AWESOME. Beautiful. With some humans doing something or other next to it, I dunno.

Here's a bit about the book, and another book-in-progress, from the author's blog.

Cormac is mildly interesting. In his recent books, Asher has been working towards making his characters a little more rounded. He already has the settings and monsters beautifully characterised, at least in terms of behaviour (flesh-eating) and ecology (sadistic).

Sometime I'm going to follow his recommendation and read a book or two about parasitology. For example, in that short story from Engineer Reconditioned about the church of the fish I recognised the same mechanisms that make things like this utterly awesome.

Every writer has its strengths, and I guess the temptation for all of us is to play to them. So it's cool that Asher is working on making the human characters half as interesting as the alien ones (Vrell can sink my battleship any day, non-metaphorically), and I should throw some polyfiller at some of my weaknesses too. Whether that means finishing that Jared Diamond or finding a kiddies' book about the history of firearms ("He had a stick. A firework stick."--Cornice-overlooking-Broadway) or developing some writing discipline or, well, whatever.

And then there's Iain M Banks, who has no weaknesses whatsoever. Except, arguably, liking whisky. DO WANT DO WANT DO WANT.