Neal Asher Interview

It’s not every day that one gets a chance to chat with one of the top names in SF, so I jumped at the opportunity to interview Mr. Neal Asher! I have most recently reviewed his novel Prador Moon, the first book in The Polity series, and I’ve reviewed Brass Man and Shadow of the Scorpion for another site. Both are novels of the Polity featuring agent Ian Cormac, who is a killing machine. If you’re a fan of military SF and haven’t yet read any novels by Neal Asher, do yourself a favor, and read them – you’ll be glad you did!

And now, on to the Q&A….

Professor Crazy: Neal, you’ve been accused of, in general, writing novels that are heavy on the action front but that don’t develop your characters very well. However, I choose to look at it a bit differently – perhaps in individual novels there’s not always that much character development, but over the course of your two different series of novels, there is clear character development. In a way, “Who cares?” because your fans buy your books because of the ginormous amount of action, bloodletting, slaughter, and way-cool monsters, technology, and weapons you write about. What’s your take on this?

Neal Asher: I think you covered it in your last sentence there. For me story comes first, and if development of a character is a requirement for that, then I’ll develop the character. Generally, though, a story that revolves around technology, action, and weird life-forms doesn’t require it. I’m certainly not going to ramble on about how some baddy was abused by his father, grew up in poverty, and just didn’t get the breaks. That kind of digression is too often an authorial excuse for a bit of moralizing and just slows things down. My job is to entertain you, not lecture you. And that ‘slowing down’ is something to bear in mind. I let the characters’ actions, their decisions, speak for them, which is often missed by the reader whilst said characters are evading the latest flesh-eating monster or clinging to safety straps during a space battle.

In The Line of Polity, the outlink station Miranda is destroyed by sabotage, by a nanomycelium which Dragon supplied. Why did Dragon supply it?

That is still being answered even now in the book I’m presently writing, called The Technician, which is set on the planet Masada from The Line of Polity. Masada is the homeworld of an ancient race that committed racial suicide to avoid civilization-destroying Jain technology. The Polity needs to know about this, but cannot whilst Masada is under the control of the Theocracy. Dragon knew that once the theocrats used the nanomycelium to destroy Miranda, that would pull the Polity in to take over Masada and thus learn what happened there two million years ago. See, not complicated at all…

The slave population of Masada is controlled by the Theocracy, who live in cylinder worlds. Though there are religious allusions in your novels, you’ve written that you don’t particularly care for organized religions. Why is that?

Best to refer you to The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, or maybe Why God is not Great by Christopher Hitchens for a lengthier answer. My simple answer is that nothing should be taken on faith, and that belief in an invisible friend in the sky is a lazy way of avoiding thinking about the complexities of life, and a form of stupidity we should have left behind us years ago. Organised religions promote ignorance.

I compared Ian Cormac and Rondure Knight Anderson’s quest to find and destroy Dragon in Brass Man, in a review I wrote about it, to Captain Ahab’s single-minded pursuit of Moby Dick. Did you have this comparision in mind when you wrote Brass Man, or is it perhaps myself reading too much into it?

I didn’t have Moby Dick in the forefront of my mind, because Anderson is not a rabid loon like Captain Ahab, but maybe it was lurking there in the background, along with a touch of Don Quixote.

The two-meter brass golem, Mr. Crane, whom you introduce in Gridlinked, is one of my favorite characters that you’ve created. He’s used by the villian Skellor like a puppet, but Mr. Crane, despite having been programmed with the memcording of a serial killer, has a soul and can be a rather nice chap – er, when he’s not savagely murdering people, anyway. He’s trying to restore his shattered mind, each killing helping him remember and organize in the correct sequence the seventeen disparate parts of his pysche.  Did you set out to make Mr. Crane into a sympathetic character, or did it just work out that way as you wrote Brass Man?

In Gridlinked he was introduced as a throw-away monster but grew in the telling. In that book he was destroyed, but wouldn’t leave my mind, nor would he leave the minds of many of my readers. In Brass Man I resurrected him, which might seem like a bit of a cheat, but a machine is never unrecoverable scrap if the technology is available to make repairs – and that applies to the human machine, too. He became a sympathetic character because I focused on him closely. In fact, referring back to one of your previous questions, I showed how he was abused by his father…

One more question about Brass Man before I move on to some of your other novels – besides comparing Cormac and Anderson to Captain Ahab, I compared Anderson’s character to that of Stephen King’s Gunslinger, in the book by the same name. Had you read Gunslinger when you wrote Brass Man, and been influenced by it, or did you base his character on something totally different?

I have read a few of the Gunslinger books, but again no conscious connection. If there was to be a conscious connection to a character of that kind it would more likely have been David Gemmell’s Jerusalem Man. So what was Anderson based on? As I said before, a touch of Don Quixote, but more perhaps on the wise old warriors that are usually a staple of fantasy fiction, or perhaps the down-to-Earth seargeant who keeps his men alive.

I was wondering why, in Prador Moon, Sylac installs souped-up augs on Moria and a Separatist?  He seems to be both an enemy of the AIs and a criminal, yet doesn’t seem to mind when the AI George realizes he can use Moria to try to stop the Prador from seizing runcible technology.Sylac isn’t really an enemy of the Polity. He’s just an amoral scientist and is more interested in how the augs work rather than to what ends they are used.

