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...gonna kick the darkness 'till it bleeds daylight... musings of a hungarian in texas

©2003 by Annamaria Kovacs. All contents of this blog are the property of the author. Use with written permission only.

Tuesday, July 12, 2005

Another Book Recommendation

Since my birthday resulted in a veritable rain of books gifted by The Husband ::happy dance:: I am reading a LOT of fiction lately. All the books I got were hitherto unknown to me, and of the science-fiction genre; so far I enjoyed most of them.
The one I finished last week was The Skinner by Neal Asher. You know, this new generation of British sci-fi writers is truly gifted. This one is touted on the cover as: 'Dune meets Master and Commander' and it actually meets that description pretty good. Without giving out much of the storyline: imagine a planet, mostly covered by oceans where every living organism is literally the food of others, and besides that, a bite of some of these critters can grant immortality to humans. As if, you do not die. You suffer, you get hurt, mutilated, eviscerated alive, skinned, thrown to vicious sea creatures as food...but you do not die. Hence the natives of this planet has a peculiar social structure, some really weird social customs, and some really dark secrets. Throw in a long-ago alien invasion, an undead cop not willing to die until he finishes his last assignment, a relatively young immortal woman who is looking for the meaning of her immortality, a bunch of 700+ year old sea captains and a hive mind of Earth's wasps with its own agenda... I think we all could enjoy this one despite some of the really violent parts, which, I must warn you, are NOT very nice. However, at the end, the adventure eventually comes to a very satisfying ending.
I hear there is an actual prequel to this, where the world of the planet Spatterjay is first introduced; I shall eventually take a look at that one too.

7 Comments:

At 1:43 PM, Blogger Autumn said...

Hmm.. Sounds like I shall have to raid and pillage- I mean BORROW, yes, BORROW books. I am reading the one you lent me right now that is the prequle to Beowolf's Stepchildren and it is very good. :)

 
At 2:28 PM, Blogger Annamaria said...

Glad you like that one...and yes, you can definitely engage in some BORROWING books binge...:-)

 
At 4:05 PM, Blogger Autumn said...

YAY!

::happydance::

 
At 12:11 PM, Blogger JimDesu said...

Neil Asher's a gifted author. I haven't read any of his other stuff, but The Skinner's really good. It looks like it's going to be cr*p when it starts, then it picks up speed and doesn't stop. There are several delightful plot twists, and the droids are fun too.

 
At 1:30 PM, Blogger Annamaria said...

I love the droids...especially Sniper...:-) I will have to get the prequel, definitely, and I hope he''ll return to this world with another novel.

 
At 6:52 PM, Blogger Annamaria said...

Ah, kashi...you especially would like some of these characters I reckon...:-) I'd be tickled to see if you were inspired to draw some of them. I can lend it to you, since we wanted to get together LONG time now anyway...

 
At 7:59 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Glad you liked it!
Neal Asher
http://freespace.virgin.net/n.asher

 

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