The Voyage of the Sable Keech

Neal Asher The Voyage of the Sable Keech (2006)
For me it began with Bioship, an entertainingly disgusting short story in a Solaris anthology which prompted me to bag a copy of Asher's The Skinner, an entertainingly disgusting novel, a big fat housebrick of smelly maritime science-fiction based on that poster of a small fish about to be devoured by a larger fish which is itself about to be swallowed by an even bigger one, and so on and so on. The Skinner is set on Spatterjay, a planet with a unique ecology based around a virus which keeps its host alive by almost any means necessary. The oceans of Spatterjay are home to galleons manned by salty and significantly mutated sea dogs who spend their days wrestling giant leeches or else regrowing body parts nipped off by the same; and that's before we even get to cored human slaves and all the other stuff you probably wouldn't want to read about whilst eating dinner.

The Skinner was such a treat that plucking others by the same guy as I found them from the book store shelf seemed a no brainer, as they say; but unfortunately Shadow of the Scorpion and The Engineer Reconditioned both turned out to be pretty dull, your average militaristic technowank; so when I chanced upon this sequel to The Skinner, the resumption of a nautical theme suggested it to be at least worth a look.

I read about a hundred pages engrossed and yet without much of an idea what was actually happening. Online friends and acquaintances commented that they found Asher's prose impenetrable partially due to his lousy characterisation. I could see their point, but I nevertheless persisted, actually going back to re-read those first hundred pages in the hope of forming a stronger impression as to what was going on with the narrative; and as it happens I seem to recall also having had to do this with The Skinner. One might suggest that finding myself obliged to re-read those first four or five chapters indicates a severe failing on the part of the author, and whilst that may be true, it's probably also worth considering that I actually enjoyed the re-reading as much as I'd enjoyed the initial bewildering foray. The problem is that Asher gets so lost in his baroque and squelchy biological world building, that it's difficult to pick out individual characters or events amongst all the slimy protuberances and circular orifices lined with plug-cutting teeth.

I seemed to be back on track, but with each hundred pages or so, progress became ever more difficult. I knew what was happening, but I never quite worked out why, or why I should care, and after a while the novelty wore off because I've already read The Skinner; and if convoluted, I'm sure it had a bit more of a story than this. It's not that The Voyage of the Sable Keech doesn't have a story, but it doesn't have one requiring six-hundred pages; which is a real shame because some of the concepts are fucking bananas.

Shadow of the Scorpion

Neal Asher Shadow of the Scorpion (2008)
Still buzzing from how much I recall having enjoyed The Skinner - which I read back in 2012 - here I am once again slightly underwhelmed by a Neal Asher title, so bugger!

Shadow of the Scorpion turns out to be military science-fiction, probably decent as military science-fiction goes, but military science-fiction nevertheless. It narrates the early years of Ian Cormac, Polity agent and two-fisted protagonist of other novels by Asher, so it probably helps if you've read those other novels and already care about the character, which I haven't and don't.

I gather this one is roughly about war, and the truism of its first casualty being truth, in this case referring to Cormac's memories which have been edited so as to remove the traumatic bits and thus allow him to carry on soldiering. It also occurs to me that some of this might represent an oblique response to the Iraq war, to US coverage of the Iraq war and to what went on at Abu Ghraib, which at least elevates it above the general level of most military science-fiction as I understand it to be, and about which I don't really care enough to investigate for myself, having at least a million better things to do. If that bothers anyone, please feel free to stop reading and piss off. Military science-fiction indeed! You sad fucking wankers!

Ahem - pardon me...

'—experiencing pain only hardens you, desensitises you, was how I thought about it all back then. I now understand that I was just being selfish, like a parent giving an unruly child drugs to calm him down. Pain, whether physical or mental, always serves the purpose of teaching the recipient to avoid it, but more important than that, it can teach said recipient to empathise with the pain of others. We need pain to be human.'

