The Gabble and Other Stories
Neal Asher
372 pages
published in 2008

I'm always a bit wary when I start reading a short story collection by a modern science fiction author like Neal Asher, who has made his name writing novels. It's been decades since the short story was the dominant form of science fiction, so for most modern authors writing them is like doing finger exercises for pianists. Something you do inbetween serious projects. Which can be very unsatisfying for the reader, who sometimes just gets a slab of novel instead of a proper story, or just something slight and inconsequential with no real point to it.

With that in mind I got The Gabble and Other Stories from the library, Neal Asher's collection of short stories set in his Polity series universe, all written between 2001-2008. Anybody familiar with that series will find more of the same here. Asher's universe is one of violence, strange alien biotech and body horror, squelchy organics and baroque artificial intelligences, all of which are on display here as in his novels. The main difference between Asher the novel writer and Asher the short story writer is that in the latter he keeps his plots much simpler.A few do suffer from reading as extracts from novels, especially the longest story in the book, Alien Archaeology

For the dedicated Asher fan, there are a lot of cameos and shoutouts to earlier novels in these stories, which mostly went over my head I'm afraid. It was only thanks to Asher's afterword that I realised that these were there. This was more my fault than Asher's I fear; I'm not familiar enough with his work to have gotten those on my own.

For readers new to Asher, this collection does provide a good overview of what he's all about. Not so much useable as an introduction, but more a crosssection of his work. You get all of his obsessions and recurring themes in one reasonable sized package. If you don't like any of these stories, don't even bother with his novels.

Softly Spoke the Gabbleduck (2005)
A Gabbleduck has six arms, a beak, looks like a massive fleshy pyramid and talks nonsense that almost, but not quite evokes language. Having it on the trail of your hunting party is bad news.
Putrefactors (2008)
An amoral mercenary in service of an even less moral interstellar company learns too late he's been doublecrossed.
Garp and Geronamid (2005)
On planets where Polity law doesn't run, things can get very nasty...
The Sea of Death (2001)
How was it possible that millions upon millions of aliens sleeping in cryosacrophagi made of ice could've survived the thousands or even millions of years they have been frozen?
Alien Archaeology (2007)
This really is a mini novel and as such best represents what an Asher novel reads like, only it's slightly less complicated. Anb archeological dig on a small insignigicant planet finds an Atheter memory story, the Atheter being an extinct alien race. The guy left for dead at the dig goes after the thief to get it back. Acephalous Dreams (2005)
A man five minutes away from execution is offered the chance to volunteer for a dangerous experiment instead, to be implanted with an alien cybernetic node and what happens. It turns out to be life of a sort.
Snow in the Desert (2002)
A hunted, immortal man on a desert world that ownes some depth to the sets of spaghetti westerns. This doesn't quite fit in with the Polity background, but is apparantly an old story Asher reworked a few years later.
Choudapt (2008)
You want bodyhorror? This story got it in spades, as it's about how the adaptions a particular strain of humanity uses to be able to live underwather start to break down...
Adaptogenic (2008)
A man left to die on an incredible hostile world where flood waters will drown everything very soon has to adapt or die...
The Gabble (2006)
A fun filled exploration of the incredible dangerous and lively fauna of Masada, with the gabble duck as the coup de gracie...