Wired.com presents the Geek's Guide to the Galaxy. And here is your host, David Barr-Kirtley.

Hello and welcome to episode 319 of Geek's Guide to the Galaxy.

Our guest today is Neil Asher.

He's the author of dozens of science fiction novels and short stories, most of which are

said in a future history called the Polity Universe, which encompasses

many classic science fiction tropes, including world ruling artificial intelligences,

Androids, Hive Minds, and Aliens.

And we'll be speaking with him today about his most recent short story collection, The Gable and

other stories. And now here's our interview with Neil Asher.

All right, so we're here with Neil Asher. Welcome to the show.

Thank you for having me here. Okay, so it says online that when you were growing up your parents were big science fiction fans.

So just what was that like growing up surrounded by science fiction?

Well, I mean, there wasn't huge amounts of science fiction in the house.

I mean, they were definitely science fiction fans.

It was just nice to grow up in the house with plenty of books everywhere. I mean they had things like the old

Victor Galan's yellow spined books I don't if you know about those. Yeah yeah sure.

Yeah I mean they had those scattered about

about copies of things like books by John Windham like you know Dave the

Triffids things like that John Limington and yeah so it was good they led me

astray it says that righteous last needs chronicles of Amber was a big influence on you.

I've, yes, it's, I mean, I've read an awful lot, but I must admit those those books were ones I kept going back to to the

point where I I hid them away in the loft so that I wouldn't read them again

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