Tag: Books

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

Posted on by Neal Asher

We went to watch The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo yesterday – a film we were looking forward to after seeing that Daniel Craig was in it, and after one glimpse at the actress playing Lisbeth Salander. The title sequence was gobsmacking: James Bondish but in an oily and dark and somewhat disturbing way, thereafter I found the music a bit annoying at first and got that feeling of, ‘Oh dear, they’re doing the intrusive music to cover the crap content,’ but this turned out not to be the case.

As Blomkvist Daniel Craig was excellent, but then he’s excellent in just about any role he takes, though of course he is always Daniel Craig. I’d add that he was excellent in Quantum of Solace and that the reason the film was crap had more to do with the story and direction. Rooney Mara, as Salander, was simply brilliant. I think my criticism of the Swedish version was that both these roles weren’t filled adequately and, certainly, the Salander of that version wasn’t anywhere near enough as edgy, dangerous and disturbing. I reckon it was Mara’s bleached eyebrows that tipped it. The rest of the cast were great too. Christopher Plumber of course could be relied on to deliver the goods, and Salander’s new guardian did a very good job of being thoroughly detestable.

I could see where bits of the book had been excised and I could understand the reasons why. A large book of course has to be cut to fit into the film format and the need for the plot to head in a relatively straight line to the end. I was slightly annoyed by the cutting of what I will call the ‘Australian bit’ but even then could see why it might have been removed. It didn’t fit the tone and texture of the film and was, in essence, after the dramatic ending – subtext.

Thoroughly recommended.  

Writing Update

Posted on by Neal Asher

And another 2,000+ words written today. How many times should I repeat this before you all get bored with it? Anyway, I’ve now reached the stage where I’ve got nine sections, or episodes of the story, chronologically ordered in a large lump of text 17,000 or so words long over 26 pages. I also have a contents list which details what I have, with one brief line describing each section. (I use this list to keep track of the story. I then copy it when I’ve finished and convert it first into a long synopsis, then that into a short synopsis, then that into cover blurbs)

Now it’s time to start deciding how I’m going to structure the book. Usually I divide up what I’ve written into about ten pages per chapter, but in this case I might be working slightly differently, in fact more like I did with Brass Man. A lot of what I am writing now is, essentially, backstory. I’m considering making these sections into ‘retroacts’ to start off each chapter, or to insert where relevant in the current story as reveals. This backstory also comes from two perspectives, so there will also be opportunities, in those reveals, to show stark contrasts.

So far as I plan, the story itself begins during the prador/human war (that backstory), then continues just after the events on Masada in The Technician. So far. Maybe I’ll end up just writing my way through to that point, I’m certainly enjoying myself at the moment. And maybe you’ll end up with more than one book.

Another Interview

Posted on by Neal Asher

Here’s a recent interview with me conducted by Douglas R Cobb. I’m probably repeating a lot of stuff considering how many of these I’ve done.

Different SF writers have different names for their interstellar civilization. Ian M Banks has the Culture, Star trek has the Federation and the Dominion, empires and kingdoms have been used too. The Polity was my own particular take on this. I wanted something big, sprawling and complicated in which I could set just about any SF story. Its inception was in numerous short stories where similar technology might be used, similar alien life, agents, characters and gradually grew almost like a crystal forming. Runcible gates where a hat-tip to the ansible, but grew into a science whose nomenclature evolved from the poem The Owl and the Pussycat by Edward Lear (a tachyon, for example, is called ‘pea-green’). I wanted my Polity linked up by spaceships and instantaneous matter transmission and the runcible gates are the latter, giving people the ability to step across light-years in an instant.

Conflicts

Posted on by Neal Asher

Nice review of Conflicts here.

Neal Asher’s “The Cuisinart Effect” is a romp equal to the earlier story from Andy Remic. A hard-nosed officer leads a group of soldiers into the distant past in order to foil their enemy’s plot to kidnap dinosaurs and use them as weapons of mass destruction. (Wow. The sentences I type sometimes.) The dinosaurs are, of course, awesome. And they provide an excellent backdrop for the story’s real conflict: the inhuman “by the book” officer versus the flawed but empathetic soldiers. I’m not familiar with Mr. Asher’s other work, but got the impression that this was linked into an existing world. I’m sure I missed a few nuances because of that, but, whatever. Dinosaurs.

Website Updates

Posted on by Neal Asher

I decided a number of days ago to put some extras on the website but for three or four days have been unable to upload anything. No explanations from Virgin – I suspect they were either overloaded or doing some maintenance.

I’ve now added a my SFF collection to Galleries and the ‘scooby’ ending on Gridlinked (this latter was an ending that was taken out during the editorial stages of the book because it was too much like a Scooby-Doo explanation).

Even with all the additions the website is only 11.4 megabytes so I will keep adding to it as time goes on. Any suggestions as to what you might like to see there?

Nostalgia Trip.

Posted on by Neal Asher

After putting up that clip of the coming John Carter of Mars film, and then searching for the cover of the first of those Edgar Rice Burroughs books I got hold of, I’ve been pondering on the first SFF books I read. When I do interviews, I often chunter on about first having my mind distorted by E. C. Tubb’s Earl Dumarest saga, but maybe I chose that simply because of its connection to the first bit of creative writing I did in school (wholly derivative stuff about people having their brains removed). But I wonder which book was the first.

There are a few contenders. I know that the first E. C. Tubb book I read was The Winds of Gath. However, did I read that before one of the books my mother – a school teacher – was reading to her kids and kept at home: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis. As an aside here I should mention that the second bit of SF I attempted to write, as a teenager, was something called The Crab, the Serpent and the Carpenter … shortly after something called The Planet of the Light Creatures, with drawings.

