It’s weird, gross and intriguing all at the same time.įollowing from this, Spatterjay is another riot of biological weirdness that takes place in a different one of Asher’s regular settings, a strange world infested with symbiotic parasites that alter everything they come into contact with. Snairls is as completely different to The Engineer as could be, a story set on a gigantic floating snail populated with gene-modified people who we see from the view of a man who has been indentured to a hive-mind comprised of garden-variety hornets. It’s a bloody good story, and well worth your time. It has the feel of golden age SF about it, but with a modern sensibility and some damn fine writing behind it. It’s big SF, with gigantic dreadnoughts, ancient alien races, and the highest of stakes.
The first story, The Engineer, is very cool. The first two stories here are connected to Asher’s ‘Polity’ universe – a world I’m now very keen to explore in his novels. Usually in an average collection there are flashes of brilliance, a handful of good stories and one or two whose weakness stinks the whole collection up - the long-dead fish under the floorboards of an otherwise lovely home.įrom page one, Asher inducts his reader into fascinating universes. I can’t remember the last time I encountered that in a short story collection. Not even a merely average story, one of the anaemic but still serviceable filler tales of the sort so frequently tacked onto compilation books.Įvery story in this collection is solid.
Maybe you, like me, are looking for an epic novel in an awe inspiring setting that also makes you laugh – my personal white whale.Īnyway, I have a couple of unlikely treasures I seek in my reading, and when I finished The Engineer Reconditioned I knew I had found one of my personal grails, that most rare of things - A science fiction short story collection with no duds. Maybe a story that expands your mind so much that you can only mouth a silent ‘wow’ when you turn the last page. Maybe it’s a novel that makes you feel so much, that you tear up. An El Dorado in paper and ink that they seek, usually fruitlessly, across the many books they read, whether they even know it or not.
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