The Skinner (Paperback)

from Uffer

On the planet Spatterjay, sudden death is the normal way of life. It's a planet with a savage thing-eat-thing ecosystem and a virus that permeates everything native that means that those things that don't get eaten live more or less forever. Including some of the human beings, those who have been...

from SwampIrish

Highly entertaining sci-fi set on a horrifying planet with equally horrifying flora and fauna.

from nmele

Reread this and realized that not only is Asher very inventive, but that one of the reasons I am fascinated with his novels set in the Polity universe is that he describes or implies a very complex, coherent universe. There is depth, in this sense, to the settings of his novels--this one connects...

from Shrike58

Disregard the blurb on the cover that describes this novel as being a cross between "Dune" and "Master and Commander." A better description would be Harry Harrison's "Deathworld" meets Iain Banks' 'Culture' novels. Not that this is a bad thing, what with the conjunction of whacked-out galactic cu...

from candlemark

Not as grotesque as I was led to believe from the jacket copy, this book was nonetheless something of a challenge. It's fairly hard sci-fi, but not technical/mechanical sci-fi - rather, it deals with some very alien biology, and its effect on humans. People infected with the Spatterjay virus are,...