The price of immortality is high, when flesh is a harvest.
'His
easy style and intriguing plot make for a great story that treats the reader as
an adult rather than an educationally subnormal adolescent' -- The Times (Tim
Cadman)
'an exhilarating tour through one of the most ingeniously, elaborately deadly worlds since Harry Harrison invented Death World in the 1960s' -- Locus (Russell Letson)
'Wild imagination, rigorous extrapolation, great characters , well-placed humor, clever plotting and a boatload of monsters make this novel a must-buy for any serious science fiction reader' -- Rick Kleffel
'loads of cool gadgets and enough violence to satisfy even me' -- Waterstones (Mike Rowley)
Published by Pan Macmillan and available in all good book shops from March 2002. (ISBN: 0 333 90364 1). Large Format Paperback £9.99. Mass market paperback 6.99. Also available through online stores like Amazon in trade or mass-market paperback or in the hardcover version opposite.
To
the Line planet Spatterjay come three travellers: Janer brings the eyes of a
hornet Hive mind, and an agenda he would rather not own; Erlin comes to find
Ambel – the ancient sea captain who can teach her to live; and Sable Keech is
a man with a vendetta he will not give up, though he has been dead for seven
hundred years.
The
world is mostly ocean, where all but a few visitors from the Human Polity remain
safely in the island Dome. Outside, the native hoopers risk the voracious
appetite of the planet’s fauna in their struggle for life and life eternal.
Somewhere out there is Spatterjay Hoop himself, and monitor Keech will not rest
until he can bring this legendary renegade to justice – for crimes so hideous
Keech can never forget.
Pursuing
rumour, Keech learns that Hoop has become something monstrous: his body roaming
free on an island wilderness, whilst his living head is confined in a box on
board one of the old captain's ships. Janer, the eternal tourist, is bewildered
by this place where sails speak and the people just will not die, but his
bewilderment turns to anger when he learns the Hive mind’s intentions. Erlin
thinks she has all the time she will ever need to find the answers she requires,
and could not be more wrong. And so these three travel and search, not knowing
that one of the brutal Prador is about to pay a surreptitious visit, intent on
exterminating witnesses to wartime atrocities, nor do they know how terrible is
the price of immortality on Spatterjay.
As the fortunes of these travellers unwittingly converge, a major hell is about to erupt in this chaotic waterscape ... where minor hell is already a remorseless fact of everyday life – and death.
'Asher's ready, willing, and more than able to put the fear of...whatever he likes, into you' -- sfsite (Lisa DuMond)
'a piece of phantasmagoric SF that few aficionados will want to miss' -- The Good Book Guide (Barry Forshaw)
'The Skinner is crammed full of inventive technology, organic and artificial intelligence, horrible monsters, and a thick mesh of story lines' -- SFX (Sam Croft)
'And ten seconds in the company of the alien enemy, the Prador, would assuredly be sufficient guarantee a mass avoidance of lobsters' -- Dreamwatch (Colin Baker)
Foreign covers:
