Present Books Conducive To The Skinner (Spatterjay #1)
| Original Title: | The Skinner |
| ISBN: | 0765350483 (ISBN13: 9780765350480) |
| Edition Language: | English |
| Series: | Spatterjay #1, Polity Universe (chronological order) #12 |
Neal Asher
Paperback | Pages: 432 pages Rating: 4.14 | 5506 Users | 250 Reviews
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| Title | : | The Skinner (Spatterjay #1) |
| Author | : | Neal Asher |
| Book Format | : | Paperback |
| Book Edition | : | Anniversary Edition |
| Pages | : | Pages: 432 pages |
| Published | : | May 1st 2005 by Tor Science Fiction (first published 2002) |
| Categories | : | Science Fiction. Fiction. Space. Space Opera |
Chronicle To Books The Skinner (Spatterjay #1)
Neal Asher, whom Tor introduced to the American audience with Gridlinked, takes us deeper into his unique universe with an even more remarkable second novel, The Skinner. On the planet Spatterjay arrive three travelers: Janer, acting as the eyes of the hornet Hive mind, on a mission not yet revealed to him; Erlin, searching for Ambel -- the ancient sea captain who can teach her how to live; and Sable Keech, on a vendetta he cannot abandon, though he himself has been dead for 700 years. This remote world is mostly ocean, and it is a rare visitor who ventures beyond the safety of the island Dome. Outside it, only the native Hoopers dare risk the voracious appetites of the planet's wildlife. But somewhere out there is Spatterjay Hoop -- and Keech will not rest until he brings this legendary renegade to justice for hideous crimes committed centuries ago during the Prador Wars. While Keech is discovering that Hoop is now a monster -- his body and head living apart from each other -- Janer is bewildered by a place where the native inhabitants just will not die and angry when he finally learns the Hive mind's intentions for him. Meanwhile, Erlin thinks she has plenty of time to find the answers she seeks, but could not be more wrong. For one of the most brutal of the alien Prador is about to pay the planet a surreptitious visit, intent on exterminating all remaining witnesses to his wartime atrocities. As the visitors' paths converge, major hell is about to erupt in a chaotic waterscape where minor hell is already a remorseless fact of everyday life . . . and death.Rating Containing Books The Skinner (Spatterjay #1)
Ratings: 4.14 From 5506 Users | 250 ReviewsCommentary Containing Books The Skinner (Spatterjay #1)
I was so excited about this book. Sailors! Viruses! Sea creatures! Oh my... A Caroline bonanza book. And for the first few chapters, it totally delivers. Wacky characters strengthened by viruses sail across salty, windy seas with alien creatures trying to take chunks out of them. Sea creatures wriggle and writhe and swim their way through in the oddest of ways. It's wonderful.And then I seriously think someone took Asher aside and shook him by the shoulders, yelling at him, "Get down toI bought this book on a whim at a Barnes & Noble, mostly because the cover looked interesting (Note: The cover shown here on Goodreads is a totally different cover and frankly I wouldn't have bought the book based on it. Yes, I judge books by their cover). This is my first foray into the Polity universe, and I know the Spatterjay series is kind of a standalone offshoot of his main Polity stories, so I felt lost a little bit with some of the details Asher went over in this book that
A captivating mix of science fiction and fantasy. Containing all the swashbuckling excitement of a YA story, but ratcheted up to a gritty adult level, this crazy weird novel includes killer crustaceans, a decapitated captain, carnivorous crabs, hornet hive-minds, AIs with attitude, lecherous leaches, super-human sailors, a vile villainess and a mummified zombie cyborg. A very original mix...just way, way cool. Looking forward to reading Spatterjay #2, The Voyage of the Sable Keech.
I really enjoyed this book. I don't read a lot of sci-fi but I thought this was a very good read. For me this wasn't so much a book about characters as it was about the things they do and the world they inhabit. Fortunately the world/s they occupy are full of fascination of both the biological and technological varieties and there's a complex and fast moving plot. So whilst I didn't feel a great emotional investment in any of the characters, I was very interested in reading what happened to
4.5 starsSpatterjay is a water world with extremely hostile fauna and was once a site of a terrible war crime - a group of criminals exploited the local virus that turns humans into hooders, making them nearly indestructible. Then they sold them to the alien Prador to become the slaves - blanks with their minds destroyed - or food. For seven hundred years, a Polity cop turned into a reification - basically resurrected corpse - had been hunting them throughout the universe. He, an adventurer
This is a great post-nanotech thriller/adventure SF story. Say that five times fast.It's also the first Asher I've read, and I find his writing broadly similar to both Alastair Reynolds and Iain M. Banks in the setting and even type of story being told. That said, it's definitely distinct from either of those, most notably through the heavy reliance on nanotechnology and the different approach to Artificial Intelligences (the ones here are more similar to Banks' Culture drones, but they're much
There was a really good and interesting story in this but there were just so many characters so that I couldn't process them all so I kept skipping chunks of parts of less relevant characters and when they became more important later on I didn't know what's going on anymore. What I was able to follow was great, though. There were characters which parts I really liked and if this book just focused on only a few points of view I might have actually loved it. But the way it was it just increasingly
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