So, as military science-fiction, Shadow of the Scorpion at least has a more elevated purpose than the presumably usual weapons-porn driven fight to liberate freedom from the clutches of a giant space Nazi ingeniously named Obamack Bara or whatever; and Neal Asher certainly knows his way around a sentence, but the problem is that  most of the book is actually quite boring, at least up until the last couple of chapters. It's well-written and wildly inventive - although nowhere near quite so apeshit as was The Skinner - but somehow I just wasn't feeling it. I've noticed how Asher occasionally has this habit of avoiding too many direct references to people, objects, occurrences or whatever, I suppose so as to avoid the sort of repetition which comes when everything is continually spelled out over and over and over. Unfortunately he seems to push the fine balance just a little too far over the line on occasion resulting in three or four pages passing with only an approximate idea of who or what the fuck they're all talking about, or at least this was how I found it. It's probably significant that I happily kept on reading, regardless, and still got enough out of it to conclude that Shadow of the Scorpion was more in the direction of a pleasure than not.

His Share of Glory

C.M. Kornbluth His Share of Glory (1997)
As a fairly general rule I tend to approach an author of unfamiliar stripe by first dipping into the short stories, from which platform I then attempt to assess whether or not I'm likely to enjoy lengthier works. His Share of Glory seemed nevertheless a slightly daunting proposition because although it does indeed collect the short fiction of the highly praised C.M. Kornbluth, it collects all of it, or at least almost all he wrote alone and extracurricular to collaborative efforts with Frederik Pohl, Robert A. W. Lowndes, and others; so it's a 670 page hardback of such constitution that ne'er-do-wells could quite easily use it to smash the windows of jewellery stores. Reading His Share of Glory has therefore, in some respects, been a less casual undertaking than I would like, but being a birthday present from the world's greatest mother-in-law - who presented me with the Ace Double edition of Fritz Leiber's The Big Time on a previous occasion - it would have been churlish to get too sniffy about it, and not least because Kornbluth was clearly a remarkable writer.

As his still glowing reputation attests, Kornbluth was patently amongst the more talented of the Futurians - a moderately political New York based science-fiction fan group with a membership roster including Isaac Asimov, James Blish, Judith Merril, Damon Knight, Donald A. Wollheim and others; and it's probably worth noting that he died relatively young and said reputation is thus founded on less than two decades of paid work. His characters tend to be lively, believable, and informed by strongly literary sensibilities. The stories they inhabit tend to be playful, rich in imagery and memorable phrasing, with the jerky narrative motion of van Vogt played more for comic than traditionally pulpy dramatic effect, so there's occasionally a faint tone of Marx brothers lending an absurdist spin to the proceedings, and the sort of bizarre embellishments which suggest Kornbluth's fiction as ancestral to Michael Moorcock's stranger material, or even that of Terry Pratchett in a certain light. One further element he at least had in common with these two is that of genre never once being allowed to take precedent over the progression of the narrative, or over its author taking infectious pleasure in the process.

Of Kornbluth's short stories, The Marching Morons and The Little Black Bag seem to be the best known, and understandably so, but he had plenty others of equivalent quality where those came from. Shark Ship predates Neal Asher's nautically themed weird fiction by nearly half a century; and Two Dooms divided the United States between Japan and the Third Reich a couple of years before The Man in the High Castle, and to more chilling effect for my money. The final eight stories of the collection were written to specific commissions and as such read a little like Kornbluth channelling E.E. 'Doc' Smith in terms of concessions to fifties space opera, but generally it seems he would have had trouble had he ever been asked to write a dull sentence; for example, The Last Man Left in the Bar:

'Bartender,' in a controlled and formal voice. Shot of Red Top and a beer at 9:09, the hand vibrating with remembrance of a dirty green El Greco sky which might be Brookhaven's heavens a million years either way from now, or one second sideways, or (bow to Method and formally exhaust the possibilities) a hallucination. The Seal snatched from the greenlit rock altar could be a blank washer, a wheel from a toy truck, or the screw top from a jar of shaving cream but for the fact that it wasn't. It was the Seal.

Of course, 670 pages of this would be disorientating, which is probably the only weakness of either this collection, or the fact of my having attempted to digest it in one go over the duration of a couple of weeks. Kornbluth possibly shouldn't be read in such huge chunks, at least not his short stories, being as some of those more eccentrically narrated lose cohesion without due concentration. At least that was how it seemed as I worked my way through, although considering the sheer volume of material here, the guy is entitled to have fired off a few blanks now and then.

In the event of this reading like an ambiguous verdict, the points to remember are that at his best, Kornbluth was fucking tremendous, and there's quite a lot of his best to be found here.

