out next September. If anyone comes up with that picture I'm seeking of a gabbleduck by then, that'll be worth a copy of Orbus plus copies of the rest of the Macmillan backlist of my books. My contact details can be found in 'Contacts' on my Virgin website.