LINE WAR hardback, trade paperback, mass-market paperback.
He doesn’t do combat droids; he does razor-edged combat droids with attitude. He doesn’t do alien tech; he does alien tech clumped like coral round desiccated bodies – floating in deep space with a deep desire to spear bits of his heroine -- Jon Courtenay Grimwood (SFX)
The Polity is under attack from melded AI entity controlling the lethal Jain technology, but the attack seems to have no coherence. When one of Erebus’s wormships kills millions on the world of Klurhammon, a high-tech agricultural world of no real tactical significance, Cormac is sent to investigate, though he is struggling to control an ability no human being should possess, and beginning to question the motives of his AI masters.
Further attacks and seemingly indiscriminate slaughter ensue, but only serve to bring some of the most dangerous individuals in the Polity into the war. Mr Crane, the indefatigable brass killing machine sets out for vengeance. Orlandine, a vastly-augmented haiman who herself controls Jain technology, seeks a weapon of appalling power and finds allies from an ancient war.
Meanwhile Mika, scientist and Dragon expert, is again kidnapped by that alien entity and dragged to the heart of things; to wake the makers of Jain technology from their five million year slumber.
But Erebus’s attacks are not indiscriminate, and could spell the end of the Polity…
HILLDIGGERS hardback, trade paperback, mass-market paperback.
What we have is a wonderfully rich and complex tale that happily flips between giving the mind something to weighty mull over and pleasing its baser, thrill-seeking desires -- Jonnie Bryant (Deathray)
If there's a more enjoyable and provocative sci-fi action saga this year, we'll be seriously surprised. -- Saxon Bullock (SFX)
A very political novel about the conflicts between the military and civilians, between the war and post-war generations, and balancing truth and reconciliation. -- Anthony Brown (Starburst)
A terrible war once raged between the two rival planets within a distant solar system. Over the centuries their human inhabitants had ‘adapted’ themselves to the extremely different conditions of their new homes, far outside Polity influence..
In the midst of this merciless conflict, one side encountered a bizarre object suspected of being a cosmic superstring employed as a new weapon by the rival side. Their attack on it caused the object to collapse into four parts, each found to be packed either with alien technology or some unknown form of life. Pending further study, these were quickly encased inside four separate Ozark cylinders, and stored in a massively secure space station in orbit.
Sometime later, while conducting research on this alien entity they now call ‘the Worm’, a female scientist falls pregnant and susequently gives birth to quads. She then inexplicably commits suicide by walking directly out into space…
The war was finally brought to an end by use of new weapons arising as a result of research of the Worm. These were employed by giant space dreadnoughts nicknamed ‘hilldiggers’ –– and their destructive power created new mountain ranges out of the vanquished planet’s terrain. Twenty years after the dust has settled, those four exceptionally talented orphans have grown up to assume varying degrees of power and influence within a post-war society.
And one of this exceptional breed now seems determined to gain total control over the deadly hilldiggers. But why?
POLITY AGENT hardback, trade paperback, mass-market paperback.
He’s got a fantastic eye for monsters, writes turbo-charged battle sequences, and can describe cosmic events and alien landscapes with an edge of evocative beauty -- Saxon Bullock (SFX)
'Polity Agent' satisfies on a number of levels, from the monsterama aspects that Asher's readers expect to the open-and-closed ending of the novel. More entries in this series are certain to come, and that's great news for those of us who enjoyed the first four. If you've not started, you’re not that far behind yet. Well, light-years and centuries, to be sure. But just step through the runcible gate that is 'Gridlinked' and you're here. There. In Asher's universe. Be warned: here be monsters. But also, like Orlandine and Cormac, great characters as well. -- Rick Kleffel
From
800 years in the future, a runcible gate is opened into the Polity and those
coming through it have been sent specially to take the alien 'Maker' back to its
home civilization in the Small Magellanic cloud. Once these refugees are safely
through, the gate itself is rapidly shut down - because something alien is
pursuing them. The gate is then dumped into a nearby sun. From those refugees
who get through, agent Cormac learns that the Maker civilization has been
destroyed by pernicious virus known as the Jain technology. This, of course,
raised questions: why was Dragon, a massive biocontruct of the Makers, really
sent to the Polity; why did a Jain node suddenly end up in the hands of someone
who could do the most damage with it? Meanwhile an entity called the Legate is
distributing pernicious Jain nodes ...and a renegade attack ship, The King of
Hearts, has encountered something very nasty outside the Polity itself.
