Polity Agent: The Fourth Agent Cormac Novel

If you're an asher/polity universe fan this is great. Continues the story of the Jain tech invasion. One of my friends read part of it and said "I don't like cyber punk" His loss.

Neil Asher's world is populated with superheroes, sometimes in unlikely forms: robots, computers, cyborged humans, self-aware spaceships, alien-engineered life forms, sometimes even smart weapons. This larger-than-life cast battles it out on an expanding canvas in an increasingly hostile universe, where many of SF's worst nightmares have come horrifyingly true, and the joining together of seemingly disparate forces offers humanity's best hope. It's a race against escalating and overwhelming odds as an ever faster, bigger, smarter (and absolutely essential!) AI government pulls out all the stops to protect its flesh and blood charges, with Ian Cormac, our main POV, as the questionably superfluous and not yet fully briefed human manager at the center of it all.

In Polity agent, Asher reunites us with the leading characters of his masterworks of science fiction which constitute the polity universe, Ian Cormack, Horace Blegg, the A.I. Jerusalem and ECS et al. The gang is all back once again trying to analyze and somehow contain the Jain nanotechnology, which threatens to destroy all sentient life in the known galaxy. Once again Asher's storytelling is wonderful, fast moving, great characters and plausible, little riffs on quantum mechanics and a grand vision of Space Opera as it should be. We finally find out who Horace Blegg actually is, what ultimately became of the Brass Man and Dragon. I love the way Asher narrates his Polity A.I.,'s which rule the known human galaxy. Ashers gift for description and invention make this book well worth reading. I would highly recommend you read the novels in order to make sense of the entire wonderful over arch of the story and Polity mythopoeia. Well worth the time and money if you love the best of current space opera.

This is the fourth and most recent Ian Cormac installment from Neal Asher. If you haven't read the first three yet then please, please, please take my advice and order them right away. You'll be delighted that you did. The previous books are, in order: Gridlinked, Line of Polity, and Brassman. Together with Polity Agent they form the core novels comprising Asher's "Polity Universe", a future where humanity has spread to the stars and found that there are lots of unpleasant surprises out there. These books do one of the better jobs in sci-fi today of thoughtfully exploring the consequences of developments in technology and science and from this raw material then extrapolating plausible and interesting future interstellar societies. This is what science fiction is all about and Asher does it very well indeed. But then he goes and makes it deliciously fun! I am pretty sure that Neal Asher was one of those little boys who delighted themselves by dumping all their toys onto the floor, organizing them into big set piece battles, and then gleefully and violently crashing them into each other while making extremely loud and repetitive explosion noises, followed by rattling death-gurgles deep in his throat. He obviously had a blast because he is still doing it today, now using books as his playground and canvas. Neal takes his intricate and well-develeped future societies and then starts smashing them with all the toys his imagination can build. Rogue AI warships, wormhole technology, time travel, deadly nanotech "Jain" plagues, ruling artifical intelligences, enigmatic aliens the size of small moons, evil giant crab-like aliens that consider humans a delicacy, mysterious dead alien civilizations, sentient combat drones, combat robots, cyborgs, vicious and deadly xeno-widllife, deadly weapons and armaments, and the biggest problem of all: our own human nature. Crazy terrorists, crazier religious cults, arms dealers, designer drugs, criminals, the whole panoply of human ills are every bit as much of a problem in the future as they are now. Asher builds a fascinating and interesting conventional future and then delights in splashing it with explosions and blood as humans, AIs, aliens, cyborgs, terrorists, and deadly fauna battle it out in non-stop, adrenalin-fueled, free-for-all and devil-take-the-hindmost action. These books are gritty, violent, and deliciously fun. They also work exceptionally well because his character development is superb and he builds intricate, even byzantine plots, that provide completely justifiable and believable reasons for the splatter-fest. Asher is the master of the action-adventure novel, not because he crams the most over-the-top violence into his works, but because all the fireworks make sense and the contending parties are all acting in a sensible fashion according to their own world-view. He isn't just banging his toys into each other; he obviously also learned how to placate his parents with outlandish and plausible ex

I've enjoyed all of Asher's "Cormac" books. Fast and furious action with an unusual but believable setting. This book, the 4th in the series (Gridlinked, Line of Polity, Brass Man) is the best of the lot. Space opera and black operations come to a head with very violent results. The book reads like an express train with space battles, assasinations, intrigue and xenobiology gone amok on every page. I killed this book in 2 days (with every spare moment I could muster) and then read it all over to make sure I didn't miss anything. A must have. Though he does re-cap, you should start at the beginning of the series. There's way too much that has gone on before that, if you're not aware of the previous story, will seem meaningless.