Neal Asher was born in 1961 in Essex, Great Britain, and divides his time between there and the island of Crete. He's been an SF and fantasy junky ever since having his mind distorted at an early age by JRRT, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and E C Tubb. Sometime after leaving school he decided to focus on only one of his many interests because it was inclusive of the others: writing. Finally taken on by a large publisher, Pan Macmillan, his first full-length SF novel, Gridlinked, came out in 2001, and now in total he has over twenty-five books to his name, also available in translation across the world.