I think this author really gets off on coming with the grossest imagery he can, and in The Skinner, he's invented an entire ecology of gross, which he describes in loving detail.

In between gross, there's some plot, and it's not bad. Unlike Gridlinked, I didn't find the switches in perspective jarring, even though there were a number of viewpoint characters used throughout the book.

The biggest weakness of this novel, and in retrospect, of Gridlinked, is the way Asher writes his "bad guys". Instead of making them real people with real motivations who are doing something unethical, he makes them psychotic torturers. This makes it easy for the reader to hate them and root for the opposition, but it is really flat. Plus it seems to be an excuse for yet more gross. I hope that in future novels Asher gets over this, or I'll get burned out on him pretty quickly.

Gridlinked is kind of a mashup of cyberpunk, first contact, a spy novel, and lots of other elements. I liked it fairly well, but there was one element which got on my nerves a bit. Namely, during much of the book, the viewpoint switches between two characters, but it switches so often that it's kind of distracting. It wasn't switching once per chapter, but once per couple pages or paragraphs.

Later on, this settled down, and Asher seemed to find a better rhythm for switching viewpoints, or maybe my brain just caught up with it. Either way, it didn't bother me after the first half of the novel.

There's a number of interesting unresolved questions in this book that are open to exploration in future books. It looks like Asher has written several other novels in this universe, so I'll be on the lookout.