'The Thrake' concerns the fate of a Christian pseudoscientist who makes a near-fatal mistake while looking for signs of religious belief in the aliens he's studying.Here’s an old review that’s escaped from the vaults at Hobbit Towers. 'Proctors' and 'The Owner' are part of a series in which human beings must come to terms with the universe being ruled by an inscrutable, virtually immortal alien with godlike powers. The gruesome 'Spatterjay' is set on an alien world whose human colonists have been radically modified and made virtually indestructible, by the enormously hostile environment.

The alien it contains turns out to be the last of a long-extinct race of genetic engineers with terrifying capabilities. In 'The Engineer,' an interstellar research vessel picks up an escape pod that has been drifting for millions of years. I doubt it will happen and I'd be ok with just some more short stories, but since I'm wishing, a trilogy is what I want.īritish author Asher is rapidly becoming one of the major figures in 21st-century SF, as shown by the 10 powerful and entertaining stories in this collection. There was a story about the Hive (turns out Wasps are sentient creatures) and I have to admit I would like a trilogy about them at some point. Once I finish up my Polity re-read, I'll probably re-read the Owner books to tide me over until Asher's Jain trilogy wraps up. I enjoyed the Owner stories a lot this time around as I now had the Owner trilogy under my literary belt. Scyenze is Asher's god, he just won't admit it. Thankfully, I knew this was an element in this book so it didn't shock me like it did the first time around. In fact, now that his wife has passed on, I've noticed LESS bashing of religion in his books.

His wife hadn't died yet, so it wasn't like he was blaming God for that.

Asher just unloads several times on anything “religious” and even in one of his intro's to a story admits that's exactly what he is doing. Crossposted at WordPress, Blogspot & Librarything by Bookstooge’s Exalted PermissionĪ collection of short stories from Asher's Polity Universe, his Owner universe and some general SF shorts. This review is written with a GPL 4.0 license and the rights contained therein shall supersede all TOS by any and all websites in regards to copying and sharing without proper authorization and permissions.

The engineer neal asher