The third book in the Spatterjay series picks up directly after the end of the Voyage of the Sable Keech. This book hits the ground running and accelerates wildly afterward. There are action sequences here that must have left Asher breathless after writing them. Insane, over the top space opera t...
This creative collection of short stories by Neal Asher will provide an excellent introduction to his work for those unfamiliar with it, as the standalone stories cover his favorite themes and strengths: high-intensity action, richly described alien biologies, villainous religious cults, and much...
I’ve been trying lately to pin down, in some quantifiable way, how I read books. When I first started my blog I started giving everything a rating. It didn’t make sense after awhile so I abandoned it. I decided that my reviews have to stand on their own. So I’ve been trying to find a way to descr...
Outlink station Miranda has been destroyed by a nanomycelium and the very nature of this sabotage suggests that the alien bioconstruct Dragon - a creature as untrustworthy as it is gigantic - is somehow involved.
Damn.This was a good book, however there was something that ruined it for me. I'll list that at the bottom of this review so you can skip it if you haven't read the book yourself or are not familiar with Neal Asher.Ok, so last year I tried to read one of Asher's other books, The Skinner. There wa...
Ahh, the perils of 5-star rating systems. There's a wide gulf between the 3-star "liked it" and the 4-star "really liked it".I enjoyed this book of the Agent Cormac series much more than the previous two Cormac novels. I reviewed (If you can call a few sentences a review) the first novel, Gridlin...
(view spoiler)[**SPOILER ALERT******* - Enjoyed & Would Read Again **** - Enjoyed *** - Not Bad ** - Didn't Like * - Didn't finishDisclaimer: Even though this review is open for everyone to see due to the nature of GoodReads. Please note that this review / notes are just for my own personal use a...
During a war between two planets in the same solar system - each occupied by adapted humans - what is thought to be a cosmic superstring is discovered. After being cut, this object collapses into four cylindrical pieces, each about the size of a tube train. Each is densely packed with either alie...
The Polity Collective is the pinnacle of space-faring civilization. Academic and insightful, its dominion stretches from Earth Central into the unfathomable reaches of the galactic void. But when the Polity finally encounters alien life in the form of massive, hostile, crab-like carnivores known ...
The Collector rampages across a far future Africa populated with gene-spliced vampires, resurrected mammoth and nutters with APWs . . .
However, for ship-to-ship conflict, improvements in reflective and s-con heat dispersal armours have all but rendered ineffective as weapons lasers in the range of infrared to ultraviolet. Move outside those spectra, however, and you have masers, which can be used to sufficiently penetrate missil...
I opened my eyes to a blur as I felt a metal grid slide up beneath me, hoisting me up and out of the liquid under harsh bright lights. It swung me to one side of the tank, then lowered me down again. Cold metal clamps took hold of my head, but this evoked a recently returned memory which I hadn’t...
If your breathing and your heart stopped, you had achieved that state and little else was considered. This, in its time, could lead to some unfortunate results when the person checking the death failed to make absolutely sure, as fingernail marks on the insides of lids of ancient coffins attest. ...
There were snipers. That was the main thing he remembered, though he was sure he had been involved in an intricate situation beforehand that explained their presence. Coming out of the tight bowel-clenching fear of physical injury, he became aware that he was dreaming and that the staccato rattli...
Sitting above the massive bureaucracy there were over three thousand delegates representing countries or regions across the Earth. Even minor matters, like the standardization of paperclips, became the subject of debates that raged for years, while vastly more important issues were consigned to a...
When seeds buried thousands of years ago could still germinate, when a single bacterium could multiply into billions in the time it takes to plant a tree, and when the exigencies of evolution could turn a mouse into the equivalent of an elephant or a tiger, Earth was not dying. Earth was sick, ho...
A subscreen blinked on to show a schematic of a planetary system along with its stellar coordinates. Because he still retained much of that part of himself required for running a ship, Vulture recognized these coordinates as being those of an inner Line world. ‘And why are we going there?’ Crane ...
The technique, first introduced by the xeno-archaeologist Alexion Smith and frowned on by others in his profession as being too blunt an instrument, was in use here by a private concern. An Atheter artifact had been discovered on this desert planetoid: a species of plant that used a deep extended...