Prador Moon, the first book inNeal Asher's Polity sequence, is exploring some of the history predating The Skinner and the rest of the Spatterjay novels. It is a fast and furious 1st contact novel, Asher Style, i.e. with lots of blood, gore, guts, and action. Not his finest or most sophisticated work, but a quick and entertaining read.
It has to be said that this is a novel that starts as it means to go on – humanity, and the all-powerful artificial intelligences who rule the whole of human space, together known as ‘the Polity’, have encountered an intelligent, space-faring race, for the very first time after a long phase of expansion with nothing more than a few separatists causing trouble. We pick up the story as the human Ambassador welcomes the representatives from the Prador Second Kingdom to Avalon Station. On page 9 Jebel Krong, in charge of security for this encounter, muses (whilst being dragged out of the reception chamber, one arm short of the full complement): Right, thought Jebel, big hostile Aliens with a taste for human flesh. It was the kind of scenario that would have been laughed out of the door by a modern holofiction producer. Jebel could not have been less amused.
Learning the World is Ken MacLeod doing First Contact – and doing it well, and in an interesting and thought-proviking way. Learning the World is also the title of the Biolog (should translate easily enough) of one Atomic Discourse Gale, of the 10th Ship Generation of the Sunliner But the Sky, My Lady! The Sky!, which is approaching its target for colonization, their ‘Destiny Star’. They have been travelling for nearly 400 years, and are now raising and training the generation which will colonize, build habitats, mine and connect the planets and asteroids, and fill the ship with fuel and the next founder generation to move on to the next system in the ever-expanding human sphere.
Things don’t go as planned, though, as for the very first time in human history the system they find is populated by intelligent beings. They call themselves humans (we are the aliens, of course, from their point of view), look bat-like (this is our comparison, we look like flightless, stunted creatures to them), and are at an early industrial stage of their development.
It’s Michael Moorcock, Captain, but not as we know him! Here are a few words, written quite a while ago, on the topic of London Bone, a collection of short stories and novellas by Michael Moorcock; a book utterly devoid of any Space Opera, and with no Sword’n’Sorcery anywhere to be found…
OK, firstly – yes, this is THE Michael Moorcock of Jerry Cornelius, Elric of Melnibone/Eternal Champion etc fame (he’s got nearly 100 books to his name meanwhile!), and no, this is NOT Fantasy or SF or Swords’n’Sorcery… instead we’re looking at a fabulous collection of short speculative fiction (for lack of a better term) stories and novellas written over a longer time frame, some of them already published in magazines or other collections before.
The stories cover a wide range of topics, from the classic ‘London Bone’, a haunting tale of the trade in bones from black death mass graves; through the story of the ‘Clapham Antichrist’ and a hidden square in SW London; to a story of an Archaeological dig in Egypt which is visited by Aliens that look a lot like the pictures of less human-like Egyptian Gods the old Egyptians left behind.
Global Headis/was Bruce Sterling’s first published collection of short stories (he’s published 4 more since) – these are stories written between 85 and 92 and, in retrospect (don’t we all love hindsight!) show his departure from the Cyberpunk/Steampunk stories he was writing (or, rather, selling!) at the time. It contains 12 stories of varying length, and, as usual for such collections, spanning a substantial range of topics and approaches; most of which I rather enjoyed.
Our Neural Chernobyl: This is a pseudo-review of a fictional book by Dr Felix Hollom, an ‘Open Tower Scientist’. Er, populist science? How very Daily Mail. Anyway, it discusses Gene Hacking gone wrong and viral, and resulting in a world where animals develop intelligence. Fun, and thoroughly tongue in cheek.
Storming the Cosmos: this is a collaboration with Rudy Rucker, describing a Tunguska Expedition by the KGB, early in the space race, to obtain a sample of the Alien technology which crashed there. It’s got plenty of cold war paranoia, party and love politics. And the artefact is not what they expected. Or is it? Delightful, to say the least.
Here are a few thoughts, put down originally in 2007, on Melanie McGrath's Hard, Soft and Wet- an inoffensive, but rather non-essential auto-biographical story describing her experiences with the online world. My, how times have moved on!
Where to start? Firstly, a few misconceptions from the front cover:
The title, pornographic as it sounds (or is that only me? search for the title on Google at your own risk...), refers to the Hardware, Software, and Wetware (ie humans – what a limited definition) that today’s world of IT requires. Not sure she really ‘got it’, though. The whole thing and its interactions seems to continually be slightly out of her grasp...
The subtitle/tag line (The Digital Generation Comes of Age) is a load of rubbish, and most likely the result of a brainwave by some marketing droid. The story is about Melanie’s love affair, and eventual disillusionment with the online world.
Prador Moon
Learning the World
Global Head 
