Author Neal Asher Talks Dark Intelligence: Transformation’s Dark Side
Earlier this month Neal Asher kicked off a new trilogy of novels set in his “Polity” universe with Dark Intelligence: Transformation Book One, and we had a chance to engage in a quick Q&A with the popular British author to learn more about the story’s horror elements and creatures along with his genre influences, thoughts on the supernatural, and more.
Q: You’re very well known in the science fiction community, but there has been a long-running undercurrent of elements in your writing that horror readers would find very familiar – monstrous alien creations, violence, torture. The Polity universe can often be bleak and unforgiving. Did you realize while writing Dark Intelligence that this series might take on a darker tone than some of your previous work?
Neal Asher: The elements you mention are in all my books while it just so happens that in this one the body count is lower! It is perhaps darker because it is centered around a rogue artificial intelligence, which committed wartime atrocities and possesses almost god-like powers. In respect of the above, I’m taking a closer look at the morality of the violence, the torture, and the prices that have to be paid and at first causes. Is Penny Royal (that intelligence) amoral or immoral?
The same question is posed about the prador, a vicious alien race devoid of human morality. Where does guilt begin and end? Also, there is an inevitability to the degree of cruelty available when technologies are deployed that have come close to erasing death. Further questions too: Is it murder when you kill a man who is then resurrected from a recording of his own mind?
Q: The Polity universe is expansive, often completely alien, and a quite brutal place for the characters in your books. For those of our readers who might not be familiar with your previous work, can you give us a brief explanation of the Polity, how it works as the backdrop to so many of your stories, and how you developed it? What kind of a role does the Polity play in the Transformation series in comparison to some of your other books?
NA: The Polity arose out of the short stories and novellas I wrote before I was taken on by a big publisher. When I sat down and wrote my first Polity book – Gridlinked – I wanted it in a large and complex setting in which it would be possible to write just about any other story I wanted to tell (though maybe no Aga sagas or teen vampires). It is a political entity – human civilization expanded across a portion of the galaxy, tied together by runcibles – instantaneous transportation gates – and FTL space ships, all governed by artificial intelligences.
In reality the Polity itself is not a brutal place, being mostly peaceful and run with an efficiency humans could not achieve. The brutality you see is because I’m telling those stories which are mostly set on the border of or outside the Polity. Nobody wants to read stories about people living peacefully in a high-tech utopia. Boring. The Transformation series is set in the Polity, along its border, and outside it and arises as a consequence of a war the Polity fought against a genocidal alien race. A key point to the story is the kind of horribly pragmatic decisions that have to be made to win total war – the necessary atrocities committed (consider here Churchill allegedly allowing the bombing of Coventry) and how war can create monsters. This is in fact a theme that has appeared throughout my books. It is integral to my Spatterjay trilogy, is there in Shadow of the Scorpion and, to a lesser extent, in my Cormac Series.
Q: You’re very well known for your exotic alien creatures. There are some strong examples in Dark Intelligence of truly terrifying creations. How do these ideas develop as you’re writing? Where do you look for inspiration? Biology? Other writers or artists? Ever have nightmares about some of your more gruesome characters?
NA: These stem from my fascination with biology, which started when I was a child. I loved the things I would find when out bait-digging with my father and brothers up in Scotland, prior to some fishing trip, and the things revealed by spring tides. While mucking about in a stream opposite my parents’ house, I was fascinated by the things I found there and sought to identify them and classify them from various books. The gift of a microscope only fed this, as did learning mycology via my mother, who was studying it for teacher training. It’s my contention that if you want to find an alien, go and turn over the nearest rock. In fact, that’s been done because the alien of the Alien franchise is based on the parasitic wasp. I, too, am fascinated by parasites because they appear in the Spatterjay books, many of my short stories, and my novella The Parasite.
This all arose when a friend of mine, a vet, loaned me a book on helminthology (the study of parasitic worms). Parasites appear here, too, in Dark Intelligence. These ideas develop in my writing because I have read and understood so much about biology that the moment I create a monster, I then feel I have to make it fit into a logical structure – an ecology. It’s very easy to create a monster that does terrible things, but the monster is made of straw if there’s no logic behind it. If you can – briefly – detail that logic, the reader is more able to ‘suspend disbelief,’ and the monster seems more real.
Q: I know you’re well read in science fiction and fantasy, but would you consider any horror writers as influencing your work? What are some of your favorite horror books and films, and how do you think they’ve affected your work?
NA: Everything I’ve read influences my work. I’ve enjoyed Stephen King and think some of his short stories are the best there are. Clive Barker’s stories in the Books of Blood are brilliant too. Though they are defined as science fiction, films like those in the Alien, Terminator, and Predator franchises are largely dependent on horror; and I love all those films. But mostly it is the films like those I mention and science fiction books that influence me now. When any kind of storytelling is reliant on the supernatural, I’m afraid my interest wanes. I have no belief in it, and though I might enjoy a book incorporating it, I find it very difficult to suspend disbelief.
Dark Intelligence: Transformation Book One Synopsis:
One man will transcend death to seek vengeance. One woman will transform herself to gain power. And no one will emerge unscathed…
Thorvald Spear wakes in a hospital to find he’s been brought back from the dead. What’s more, he died in a human vs. alien war that ended a century ago. Spear had been trapped on a world surrounded by hostile Prador forces, but Penny Royal, the AI inside the rescue ship sent to provide backup, turned rogue, annihilating friendly forces in a frenzy of destruction and killing Spear. One hundred years later the AI is still on the loose, and Spear vows for revenge at any cost.
Isobel Satomi ran a successful crime syndicate, but after competitors attacked, she needed power and protection. Negotiating with Penny Royal, she got more than she bargained for: Turning part-AI herself gave Isobel frightening power, but the upgrades hid a horrifying secret, and the dark AI triggered a transformation that has been turning her into something far from human…
Spear hires Isobel to track Penny Royal across worlds to its last known whereabouts. But he cheats her in the process and quickly finds himself in her crosshairs. As Isobel continues to evolve into a monstrous predator, it’s clear her rage will eventually win out over reason. Will Spear finish his hunt before he himself becomes the hunted?
Dark Intelligence, released by Night Shade Books, is the explosive first novel in a brand new trilogy from military SF master Neal Asher and a new chapter in his epic Polity universe.
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