‘Random Cover Art Sunday!’ ‘The Technician’ – Neal Asher

Instead of showing you random photos of the reading pile (as I’ve been known to do) I thought it could be cool to grab something, with cool cover art, from the reading pile and gush about it a little bit. It might even give me a little nudge into checking out those books that seem to get lost amongst all the others. This time round, it’s the turn of Neal Asher’s ‘The Technician’. Check this baby out...

I’ve come to realise that my tastes in cover art tend to veer away from the ‘vague and mysterious’ (although I do have time for that now and again) and land slap bang in the middle of the ‘does exactly what it says on the tin’ approach. I haven’t read nearly enough Neal Asher but I’ve read enough to know that his books are crammed full of aliens and tech that are pretty nasty yet very cool all at the same time. ‘Prador Moon’ had giant space crabs toting machine guns, case closed :o)

It tickles me then to see a cover that streamlines almost perfectly with what Asher sets out to give his readers. It’s nasty but you can’t deny how cool it is. Can you? Go on, try... See, I told you!

Here’s the blurb...

The Theocracy has been dead for twenty years, and the Polity rules on Masada. But the Tidy Squad consists of rebels who cannot accept the new order. Their hate for surviving theocrats is undiminished, and the iconic Jeremiah Tombs is at the top of their hitlist.

Escaping his sanatorium Tombs is pushed into painful confrontation with reality he has avoided since the rebellion. His insanity has been left uncured, because the near mythical hooder called the Technician that attacked him all those years ago, did something to his mind even the AIs fail to understand. Tombs might possess information about the suicide of an entire alien race.

The war drone Amistad, whose job it is to bring this information to light, recruits Lief Grant, an ex-rebel Commander, to protect Tombs, along with the black AI Penny Royal, who everyone thought was dead. The amphidapt Chanter, who has studied the bone sculptures the Technician makes with the remains of its prey, might be useful too.

Meanwhile, in deep space, the mechanism the Atheter used to reduce themselves to animals, stirs from slumber and begins to power-up its weapons.

I might just have to bump this one up the pile...