Product Description

‘What has six arms, a large beak, looks like a pyramid, has more eyes than you’d expect and talks nonsense? If you don’t know the answer to that, then 1) you should and 2) you haven’t been reading Neal Asher (see point 1)’ Jon Courtenay Grimwood

In the eight years since his first full-length novel Gridlinked was published by Pan Macmillan, Neal Asher has firmly established himself as one of the leading British writers of Science Fiction, and his novels are now translated in many languages. Most of his stories are set in a galactic future-scape called ‘The Polity’, and with this collection of marvellously inventive and action-packed short stories, he takes us further into the manifold diversities of that amazing universe.

No one does monsters better than Neal Asher, so be prepared to revisit the lives and lifestyles of such favourites as the gabbleduck and the hooder, to savour alien poisons, the walking dead, the Sea of Death, and the putrefactor symbiont.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #5153 in Books
• Published on: 2009-11-06
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 232 pages

Review
'economical, crisp and frequently fiendishly clever. The stories featuring...dangerous aliens who `speak' in a nonsensical language, are particularly impressive'
--BBC Focus

Review
'Thirteen marvellously inventive and action-packed short stories.'

Review
'Fans of Asher's Polity future history will not be disappointed.'

Customer Reviews

Cracking collection
I make no secret of being a big fan of Neal Ashers work and this collection of short works set in the Polity universe hasn't changed my opinion one bit. It's excellent. This collection sheds more light on some of the minor characters of the Polity novels, the Gabbleducks and Hooders, Geronamid, Erlin etc and adds more moments of drama and back-story to some and fleshes out the personas of others. There isn't a single weak story in this lot but if I was asked to pick the best, I'd go for "Softly spake the Gabbleduck" which was a claustrophobic chase story with a nicely packaged ending.

One quick note, and no fault of the Author, the longest story in the collection, "Alien Archeology" was also published in the recent "The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 21" anthology edited by Gardner Dozois, which effectively made a 1/4 of the book redundant for me.

Superbly executed scifi collection
These short story collections often leave the reader with a somewhat empty feeling in that they can promise much but fail to deliver. This is certainly an exception.

Asher is a cyberpunk/hard scifi writer who can mix it with the best of them. The Gabble is an example of perfect weighting, with stories superbly executed and no padding whatsoever. Set in the Polity universe this collection is eminently readable as a standalone or as part of the wider sequence, without recourse to dense technobabble or any other weak literary device. Asher's frequently humorous style, naming the vicious alien predator which is central to several of these stories, a Gabbleduck is an example of a humanising touch that scifi needs to be truly enjoyable and believable.

Another glorious read from Neal Asher, who is fast becoming top of my list as an essential author to follow.

Neal Asher on top form
These stories mostly fit in his Polity sequence. While the older ones might not exactly they show the evolution in the ideas behind his favourite universe.

If you're a fan of Neal Asher then these stories will appeal to you as they're the same style and quality as the best of his novels. Like his longer works there is plenty of action, AIs, Golems, agents and, of course, Gabbleducks. As another reviewer noted I've got one of the longer stories in a year's best anthology, but some of the others have only seen print in relatively obscure publications.

It may be familiar ground he's covering in this anthology, but he does do it well.