Neal Asher

I found this on the bookshelf in the lounge at Curry Village in Yosemite. I like science fiction war stories and this pleasantly whiled away the time when I wanted to read in beautiful surroundings and before I went to sleep at night. It’s the origin story of a soldier named Cormac who is obviously destined for greatness. He fights the enemy, deals with betrayals and injuries, and learns some things about his past. I don’t know who the audience is for the bits about how his penis was like a rod of iron when he was having sex with the beautiful chameleon-soldier, but I was not that audience (aside from the lolz.) Overall interesting and well-written, but I don’t feel called to read the many other novels in this series.… (more)

Very entertaining space opera. The setting reminds me of Iain M. Banks' The Culture, but somewhat darker and less utopic. The plot is very dynamic, an action-oriented story about revenge, with antagonistic aliens, brain implants, recent interstellar wars, super-intelligent AIs and all kinds of smugglers and crime syndicates operating in a lawless zone between hostile powers.

This novel is not suited for someone who is not used to reading SF, because it takes from granted some familiarity with concepts like brain augmentation that might be confusing for readers not used to that. However, an average SF reader should have no problem following it, even with no familiarity whatsoever with previous Neal Asher novels set in the same universe (in my case, this is the first novel by this author I have read). There were some references to events that apparently have been described in other books, but nothing that could not be understood by context.

Being the first in a new trilogy, the ending closed many of the storylines but still left some open questions that will be dealt with in the following books. One of the most interesting characters is an antagonist, the rogue AI called Penny Royal, and trying to figure out its motivations provides a lot of the fun. In this novel, however, we only get to understand part of it, and I would have liked a bigger payoff at the end. I guess it's part of the cost of reading SF&F, most novels seem to be part of a series, made worse because in this case I broke my own rule about trying not to read series until they are finished.

To sum up, this is an action-packed story and it's fun to read. I like when we can empathize completely with at least one of the characters, but this is not really that kind of story. It can be enjoyed as a standalone, but I would feel able to judge it more fairly once I have read the whole trilogy.… (more)

I'm a little hard-pressed to decide what I can say about this novel, partly because I'm not sure what I can say about Asher's work that hasn't been said, partly because I'm not interested in giving away any spoilers. At the very baseline though, this is a view of life at the very bottom of the food chain in Asher's galactic civilization, as this time he's writing about the fate of human slaves in this reality, and it's just as nasty and gross as one can imagine; the existential opposite from "cozy." That's probably the point; that there are millions of people living shit existences in our own world, a number that is ever expanding, and rubbing that reality in, might be the thematic back story here. In the end, I liked this novel, but this is not the place to begin if you're coming fresh to Asher; the "Transformation" trilogy might be a good starting place for the total newbie.… (more)