A bold and uncompromising science fiction epic. When miners on a remote colony dig too deep, the golden age of space exploration comes to a bloody end. An alien corruption springs from the soil, possessing every mind it touches. Aboard Read more
AUREALIS AWARD FINALIST; Best SF Novel of 2015 One thousand years after Earth was destroyed in an unprovoked attack, humanity has emerged victorious from a series of terrible wars to assure its place in the galaxy. But during celebrations on Read more
The Skinner is the first book in Neal Asher’s Spatterjay series set in a lethal waterworld.
To the remote planet Spatterjay come three travellers with very different missions. Janer is directed there by the hornet Hive-mind; Erlin comes to find the sea captain who can teach her to live; and Keech – dead for seven hundred years – has unfinished business with a notorious criminal.
Spatterjay is a watery world where the human population inhabits the safety of the Dome and only the quasi-immortal hoopers are safe outside amidst a fearful range of voracious life-forms. Somewhere out there is Spatterjay Hoop himself, and monitor Keech cannot rest until he can bring this legendary renegade to justice for atrocious crimes committed centuries ago during the Prador Wars.
Keech does not realize that Hoop’s body is running free on an island wilderness, while his living head is confined in a box on an Old Captain’s ships. Nor does he know that the most brutal Prador of all is about to pay a visit, intent on wiping out all evidence of his wartime atrocities. Which means major hell is about to erupt in this chaotic waterscape.
