The Voyage of the Sable Keech
Neal Asher
506 pages
published in 2006

On second thought, this might have been the wrong Neal Asher book to start with, being a sequel to an earlier novel set in an universe that itself has been worked out over the course of a half dozen or so novels. But it was the only book I had with me, so I persevered. Fortunately The Voyage of the Sable Keech was standalone enough not to be completely opaque. The reason I wanted to try out Neal Asher's work was because he kept being compared to people like Ken MacLeod, John Meaney, Alistair Reynolds and Liz Williams, part of that whole generation of late nineties British science fiction authors I like so much. Happily he didn't disappoint, even if this was a bad book to start with.

What I liked about The Voyage of the Sable Keech wasn't so much the plot, as that was fairly confusing since I had not read The Skinner, which this was a sequel to. What got me was both the inventiveness of the world Asher created as well as the matter of fact way in which he presents his world. In some ways it's easily as baroque as some of China Miéville's novels, but Asher's writing style doesn't draw attention to it the way Miéville's does.In some ways The Voyage of the Sable Keech reminded me of Steven Erikson's Gardens of the Moon, as it has a simular outrageous mix of technologies and powers, just in a science fiction setting rather than a fantasy one.

The Voyage of the Sable Keech is set on Spatterjay, a world that largely consists of water, with a few islands here and there, populated by a biotope that unlike Earth had never had mass extinctions, therefore is much further developed than Earth and much nastier. Not a new concept, David Gerrold's Chtorr series has a similar background, but Asher makes it all much more gruesome. From the opening chapter which tracks an alien Prador warrior as it attempts to get back to its spacecraft after it had crashlanded in the ocean and in the process gets attacked by everything in the sea between him and the sea, you're covered in gore. But gore described in a somewhat detached, clinical manner, which seems to be Asher's style in general. He writes convincingly about what he makes his characters go through, but always from a distance.

The plot unfortunately revolves tightly around what happened in Skinner, the book this is a sequel to. If, like me, you haven't read it, you're at sea, so to speak. The alien mentioned above was one of the villains of the previous book and the socalled Spatterjay virus, which is an "universal" virus making you nigh-immortal, is working its magic on him, turning him into something more dangerous than he already was. At the same time a group of reified people, basically zombies who had orignally been resurrected to solve their own murders, is coming to Splatterjay on a pilgrimage, with their leader having his own reasons for this journey. They're followed by a human agent of an alien, hornet hive mind and then there's also the exobiologist who's on the run for one of the biggest monsters out of Splatterjay's seas: the titanic whelk, a mobile shellfish the size of a skyscraper...

Despite the gore, this then is not quite as serious as all that. It takes a while for all the plot threads to come together, but in the end everything is resolved and even if you've skipped Skinner like me, the resolution makes some sense too. The Voyage of the Sable Keech feels like a fever dream, but a fun fever dream.

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