PRADOR MOON hardback, paperback.
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Here's the British Macmillan version of of the book.
The back cover of Asher's latest has the heading, "It's first contact . . . Polity style!" If you guessed that involved tea and crumpets, you're slightly off the mark. The opening chapter describes the first meeting between Prador emissaries and a human Polity ambassador, the latter being promptly lifted by one claw belonging to the former, and then snipped in two. The first diplomatic meeting between the two races thus marks a bloody and explosive beginning to total war. -- J J S Boyce (Green Man Review)
This being a Neal Asher novel, however, these issues do not tend to incite esoteric, multi-page conversations exploring the finer points of morality. As in the previous five Polity books and his extra-continuum novel Cowl, Asher is content to raise the issues for the reader to think about while his enraged combatants proceed to rip each other's intestines out. -- Scifi.com
I wasn't sure I was going to really enjoy this book when if first fell into my hands, but by the end of the first chapter, I had become convinced that this was a new universe I was going to want to explore. -- Paul Haggerty (sfrevu)
Published in May 2006
Neal Asher takes on first contact, Polity style. This original novel recounts
the first contact between the aggressive Prador aliens, and the Polity
Collective as it is forced to retool its society to a war footing. The
overwhelming brute force of the Prador dreadnaughts causes several worlds and
space stations to be overrun. Prador Moon follows the initial Polity defeats, to
the first draws, and culminates in what might be the first Polity victory, told
from the point of view of two unlikely heroes.
Cover by Bob Eggleton.
Trade Paperback
Here on amazon.
THE VOYAGE OF THE SABLE KEECH hardback, trade paperback, mass-market paperback.
It's highly entertaining and brilliantly imagined stuff, and there can be few readers out there who will fail to enjoy this, and pretty much every other aspect of Asher’s writing. -- John Berlyne (SFRevu)
I was ready for a break from real life, and Asher whisked me away without delay. -- J. J. S. Boyce (Green Man Review).
No, once you're plugged in to 'The Voyage of the Sable Keech', you'll want to stay there as long as you can. -- Rick Kleffel (The Agony Column)
The reification Sable Keech, a walking dead man, is the only one to have been resurrected by nanochanger. Did he succeed because he was infected by the Spatterjay virus, or because he came late to resurrection in a tank of seawater? Tracing the man’s journey in a ship also named after him, Taylor Bloc wants to know. He also wants so much else – adulation, power, control – and will go to any lengths to get it. And he has brought the means.
An ancient hive mind, almost incomprehensible to the human race, has sent an agent to the world. Does it want to obtain the poison sprine – effective against those made virtually indestructible by the Spatterjay virus? Janer must find it and stop it.
Erlin, still faced with the ennui of immortality, has her solitude rudely interrupted by a very angry whelkus titanicus, and begins the strangest of journey’s. Captain Ambel’s own journey, from Olian’s – where the currency of death his kept in a vault – is equally as strange. But he must reap the harvest of Erlin’s mistake, and survive.
Deep in the ocean the virus has wrought a terrible change that will affect them all. Something dormant for ten years is breaking free, and once again the aftershocks of an ancient war will focus on this watery world. And Sniper, for ten years the Warden of Spatterjay, finally takes delivery of his new drone shell. It’s much better than his old one: powerful engines, more lethal weapons, thicker armour.
He’s going to need it.
