In Space No One Can Hear You Scream

Neal Asher

The military team had pulled off their mission and now their problem was to get off the planet again while staying alive. They were only worried about human enemies who might be on their trail. That was a big mistake . . .

Neal Asher is one of the brightest of British science fiction writers (though many of his stories are more dark than bright), and has been very prolific since his first story was published in 1989, publishing fifteen novels and three short story collections (one of which was later reprinted in an expanded version), and numerous novellas and short stories. Most of his works (including “The Rhine’s World Incident”) are set in a future history called the Polity Universe. His stories have no shortage of action and violence and have been described as space opera with a cyberpunk sensibility (I would have described them as hard-boiled space opera, but then I’m not a critic). His stories, “Suckers” and “Mason’s Rats III,” were finalists for the British Science Fiction Award. Among the earlier novels in his Polity series are Gridlinked, The Line of Polity, The Skinner, Brass Man, and Polity Agent. For more information about the series, and his non-Polity works, see his website, http://freespace.virgin.net/n.asher/. Many of his short stories and novelettes fit nicely into the horror in space category, so picking one for this anthology was not easy. I finally decided that this one made me more uneasy than the others.