This collection was produced - by the way - by NESFA Press who've been doing some good work keeping certain authors in print, producing similarly exhaustive short story collections by the likes of Judith Merril, Murray Leinster, A.E. van Vogt, Cordwainer Smith and innumerable others; and I've encountered a rumour of their perhaps presently wrangling over the rights to gather together all of Clifford D. Simak's short fiction, volume or volumes I would crawl naked over broken glass to own, as they say, should the rumour turn out to be true. Aside from anything else, this should therefore be considered an enthusiastic recommendation.

The Engineer Reconditioned

Neal Asher The Engineer Reconditioned (2006)

I'm not exactly sure why, but this one - collecting an early short story and two novellas - dragged a bit, particularly towards the end. This is annoying as I tend to read for an hour before going to sleep and then again for another hour before I get up in the morning, and plodding through a less than enjoyable book can sometimes cast a bit of an unsavoury tang over the rest of the intermediary day, particularly if that day is already spent enduring minor pain in the shoulder, the mystery of where all the sodding flies in the kitchen keep coming from, the fact that it's still fucking nippy outside despite living in south Texas, the water being cut off for a few hours by the utilities people, realising the milk has gone off, and opening a random page in a self-published book that I've been over a million fucking times to find yet another typo I've somehow missed.

Anyway, setting aside my own first world problems, of all the roughly current crop of British science-fiction writers, Neal Asher has distinguished himself as having both the big ideas and the storytelling ability to get them across without writing like someone aiming at the airport book stands, at least if The Skinner was anything to go by. The promise of that more recent work is found in a few of these slightly more formative efforts from the small press years. He seems particularly adept at writing weird biology of such stomach-churning convolutions as to border on a sort of sciency Lovecraft, which is particularly vivid in the two novellas, The Engineer and Spatterjay, summarised in my notes as having touches of Alice in Wonderland gone horribly wrong and H.R. Giger without the necrosis. Even in the depths of space, Asher's prime fillets always seem to pull you back to the high seas with salt in the spray and faintly disgusting gelatinous things sprouting all over the hull.

Unfortunately for the sake of this collection, whilst he clearly had the recipe even in the early days, it took a while before the pies started coming out right. Some of the narratives here appear strangely lacking in direction, or even story in a few cases. Others I struggled to remember even as I was reading them. Then again, everyone is entitled to turn out a few turkeys, and it's Neal Asher, so it's still worth a read on the strength of the good stuff.

The Skinner

Neal Asher The Skinner (2002)
Neal Asher's short story Bioship made quite an impression when I read it in one of those Solaris anthologies, and this mostly delivers on that promise of sea sick space opera to churn the stomach and leave the reader smelling faintly of fish. Despite a relatively uncluttered turn of phrase, the narrative is surprisingly dense, for everything on the somewhat nautical world of Spatterjay is either weird or disgusting and requires much qualification. This is a thoroughly alien ecology of ships with living sails, huge seafaring leeches, and the salty old dogs which hunt them for a living.

The Skinner is initially disorientating, coming perilously close to doing too much - a great many characters introduced, each with their own story, and all before you've found your sea legs. This was why I ended up reading the first hundred pages twice, but it paid off and the detail is so engrossing that there's little possibility of getting bored, even in returning to recently covered ground.

In essence it's a fairly simple tale - the hunt for a war criminal - painted in very weird colours and seeming a far more likely influence on the mollusc aesthetic of the Pirates of the Caribbean films than any more obviously Lovecraftian source. The weirdest detail is probably the environment itself, a living illustration of that no such thing as a free meal poster with a succession of increasingly large fish about to vanish in a single act of recursive gastronomy. Everything on Spatterjay eats everything else, frequently by means of circular orifices lined with teeth; and everything in the food chain is infected with a viral mechanism promoting rapid mutation and healing so that even the most voracious predators need never fear depletion of their food source; so death doesn't come easy for anyone, as vividly illustrated by the Skinner of the title who, having been decapitated hundreds of years before, lives on with head and body as two independent creatures. As I said, everything on Spatterjay is either weird or disgusting.

The Skinner isn't really quite like anything I've read before in terms of story, although it hints at what Larry Niven probably should have written. As roughly contemporary space opera, it's as good as anything by Iain Banks, and superior to the work of at least a few other big names. Given how this novel is sort of like eating chocolate cake in terms of information density, I probably could have done with it being maybe a hundred or so pages shorter, but that's not a serious complaint.