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