I liked your use of Edward Lear’s poem “The Owl and the Pussycat,” both quoting from it at the start of chapters in Prador Moon and borrowing the word “runcible” to use for the warp Skaidon develops to allow the Polity to transport themselves from one world to another. What made you decide to use this word, and have you been an Edward Lear admirer for long?

“The Owl and the Pussycat” is just one of a number of poems or rhymes that have stuck in my head since my childhood, and I just like using that stuff in my books. When I was trying to think of a name for my instantaneous transmission device the name ‘runcible’ just seemed right, probably because it is already similar to ‘ansible’, which is the name of a SF news sheet from David Langford and taken from the name of a superluminal communicator coined by Ursula K LeGuin in her book Rocannon’s World in 1966.

How is it that the (to be Politically Correct) Opposable Thumbs Deficient enemies of the Human Polity, the Prador, developed sufficient technological and scientific advancements to construct interstellar dreadnoughts capable of absorbing the best that the Polity can dish out?

They didn’t develop runcible technology, so, whilst the Polity was focusing on building runcible gates between worlds, the Prador continued to develop their spaceships. Also, being armoured by nature, the idea of armour is ingrained in their psyche, so they concentrated on that, too, developing stronger armour through advanced metals technology. A parallel can be drawn with human history. Which nations developed the strongest navies? Island nations, of course. Technological development can be twisted by all sorts of factors.

In Shadow of the Scorpion, you pay a sort of homage to the excellent SF author Peter Watts by naming a motel after him which Ian, his mother, and his brother Dax stay at, and where the scorpion AI makes contact with Ian. How long have you been a fan of Watts’s writing, and why did you decide to include a motel named after him in your novel?

Tor US sent me an uncorrected proof copy of Peter Watts’ Blindsight, which I thought was one of the best SF books I’d read in a number of years. I got in contact with Peter, had a bit of an email chat, and we exchanged some books: some of mine for his Starfish, Behemoth, etc., which were then out of print. I thought they were excellent, too. Since those books were about deep sea diving it just seemed appropriate to name an undersea hotel after him. Perhaps I was also affected by Blade Runner – y’know, final scenes set in the Bradbury Hotel.

Your latest novel, Orbus, published in the U.K. but not yet here in the States, features Captain Orbus of the spaceship Gurnard, from your novel The Voyage of the Sable Keech in The Spatterjay series.  Could you briefly tell us more about what it’s about, and what adventures Captain Orbus faces in the novel, and have you gotten any update on when it might be released here?

The best way to do that is to offer the blurb:

Now in charge of an cargo spaceship, the Old Captain Orbus flees a violent and sadistic past, but he doesn’t know that the lethal war drone, Sniper, is a stowaway, and that past is rapidly catching up with him. His old enemy, the Prador Vrell, mutated by the Spatterjay virus into something powerful and dangerous, has seized control of a Prador dreadnought, slaughtering its entire crew, and now seeks to exact vengeance on those who tried to have him killed.

Their courses inexorably converge in the Graveyard, the border realm lying between the Polity and the Prador Kingdom, a place filled with the ruins left by past genocides and interplanetary war. Secure in that same place the Golgoloth, a monster to a race of monsters, is recruited by the terrifying King of the Prador into the long cold war between his kind and the humans. It is imperative that Vrell be hunted down and killed, for what he knows and what he might become.

Meanwhile, something that has annihilated civilizations is stirring from a slumber of five million years, and the cold war is heating up, fast.

There are many more questions I’d love to ask you, Neal, but I’ll end this interview with two fun ones.

First, if humans one day routinely had augs implanted in their heads, and could download CDs directly to their brains, which rock, punk, etc., music do you think would survive the test of time and still be listened to in the future?

I’m damned if I know. I expect the stuff that has already survived the test of time to be there – like the classical stuff – I can see someone sit back in a chair listening to Holst whilst gazing out the panoramic window of cruiser as it sling-shots around Jupiter. As for more modern music, yeah, Pink Floyd whilst stoned on some exotic drug on the surface of an alien world, maybe boogying in some virtual reality to something present day. Can’t say beyond that – my interest in music is limited.

And, second, if I or any of your other fans met you at whichever local pub you might frequent, which alcoholic beverage would we be most likely to find you drinking and could offer to buy you a round of?

Here in Britain it would be a pint of IPA, out in Crete, where I spend much of my time, it would be a carafe of white wine, or maybe some raki.

This has been a great experience for me, Neal, and I hope that the readers of BSC also enjoy this interview! Thanks again from all of us at BSC! 

To learn more about Neal Asher and his work, visit his website or stay up-to-date with his doings on his blog!

About Professor Crazy

Professor Crazy here! I have obtained degrees from numerous colleges & universities both Major and Minor, with an emphasis on all of the Various & Sundry schools of Thought & Discipline. I majored in Rhetoric at the University of Illinois, obtained a Master's degree in English at Arizona State University In Tempe, AZ., and another Master's in Secondary Education at UALR, in Little Rock, AR. Then, there are the years I spent with the Swedish Bikini Team, touring throughout Europe...fond memories, those...especially that time in Amsterdam....