[Hobbit]

For those who are 'new to the Neal', here's a summary of work to date:

Novels

Mindgames: Fool's Mate (1993)
The Parasite (1996)
Africa Zero (2001)
Gridlinked (2001)
The Skinner (2002)
The Line of Polity (2003)
Cowl (2004)
Brass Man (2005)
The Voyage of the Sable Keech (2006)
The Engineer Reconditioned (2006)
Prador Moon: A Novel of the Polity (2006)
Polity Agent (2006)

Forthcoming:

Hilldiggers (2007)
Line War (2008)

Hobbit (Updated May 2007)

[KatG]

Three out in 2006? That's rather unusual. How did that happen? (Not that I'm complaining, or anything.)

[nealasher]

KatG, it's actually four, but they're from three entirely different publishers.

The Engineer ReConditioned is being published by Cosmos Book. It is The Engineer, a novella and collection of six short stories ... reconditioned i.e. I've done some extra editing, added a few more stories and blurbs to introduce each.

Prador Moon is a short novel I wrote last year for Night Shade Books.

The other two, The Voyage of the Sable Keech (February) and Polity Agent (nine months later), are published by Macmillan. Since I've always been way ahead of the original yearly publishing schedule, they reduced to gap between books to nine months.

Busy busy.

[nealasher]

In a way The Engineer Reconditioned shouldn't be on the 2006 list since it came out at the end of last year POD, though it is going to be published properly this year.

[KatG]

No need to get defensive -- it's impressive by any account. :) Can we get a little descript of what the stories are about? (I could go to the proper websites, of course, but I'm lazy.)

[nealasher]

It's funny how that question, "What's it about then?" always makes me edgy. I always want to reply, "Well, if I could answer that in a few brief sentences, it wouldn't have been necessary for me to write a book!"

You wouldn't find much about Prador Moon or Polity Agent since they're pretty new and I haven't written any blurbs yet. In fact for the latter, I wrote a synopsis only yesterday. The first concerns some particularly nasty aliens the human race encounters and the beginning of a war with them. Anyone who has read The Skinner will know about the Prador. The second is the next one in the Cormac sequence:

Polity Agent
A runcible gate is opened into the Polity from 800 years in the future. Those who come through had been sent (from Gridlinked) to take the alien Maker back to its home civilization in the Small Magellanic cloud. The time-inconsistent gate is shut down from the Polity end once the refugees are through. Something was pursuing them. The gate is dumped into a sun.

From the refugees Cormac learns that the Maker civilization has been destroyed by Jain technology. Many questions arise from this: why was Dragon, the massive bioconstruct of the Makers, really sent to the Polity; why did a Jain node – something never before discovered throughout Polity expansion – suddenly end up in the hands of someone who could do the most damage with it, within only a few years of the Maker’s arrival? Other questions are addressed, like who or what is Horace Blegg?

Meanwhile, an entity called the Legate, is distributing Jain nodes, and the renegade attack ship the King of Hearts, has discovered something nasty outside the Polity.


A blurb for Voyage can be found here: http://freespace.virgin.net/n.asher/books.htm and a review for The Engineer can be found here: http://www.authortrek.com/engineer.html

[KatG]

Authors hate synopses. That's a given. :)

I'm clearly going to have to nose around to the beginning books and see what you've done previously. By the way, we're delighted to have another sf author on the author forums.

[Eperitos]

Hey Neal.

Any news on US publication?

[Rob B]

Yeah, especially for Brass Man which sounds really interesting.

[nealasher]

Well, I'm happy to report that Tor US will be publishing Brass Man -- only heard about this last week.