REVIEW LINKS
SFRevu: http://sfrevu.com/Review-id.php?id=3682 Green Man Review: http://www.greenmanreview.com/book/book_asher_sablekeech.html
SFX: http://www.sfx.co.uk/book_reviews/the_voyage_of_the_sable_keech
The Guardian: http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/roundupstory/0,,1717359,00.html Emerald City: http://www.emcit.com/emcit126.php?a=7
sffworld: http://www.sffworld.com/brevoff/256.html
Agony Column: http://trashotron.com/agony/reviews/2006/asher-voyage_sable_keech.htm
***
BRASS MAN hardback, trade paperback, mass-market paperback
His writing is fast-flowing and tight, fizzing with energy and the resulting stories are examples of the very best science fiction out there. -- John Berlyne (SFRevu)
Neal Asher is back and he makes 'Brass Man' far more fun than reading has any right to be. -- Rick Kleffel
Gridlinked marked Asher as one of the most inventive practitioners of hard SF and Brass Man consolidates that reputation with another virtuoso display. -- Barry Foreshaw (Dreamwatch)
The knight errant Anderson is hunting
a dragon on the primitive Out-Polity world of Cull, little knowing that far away
a man has resurrected a brass killing machine to assist in a similar hunt that
encompasses star systems. When agent Cormac learns that an old enemy still
lives, he sets out in pursuit aboard the attack ship Jack Ketch … whilst
scientist Mika begins discovering the horrifying truth about that ancient
technology ostensibly produced by the alien Jain, who died out five million
years ago.
On a planet roamed by ferocious insectile monsters the people of Cull must struggle to survive, while they build the industrial base to reach their forefathers’ starship still orbiting far above them. An entity calling itself Dragon assists them, but its motives are questionable having created genetic by-blows of humans and the hideous local monsters, before growing bored with that game. And now Cull, for millennia geologically inactive, suffers earthquakes…
Meanwhile a brass killing machine seeks to escape a bloody past it can neither forget nor truly remember. So mindlessly will continue its search for sanity, which it might find in an instant or not for a thousand years.
REVIEW LINKS
Crowsnest here: http://www.sfcrowsnest.co.uk/articles/books/2005/nz7728.php SFRevu here: http://sfrevu.com/Review-id.php?id=3665 Rick Kleffel here: http://trashotron.com/agony/reviews/2005/asher-brass_man.htm
Green Man Review here: http://www.greenmanreview.com/book/book_asher_brassman.html
SFsite: http://www.sfsite.com/09b/bm208.htm
Kirkus says: “Fizzing with intelligent ideas and occasionally streaked with black humour. Appalling, mind-boggling, fascinating—and irresistible.”
Asher has created another multi-threaded romp full of awesome spaceships, awesome weapons, and vicious drooling beasties with awesome appetites. -- Interzone (Sandy Auden)
...to thrill the blood of any Culture fan who likes 'Big Fast-Thinking Spaceships with Nukes', -- Starburst (Anthony Brown)
***
COWL: He is the summit of human evolution, and more vicious than any prehistoric beast.
In
Cowl Neal Asher seems to be doing to the time-travel adventure what he has been
doing to space opera and planetary romance: to pump it full of
performance-enhancing substances and send it crashing through a gigantically
expanded version of its traditional milieu, exploding the big sets and sending
body parts flying in all directions. -- Locus (Russell Letson)
'Neal Asher can do no wrong, it seems. He possesses the ability to take on mammoth themes and make them original, credible and dynamic. Not to be read on a plane - this book deserves your full attention' -- Dreamwatch (Colin Baker).
Now
available on Amazon in hardback,
trade
paperback, and for pre-orders in mass-market paperback.
In the far future, the Heliothane Dominion is triumphant in the solar system, after a bitter war with their Umbrathane progenitors. But some of the enemy have escaped into the past, where they could position themselves to wreak havoc across time. The worst of these is Cowl, an artificially forced advance in human evolution … who is no longer human.
Polly knows no more than how to obtain the funds to support her habits. She is unprepared for her involvement with Nandru Jurgens, a Taskforce soldier, and the killers pursuing him. Nor is she able to resist the powerful attraction of the alien tor, which she is impelled to pull onto her arm… But she must learn fast as she is dragged back through time, not least that to the denizens of some eras, she is little more than a food.
Initially, the fragment of tor imbedded in Tack’s wrist is the extent of his value to the Heliothane – a point that is brought home to him with bloody abruptness. But he is a vat-grown programmable killer employed by U-gov, and no stranger to violence. His long journey into the lethal world of the Heliothane is only beginning, and the extent of his mission just becoming apparent. And he must become more, he must change, and be changed…
Meanwhile, hunting throughout time and the alternates, Cowl’s pet, the torbeast, grows vast and dangerous. It sheds its scales where its master orders. They are tors – organic time machines to bring human samples to Cowl. And the beast feeds…
REVIEW LINKS
Excellent review by Paul Di Filippo here of the American issue of Cowl: http://www.scifi.com/sfw/advance/11_books.html http://www.sff.tigerheron.com/editors-sf-picks-0508.php
'Readers with a taste for dense, high-concept science fiction will find much to admire in Neal Asher's Cowl' -- Washington Post.
