Neal Asher, The Gabble and Other Stories (Tor UK, 2008)
The Gabble and other stories is a new collection of Asher’s shorter Polity series fiction, with ten short stories dating from the late ‘90s to this year. Asher's work encompasses many classic science fiction tropes, including crystalline AIs you can hold in your hand and crush if you wish, enhanced humans, androids and things which might or might not be androids, hive minds of various sorts, teleportation across galaxies, aliens both friendly and very unfriendly, and lots of really cool weaponry, all the way up to moon sized starships that can lay waste to entire solar systems. And politics that are not kinder and gentler by any means. Quite the opposite indeed!
His first Polity novel, Gridlinked, was published in 2001, the first in a series of novels made up (in series order) of Prador Moon, Shadow of the Scorpion, Gridlinked, The Line of Polity, Brass Man, Polity Agent, Line War, The Skinner, The Voyage of the Sable Keech, and Hilldiggers. Yes, I've read, and considerably enjoyed, every one of these mostly long novels. (Prador Moon and Shadow of the Scorpion are svelte, one-night reads. Hell, they're almost novellas compared to any of the longer novels.) As modern SF series go, I think it is the best ongoing series being done now, topping anything else being currently written, period. I make no secret of being a big fan of Neal Asher's work and this collection of short works set in the Polity universe hasn't changed my opinion at all, even though I was not expecting him to do so well in the short form given how complex and lacking in any noticeable padding the novels are.
Understand this about The Gabble and Other Stories -- this is clearly not the best way to get a feeling for the sprawling Polity series, as most of these stories are anything but freestanding. Most of them, though theoretically stories unto themselves, are so deeply embedded in other tales told in the much longer novels that only someone -- like me -- will fully understand what's going on in these stories, and even I several times scratched my head over a plot detail here and there! This is not unusual with long-lived series. For example, the shorter fiction in Kage Baker's excellent Company series builds off of the many novels that are set in that series. Series are, as Larry Niven once noted, 'playgrounds of the mind' and short stories allow a writer like Asher to fill in details which just might get lost in longer works.
Keeping in mind that a critic at The Guardian said 'Asher delights in depicting the universe as a Hobbesian nightmare' -- which should tell you that those with tender sensibilities might well want to skip this series for something more gentle like an early Larry Niven novel -- I found all of the stories, errr, as tasty as a rare cooked steak. I learned more than I knew about Gabbleducks and Hooders (see the novels for what they are, but just think bioengineering gone deliciously insane), watched Asher flesh out some of the minor characters of the Polity novels (who turn out to be quite memorable in these stories), read a rip-roaringly great zombie story (and I generally detest passionately zombie tales), and encountered the putrefactor symbiont which I will not explain here.
Best story? I really can't say, for much the same reason that I can't pick out the best novel of the entire Polity series. Having read eleven novels and one collection comprising over ten thousand pages of reading, I can only say that all of it is excellent, all of it well-worth reading. If you haven't yet read your way through this series, I envy you; if you have, go get your copy of The Gabble and Other Stories right now before it sells out in hardcover!
