I thought a Runcible was a Spork

kw: book reviews, science fiction, anthologies

The traditional runcible is a spoon-fork combination, with a wide central prong flanked by two recurved prongs nearly as wide. The sci-fi runcible is so-named because its matter-transmitter field is generated between two recurved prongs, though these are meter-scale. Neal Asher is one writer who liberally employs the runcible in his galactic-scale space fiction, including the new collection The Engineer Reconditioned. This book is essentially his Engineer collection of 1998 plus about 30% new stories.

In the title novella, the Engineer is a genetic engineer, a stasis-preserved survivor of a long-extinct starfaring species. Taking his clue from Heinlein's Dictum that "sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic", the author writes of this Jain engineer and a small device that expands—when fed high-temperature crabs—into a machine that clones one of the human characters, and just as an aside, transmutes elements so as to provide an example of supplies (s)he desires (the species has three sexes).

A number of the other stories take their impetus from the Owner, a godlike machine-supported human of a hundred centuries' age, with a starship that raises tides on any world it circles. This irascible character is presented as a minimal-interference Jehovah-like being, all-powerful (or so close as to make little difference) but disinclined to interfere. Of course, he does save the day a time or two—else why introduce him at all?

Of note in Asher's work is his ability to get the reader under the skin of several kinds of quite diverse alien beings. The stories are high-concept, so surprise endings are rare, but one surprise of note is the twist when a bigoted character learns which species is the high-level intelligence being studied and readied for galactic contact.

Finally, do you know about the little parasite that gets into the head of an ant and alters its behavior so it crawls to the top of a grass blade, where it is eaten by a sheep, the next host in the parasite's life cycle? Asher makes use of the behavior-manipulating parasite idea in several of his scenarios. A touch grisly but a masterful bit of ideation.