The Line of Polity
This is the second Neal Asher book I’ve read so far, and so far I’ve been a bit dissapointed with both. From what I’ve read, Asher is reputed to be a new shining star in Science Fiction. I can’t say I agree, but at the same time, I can’t proclaim his work as poor by any stretch.
It’s good work. The two stories have been competent and worthwhile. But neither has blown me away as I expected. Maybe Asher is a victim of my over-inflated expectation.
The Line of Polity refers to the demarcation of the AI governed super-civilization, the Polity, and the expanse of ‘wild’ space populated by humans but not part of the central Polity. Within the Polity, humanity has given over rule to AIs, finding them much better at handling such power without the corruption of a human government. This isn’t a typical ‘machine rules man’ horror story. The Polity seems to be the shining example of civilization.
The story revolves around Masada, a planet ruled by an oribital theocracy with a repressed slave population on the surface, living in an amazingly hostile environment toiling under the heel of the theocracy in short, brutish lives to support their rulers. The various parties in the book, both off and on-planet, strive to bring the Line down so that Masada becomes part of the Polity and the AIs can move in to liberate the people.
From there, the book is kind of standard. The various parties range from the Earth Central secret agent, gun runners, refugees, and rebels. Various bad guys are represented by the theocracy, a scientist infected by advanced alien technology, and some starship-sized alien with inscrutible goals. Frankly, by page 400 I was still waiting on something really interesting to happen.
The conclusion of the book has a lot of deus ex going on. Parties randomly find each other in the midst of a massive battle, previously unmentioned technology provides escape routes or augmented abilities, and even the bad guys seem arbitrarily evil, without any real depth beyond petty cruelty.
I expected better.
I have two more Asher books left in the library, and I certainly intend to read them. This wasn’t a complete waste of time, but I had hoped for a lot better.
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[...] This is the third Neal Asher book I’ve read in the past couple of months. My last review for The Line of Polity was mostly indifferent, and I had complained about Asher just dropping things into the story with no reference or background, leaving me to flounder. Well, I have to retract that part of my criticism. The events and characters of The Line of Polity flow directly from Gridlinked. While they are not a matched set of books, reading them in the order I did is ill advised. D’oh. In my defense, the copies I have are by two different publishers, and the inner flap (which I always check to see if there are linkages I should read first) did not mention one another in either text. I suppose I should have checked on-line. And before anyone jumps on me – I LIKE books that assume you have read other books in the sequence. Nothing irritates me more than plodding through a bunch of exposition for the late-comers who haven’t taken the time to start at the beginning. So, given that, those elements of my Asher criticism are fully retracted. Unfortunately, the retraction doesn’t save The Line of Polity from remaining an indifferent read. Same for Gridlinked. What’s wrong? It just wasn’t that interesting. I have no doubt Asher has a great imagination. He has some great ideas. But it doesn’t execute well. His writing style is disjointed at times, with odd constructs of grammar that slow me down from time to time. His villains have been caricature: evil, festering beings with a flair for sadism. They are a bit cartoonish, and I can’t help but imagine the character twirling a black mustache while cackling about the hero’s fate. Then there is the hero. Ian Cormac is an uber-Bond. Gridlinked ten years beyond the ’safe’ exposure duration, he’s in danger of losing his ability to interact with humans. When he is forced off the Grid for his own safety, he has to learn to deal with reality as a normal human again. That really sounds interesting. Too bad Asher didn’t do much with it. Beyond this setup, the struggle hardly comes up again, except for the occasional aside focusing on social awkwardness. The handicap hardly figured into the plot resolution. What we get is a standard high-tech Bond, dealing with an alien enigma, while being stalked by a sociopathic rebel out for revenge. The rebel is in the company of a hired gun named John Stanton, who was far more interesting to me. Too bad Stanton is a secondary character. Out for money and short on ideology, Stanton is in the mold of Han Solo. He’s just biding his time to knock over his employer, who is clearly becoming dangerously deranged with his revenge fixation. The story runs around for awhile. People get killed. Bad things happen. And then it all comes together in a rather tidy conclusion. I just didn’t care that much. I have one more Asher book to go. I certainly hope I can find something to rave about, because so far it hasn’t been all that interesting. Technorati Tags: asher, gridlinked, review, Reviews (Books and Movies) [...]