Customer Reviews

The Parasite

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This was quite meaty for a novella and I really enjoyed it. It is one of Asher's earlier works, and lacks a little bit in the editing compared with the Pan/Tor novels, but that's OK because if it wasn't self re-published on Amazon it wouldn't be available at all.
In particular it was a treat to read about some early Polity tech ideas before the Polity books were written, for example, chainglass, golems, and an obsession with nano tendrils taking over a human body.
There was plenty of Asher style gore, and a high body count, much enjoyed, good fun.

[...]

This novel is sort of a pre-Polity idea. It works quite good and the you can see where the ideas develop into the Polity/Cormac books. Not bad, still enjoyable, but not as good as the later books.

This is reputedly a recent rewrite of one of Asher's early works, now rare and priced out of reasonable reach. The novella is a good read, although it would have benefited from more than a simple spell check. It's great to see the genesis of some of Asher's more thoroughly developed concepts, most importantly the struggle of AIs dealing with the early restrictions placed upon them by the human masters. This is the only pre-Quiet War story of his that I've read. A lot of the Cormack series' future plot devices are tried out here.

The rewrite is pretty smooth. As the comments elsewhere indicate it reflects a rethinking of Asher's earlier Global Warming enthusiasm. The scene jumping is a little abrupt in so short a story, but the plot never drags. I would like to compare this to the original version of The Parasite.

I totally agree with the earlier review of "getting" ebooks. This is a great example of providing access to material that we have likely never seen again. I love Neal Ashers' work, and this was a sweet taste of it.

Please keep these coming!

Neal Asher is one of my favorite authors. After seeing that he has taken it upon himself to rescue this earlier work and publish it for the Kindle, it was an easy decision.

I'll follow up this up once I've read it and post an appropriate review of the content. However I wanted to express my thanks to authors who "get" ebooks.

What a great find. I've been looking for this for quite a while. This is a great read and it's lots of fun to find far early references to technologies found in the Polity. Thanks for making this available.

After reading Gridlinked some year's back, I became an instant fan of Neal Asher and began the process of accumulating all of his works, including short stories in collections and magazines. After this, I began looking for the odd bits of his earlier work. Not too bad as first--Africa Zero was still in print and The Engineer had been re-released with a collection of stories as The Engineer Reconditioned--but was absolutely flummoxed by the idea of paying $60+ for a used paperback copy of Parasite and $70+ for Runcible Tales! I decided to take a pass and forgot about them...almost.

A few weeks ago, as soon as I registered my brand new Kindle, Parasite was the first book I downloaded. Aside from some rough edges in the prose (Asher didn't have a battery of experts from Pan-Macmillan helping him back in 1997), it was great fun to read an early story containing many of the tropes of his recent work: an anti-hero protagonist, golems, scary biological organisms, very bad men behaving very badly, all combined with an action-packed, well-plotted story. Asher always entertains.

I appreciate his efforts in bringing forth this Kindle edition and hope we will see Runcible Tales in the near future.

I was very glad to finally be a read this, as I had heard of it, but could never find it. As the description clearly states, It is a novella, not a novel, but I think the $5 cost is fair. As another reviewer said, this is pre-Polity, but it is definitely in Asher's style. If you enjoy his other books, you will most likely enjoy this.

This is an engaging enough story, fairly formulaic, but put together well enough. However it is really let down by a dreadful kindle edition: there are no spaces between sections, creating an abrupt and confusing change of pace; there are spelling mistakes; and in general the whole thing could have benefited from an editor - any editor.

five bucks for what it would ne generous to call a novella. Throw in a couple sentence fragments to sour the deal a bit further.