Amateur Megalomania

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.

Filed under: Reviews (Books and Movies)