I also remember my first visit to a library and, when asked by mother what I would like to read, I mentioned that I had enjoyed a story a school teacher had been reading to my class. Knowing the author she directed me to the relevant shelf. The story mention was The Hobbit, and the book I picked up was The Two Towers by Mr Tolkein. But was I already reading the previously mentioned books before that.

Then we get back to John Carter. I picked up A Princess of Mars out of my brother Martin’s collection of books (mostly Louis L’Amour cowboy books), but was I already reading the skiffy stuff then? I don’t know … had I by then started picking up those Robert E. Howard Conan books? And how long was it before I started in on Larry Niven and my first taste of Ringworld Engineers?

Names

Posted on by Neal Asher

So I think to myself I’ll call the main character David Spear (second name chosen because of that cool character in Band of Brothers) then I wonder: haven’t I used David before? Of course I have – David McCrooger in Hilldiggers – so I need a rethink. In a piece I wrote off the cuff, prior to starting Penny Royal, I used a Scandinavian name and, glancing at it again, I thought yes, something like that. The first one to pop into my head was Thorvald, and I decided to do a search on it. Now, bearing in mind that this is about the black AI Penny Royal, a monster (sort of), it was interesting to come up with this is relation to the name Thorvald:

Thorvald the slayer of Nidhogg

Then a search of Nidhogg comes up with:

In Norse myth, Nidhogg (“tearer of corpses”) is a monstrous serpent that gnaws almost perpetually at the deepest root of the World Tree Yggdrasil, threatening to destroy it.

Also:

(Malice Striker, often anglicized Nidhogg)

And thus the imagination feeds.

Penny Royal

Posted on by Neal Asher

I think I can say firmly that I have now started Penny Royal (or Pennyroyal – I still haven’t decided). A week or so back I started making some notes, but then got distracted by my old website and reworked that. (Incidentally, if you haven’t noticed there are galleries and a forum there so, as far as the latter is concerned, if you have something you want to say that you feel is off-topic, pop over there.)

Yesterday, however, I sat down determined to get back on track and wrote my first 2,000 words. It’s nice to know when I’ve actually started a book. Checking my journals I see that I’ve always noted when I’ve finished one, or rather, finished the draft I send off to the publisher, but the start point has always been vague. Maybe after this one I’ll have a definite maybe answer to that perennial question, ‘How long does it take you to write a book?’

So, the state of play at the moment is this: Zero Point is at the publisher and I’ll soon be seeing it again to deal with the copy edits; Jupiter War is slowly fermenting on my computer and I’ll give it another try next year, to see if the taste has improved and what additives might be required; and my idea about doing some short stories is on hold for the moment. That’s all for now – I must get back to work.

The Quantum Thief — Hannu Rajaniemi

Posted on by Neal Asher

In a way this was more like a fast tour of the post singularity world rather than a story set in it. I’ve been reading science and science fiction for a very long time, but I often felt the need to hold up a finger and say, ‘Hang on Hannu, if you could explain –’ … but no, he’s gone like a tour guide on speed. The ideas hit you like cars in a motorway pile-up giving you no time to deal with them, absorb them. And, of course, while the ideas are hitting you like that you’re not properly processing the plot and can fail to engage with it. My feeling is that before he leapt through the next q-dot membrane to begin his next adventure in some gaming virtuality he needed an editor to catch hold of his collar and force him to stop and smell the roses, even if those roses were laced with an optogenetic virus.

Now for the however… This was all very enjoyable, bubbling with fascinating technology and its resultant life-styles, and a book that really does feel like a glimpse into a post Vingean singularity world. I found myself caught up in the author’s enthusiasm with it all and by the end of it wondered if someone has slipped amphetamines into the printer’s ink. For me it is a book I would like to read again, but with the Internet running so I can track down and nail all that glorious weirdness. And in the end, just like with the previous book I reviewed here, the answers to the questions are mostly ‘yes’.   

The Lost Fleet 'Dauntless' — Jack Campbell

Posted on by Neal Asher

There’s a whiff of antiquity about this book that reminds me of E.E. Doc Smith and other books I read at about the same time I read the Skylark series. This feels like WWII but with space ships and could easily have been written in the 50s. I felt momentary cringes at the name of the character ‘Black Jack Geary’ at the use of ‘hell lances’ and ‘grape shot’ and at crewmen being called ‘sailors’. The technology felt daft, as if the electronics aboard the ships might have employed thermionic valves, as if the corridors were full of steam pipes and the gunners were hand-loading shells. I half expected someone to pull out a slide rule at some point to calculate vectors.

 
However…

Why shouldn’t a beam weapon be called a ‘hell-lance’ and why shouldn’t ‘grape shot’ fired at relativistic speeds be perfectly acceptable? How different is the former to a maser or particle beam, and how different is the latter to rail-gun missiles? And why shouldn’t the kind of command structures seen in our navies be used? Such arguments I tried on myself as I devoured this book. What retired naval officer John G Hemry (his real name) has done here is combine his experience of military service with an obvious (and probably dated) love of science fiction.

To sum up: all of the above is true, but in reviewing a book I have to ask some very simple questions. Did I care about the characters? Did I want to know what happened next? Did I enjoy reading this book? Was it a good read? Will I buy the next book in the series?

The answer to all these questions is ‘yes’, and this book must be included in that long list called ‘guilty pleasures’.