Customer Reviews

The Voyage of the Sable Keech (Spatterjay, Book 2)

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Neal Asher has recently entered my own personal sci-fi hall of fame. His writing skills are superb and his novels are invariably entertaining. This novel slightly disappointed me, it not being on the same scale as Line of Polity or Brass Man (or its predecessor, Skinner, for that matter). There were too many subplots; and the major plot was not given enough emphasis to standout, and I was left behind, trying to pick up pieces and put them together. All in all, I was left with the impression of hurry.

I have to say though, his characters are thoroughly enjoyable and very real, and I never pass up a chance to read his novels.

If you enjoyed The Skinner, you will love this latest excursion to the insanely dangerous waterworld of Spatterjay. I really had a good time with this book! It has all the elements I like about Asher's Polity stories, including his sheer creative exuberance. Viruses, hive minds, voracious monsters, exotic weapons, giant whelks, this has it all! Complexly plotted, fast-moving, bursting with action, swarming with extremely nasty alien life forms and featuring some ace futuristic military tech, this is a novel which will immensely please Asher's existing fans and will get him plenty of new fans too. Acquire this book now!

I love Mr. Asher's world of Spatterjay and his unfettered sense of adventure. The mix of cultures and species does not get old or redundant in this continuation of the world of undie-ing sailors, and in fact continues to expand into an almost cinematic experience. I love this book.

Asher is a strangely compelling author. He's not quite as perceptive or insightful as a truly top notch novelist, but, you can't put his books down. His characters aren't all that likable, and they are somewhat Lake Wobegonish (where all the children are above average), but they are involving. The mix of hard sf concepts is outstanding.

Completely suitable sequel to The Skinner! What really separated The Skinner from the rest of the sc-fi out here today was, remarkably, such a simple thing: details, details and details. And not the kind of details which spawns a 1,000 page monster like Hamilton, but details in the sense that the original idea was so well thought out that endless sentences and chapters and stories could be written about the world. Such is Spatterjay!

Asher continues with the depth of detail of the Spatterjay pecking-order fauna in the Voyage. The scenes of grisly injury to the fauna, humans and corpses adds real spark as well as the remarkable deaths and always enjoyable dismemberments. AND there's a perfectly paced plot, what more could one want? Well, here's a short list of what to expect:
* Weapons galore and their grisly outcomes
* Wry humor from the AI wardrone Sniper
* Humorous dialogue between oddballs
* War, bluffs and repercussions

Exciting and engaging read -- back to the world of SpatterJay, but somehow kinder and less scary than other books in the series. A little long perhaps for the ideas within -- seems to go on rather long, without much new content.

I can't quite lay my finger on what exactly makes Mr. Asher's stuff flow so smoothly, or how he seems to create such a fantastic futuristic but dead real seeming world.

Voyage, despite my promises to read it slowly, is one of those books that just swiftly changes your priorities for you. Neal has mastered the art of switching focus between plots and sub-plots, main characters and minor to such a degree, that he switches plots at the exact right moment to hold up momentum for the plot being switched from and cleanly into the next.

it's art.

voyage comes as a follow up to the classic "the skinner" which i suggest you read first, though, he does a brilliant job of making the book stand on it's on, with just the right amount of back story.

the world is Spatterjay, where a virus left to it's own devices for untold time, has produced immortality in it's hosts.

combine this with a dark past with human slave trade with an alien race known as Prador, and mysterious Hive minds jockeying for possession of Sprine, the one substance known to kill the Spatterjay virus, and it's host, and it virtual chaos, as a ship full of "reifs" attempt to re-create the voyage of Sable Keech, the own known reif to successfully come back from the dead.

seems like this would be to busy of a storyline, but asher weaves it together in a style i personally have grown to love.

five stars isn't enough.

I am a confirmed Neal Asher book junkie, an easy enough fate to fall into since his novels are more addictive than crack cocaine. Every single one of them is a brilliant, enjoyable, thought-provoking and flat out fun science fiction romp which will leave you trembling like a junkie with delirium tremens waiting for the next installment. I crave his novels so much I can't wait for them to be released in the US, I go ahead pay the outrageous cost to purchase them from Amazon.co.uk (and count every penny as money well spent.) Since Mr. Asher is British his books are released there about six months ahead of the US release date.

Perhaps my favorite Asher novel up to now, although that is very hard to call, is The Skinner. The Voyage of the Sable Keech is every bit as good as The Skinner. I am not going to ruin the story by giving away the plot details but we pick up where we left off with The Skinner and get to boisterously romp around with all of our favorite characters from that novel once again. Well, the ones that survived anyway!!! This is a fantastic follow-up and a thoroughly enjoyable read replete with the same trademark action, mind-bending exploration of technology, and amazing characterization that those of us fortunate to have read his earlier work have come to expect. I highly encourage you to splurge, have Mastercard convert your dollars to pounds and order this directly from the UK. You won't be disappointed! Now, how long until I can get another fix?

This is read Neal Asher books out of sequence week it seems.

From what I gather reading this, and the list of titles at the start, this book is a sequel or follow-on of sorts from The Skinner.

It is also set in his Polity future history.

There is a list of his titles, centred, in the middle of a blank page, and that is it. No indication of order or series or whether any are collections, or anything like that.

Very poor on the part of the publisher, some obvious advertising to be done there, and a waste of space and opportunity.

That said, the book is an amusing black humoured mostly planet bound space opera of sorts.

The planet in question has a bizarre ecology, where a leech born virus makes everything long lived and hard to kill, which leaves a particularly ultradeadly poison that is also native to the planet highly sought after, and also an important part of the ecosystem.

It isn't just animals this affects, but people - some of whom are thousands of years old.

The Sable Keech is a ship named after someone who appears to have been an important character in the previous book.

An alien in a sunken ship with a secret, a flying weird form golem with a secret, another golem with a secret, a passenger on one of the privateer ships with a secret, a revivified charter passenger with a nasty secret.

In fact, secrets everywhere, along with voracious wildlife, a couple of smart, and smartarse drones and an AI all finally come to a violent head.

This is Neal Asher after all, who is definitely of the plain-speaking and blow stuff up school of SF in general, but with weird monsters added.

I liked this one more than Brass Man, certainly made me chuckle in places.

A one line throwaway could be 'pirate adventure with monsters, robots and spaceships'.


3.5 out of 5

I am a confirmed Neal Asher book junkie, an easy enough fate to fall into since his novels are more addictive than crack cocaine. Every single one of them is a brilliant, enjoyable, thought-provoking and flat out fun science fiction romp which will leave you trembling like a junkie with delirium tremens waiting for the next installment. I crave his novels so much I can't wait for them to be released in the US, I go ahead pay the outrageous cost to purchase them from Amazon.co.uk (and count every penny as money well spent.) Since Mr. Asher is British his books are released there about six months ahead of the US release date.

Perhaps my favorite Asher novel up to now, although that is very hard to call, is The Skinner. The Voyage of the Sable Keech is every bit as good as The Skinner. I am not going to ruin the story by giving away the plot details but we pick up where we left off with The Skinner and get to boisterously romp around with all of our favorite characters from that novel once again. Well, the ones that survived anyway!!! This is a fantastic follow-up and a thoroughly enjoyable read replete with the same trademark action, mind-bending exploration of technology, and amazing characterization that those of us fortunate to have read his earlier work have come to expect. I highly encourage you to splurge, have Mastercard convert your dollars to pounds and order this directly from the UK. You won't be disappointed! Now, how long until I can get another fix?