***
Beware the gabbleduck my son, beware the heroyne and shun, the murderous siluroyne...
‘This
is undoubtedly Asher's best novel
... surreal alien biologies and ecosystems' -- The Guardian (Jon Courtenay
Grimwood)
'Fast
paced, intriguing, and brutal...' -- Starburst (Anthony Brown)
'Specialising in the creation of hilariously lethal ecosystems, he’s already displayed his literary teeth with the surreal menageries of GRIDLINKED and THE SKINNER- but Asher’s latest rip-roaring space epic makes his previous ventures look like relaxing trips to the local zoo' -- SFX (Saxon Bullock)
Published by Pan Macmillan and available at all good book shops in large format from March 2003. Price £10.99. Also available through online stores like Amazon in trade or mass market paperback.
Outlink station Miranda has been destroyed by a nanomycelium and, because of this method of sabotage, the alien bioconstruct, Dragon – a creature as untrustworthy as it is gigantic – is thought to be involved. Sent on the titanic Polity dreadnought, the Occam Razor, Agent Cormac must investigate this, and resolve the question of Masada, a world about to be subsumed when the line of polity is drawn across it.
But
the biophysicist Skellor has not been captured, and controls something so potent
that Polity AIs are prepared to hunt him down forever, to prevent him
using it.
On Masada the rebellion can never rise above ground as the slave population is subjugated by orbital laser arrays controlled by the Theocracy in their cylinder worlds, and by the fact that they cannot leave their compounds. For the wilderness of Masada is without breathable air, and out there roam the monstrous hooders, siluroynes, and the weird and terrible gabbleducks.
'This is smart, sophisticated writing that seems too much fun to be true. It's not true -- it's all a big, bold, glorious lie. Asher's Ian Cormac may prove to be the Paul Bunyan of the twenty-first century' -- Rick Kleffel
'Time will tell how Asher will be judged, but the world of the Polity explored so far in the three novels and many of the short stories is one as complex and as compelling as any created in the genre, and in the breadth of biological speculation almost unparalleled' -- Dusk Site (Lavie Tidhar)
'If anyone survives, it won’t be for lack of chances to die horribly' -- sfsite (Lisa DuMond)
***
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)
***
Not only humans who know the
meaning of hate.
'This is often gruesome and shocking but it is always engrossing and never once does Asher drop the ball' -- sfrevu (John Berlyne)
'Gritty. Now, there's a word you don't often hear in connection with science fiction ...' -- sfsite (Lisa DuMond)
'Asher is the hot ticket, and if he doesn't get started on the sequel this book is crying out for then I'll send Mr Crane's dad down to the school to sort him out' -- TTA (Peter Tennant)
Published
by Pan Macmillan & Tor in America. Available at all good book shops in large format from March 2001. (ISBN
0-333-90363-3) price £10.00, in mass-market paperback from March 2002 (ISBN
0-330-48433-8) price £6.99. Also now available through
online stores like Amazon in paperback
or hardback.
A technician comes through the runcible on Samarkand at a fraction below light speed. His arrival has killed thousands and wrecked a terraforming project. The immortal Horace Blegg sends agent Cormac to investigate, but Cormac must resolve things without the support of the AI grid, for his thirty years of being gridlinked has left him without humanity. He does have Shuriken, a throwing star with a mind of its own, the ambivalent dracomen, and Golem combat androids at his side. But Pelter, with his mercenaries and something out of nightmare, is on his trail.
Samarkand has descended into frigid cold and sabotage is uncovered. The prime suspect is unfortunately an alien called ‘Dragon’, which had apparently destroyed itself twenty-seven years before the event. An alien artefact is uncovered and its monstrous guardian is a killer. How did both of these get where they were? Why was the runcible destroyed? Cormac must resolve all questions and decide who is lying. He must do this while hunted by Pelter and avoiding the ungentle attentions of the killing machine, Mr. Crane. And in the end someone must be punished.
Read the reviews and interviews on www.sfrevu.com or on the SF site!