Books like The Engineer Reconditioned

Everyone has a white whale of reading. An El Dorado in paper and ink that they seek, usually fruitlessly, across the many books they read, whether they even know it or not. Maybe it’s a novel that makes you feel so much, that you tear up. Maybe a story that expands your mind so much that you can only mouth a silent ‘wow’ when you turn the last page. Maybe you, like me, are looking for an epic novel in an awe inspiring setting that also makes you laugh – my personal white whale.Anyway, I have a couple of unlikely treasures I seek in my reading, and when I finished The Engineer Reconditioned I knew I had found one of my personal grails, that most rare of things - A science fiction short story collection with no duds. No bum notes. Not even a merely average story, one of the anaemic but still serviceable filler tales of the sort so frequently tacked onto compilation books.Every story in this collection is solid. Every story.I can’t remember the last time I encountered that in a short story collection. Usually in an average collection there are flashes of brilliance, a handful of good stories and one or two whose weakness stinks the whole collection up - the long-dead fish under the floorboards of an otherwise lovely home.From page one, Asher inducts his reader into fascinating universes. The first two stories here are connected to Asher’s ‘Polity’ universe – a world I’m now very keen to explore in his novels.The first story, The Engineer, is very cool. It’s big SF, with gigantic dreadnoughts, ancient alien races, and the highest of stakes. It has the feel of golden age SF about it, but with a modern sensibility and some damn fine writing behind it. It’s a bloody good story, and well worth your time.Snairls is as completely different to The Engineer as could be, a story set on a gigantic floating snail populated with gene-modified people who we see from the view of a man who has been indentured to a hive-mind comprised of garden-variety hornets. It’s weird, gross and intriguing all at the same time.Following from this, Spatterjay is another riot of biological weirdness that takes place in a different one of Asher’s regular settings, a strange world infested with symbiotic parasites that alter everything they come into contact with. We follow a crew of semi-humans who sail a deadly sea with a baseline human researcher trying to understand how they can survive in such a hostile place. Three of the final four stories are set in Asher’s ‘Owner’ universe – on a world that is owned and controlled by a being who has reached a superior plane of existence – a man who has become almost a god. This man has allowed humans to live on his world, but only if they follow several simple rules, banning them from entering certain places, hunting certain beasts, over-exploiting resources or growing their population beyond a certain number. Should these rules be broken the Owner’s automatons dish out brutal correction, and the interplay between the capriciousness and greed of humanity and the owners rules make for a very interesting backdrop to a trio of fascinating and entertaining stories.This isn’t to say this is a perfect collection, that every story is a masterpiece. The Tor Beast’s Prison isn’t quite as strong as the others, but it’s still a fine story, told tightly and well, in a way that grabs you and keeps you guessing. In a lesser collection it would rank somewhere in the middle, but it’s the weaker gazelle in this flock of limber, lithe antelope.Dipping briefly into Asher’s fully realized worlds - worlds he has devoted multiple entire novels to - is great fun, and filled me with a delicious sense of anticipation. It felt kind of like reading Alistair Reynold’s Galactic North, without having read any of his novels. The short stories here give you a taste of an amazing universe, followed by the realization that you have several fantastic full length novels to enjoy in the same vein – the faintly buzzing future echoes of hours of reading pleasure carrying back to the present.Neal Asher is a hell of a storyteller. I’m very keen to explore the rest of his work, and if it’s of as high a quality as the stories in The Engineer Reconditioned then I think I may have a new go-to writer, the kind of author whose books both relax and elate you when you open their covers – both from the knowledge you are in safe hands and the certainty that those hands will show you a hell of a good time. Now that I’ve found a near-perfect SF short story compilation I really only have one task left to me. All that remains for me to do before retiring from reading is to find an SF novel with the scope of Dune, the imagination of Hyperion and the wit of Iain M. Banks – when I’ve found that my quest for the best in Science Fiction will be complete. I’m hoping it will take many years and hundreds of books, numerous of which I expect to have been written by Neal Asher.Five white whales out of five.