Customer Reviews

Brass Man (Ian Cormac, Book 3)

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

If you were stunned by "Gridlinked," and left awe-struck by "The Line of Polity," then I guarantee you won't be disappointed with "Brass Man." Picking up almost immediately after the end of Line, it continues the saga of ECS agent Ian Cormac, and weaves narratives for many characters introduced in the previous two novels - plus several fascinating new ones - into an extremely satisfying whole. Best of all, it brings back one of the most unique and enigmatic of all of Asher's creations - the flawed yet noble Golem Twenty-Five, Mr. Crane.

This is the 3rd of the Polity series by Neal Asher. In this volume, Neal Asher delves deeper into the role of AI's in his universe. It quite enjoyabley follows the adventures of agent Cormac as he again must track down Skellor and the curse that is the Jain.

By the way, do not be discouraged by the lone seller here selling the title for way too much. You can buy the book from Amazon.co.uk for far less. Asher is a british author and quite a few of his books are difficult to find stateside. A quick electronic look across the pond will offer better results.

This book is cracking. Just like the Skinner I thoroughly enjoyed it. Took 3 days to read and that was only because of work food and sleep breaks!

Dragon, and Ian Cormac are back... and this makes for some real fun. There's big, bigger, and biggest nasties roaming around, a good splattering (and i use that word with a chuckle) of violent death, a decent amount of sci fi, and a damn good story to boot.

The last book I read of his was Cowl and it didn't feel quite like Neal was enjoying himself writing it. This one is different. Mind... if i wrote stuff like this.. i'd enjoy it too.

One small note, if your a first time Asher buyer, i'd suggest picking up Line of Polity first. Its not absolutely needed, but it'd certainly give you a good grounding!

Brass Man, the latest book in Neal Asher's Polity series develops into a rip-roaring action-filled dynamo of an SF novel once you get past the initial flashback sequences. There's plenty here to excite - epic space battles, virulent alien nanotechnology, evil baddies and ever larger and more hideous monsters! The flashbacks near the start can be somewhat confusing, also there is not an awful amount of character development, especially since this is now our third encounter with many of these people. Still, the inventive and fast-paced action sequences do more than enough to compensate for these flaws. I loved it!

This is the third book in the Cormac series and my 7th Asher novel to date, so I have a bit of expertise in the area of Asher. His novels tend to blend a variety of unique styles, plots and ideas. This custom blending is better implemented in the Spatterjay novels (The Skinner and The Voyage of Sable Keech). In these novels we see the romance of piracy, the horror of nightmarish life-forms and the tyranny of dictatorship which has made for entertaining reading. However, this cross-blending doesn't fare well in the Cormac series. I find that it distracts from the police-criminal pursuit which is more cleverly done in Hamilton's Commonwealth series (Pandora's Star and Judas Unchained). In Brass Man, we catch a different twist of piracy, horror and dictatorship. Instead, we get the expected horror along with something like medieval dragon quest, a dash of cyberpunk with a flare of western from the description of Mr. Crane's outfit. Hmm.

The first two books of the Cormac series (Gridlinked and Line of Polity) failed to impress me. I was, however, baited by the galactic police-criminal pursuit and thought it could be explored more fully. But Asher seems rooted in his penned tradition, hesitant to stray far from his comfortable norm (as I also said in my review of Line of Polity). Reading a few Asher novels may be entertaining, but reading novel after novel of the same hash, one can begin to accurately predict plot twists, outcomes and even character deaths. Brass Man is no different. But don't be misled by the title. Yes, Mr. Crane does make a reappearance in this novel and his history is probed to a much better extent than was done in Gridlinked. However, this coming-of-age for Mr. Crane does not take center stage and is buried behind the downy plot of when horror and weapons meet head-on.

Typical of Asher's continued Cormac series (and the Spatterjay series, to an extent), Brass Man envelopes the essence of alien fauna horror, awesome Polity weaponry, Golem superiority, planet-hopping tracking and AI antics (to a lesser extent that Banks' Culture novels). If you consider these five traits to be on par with your idea of an excellent sci-fi novel or Asher novel, then look no further than Brass Man! But, the old rigmarole has become just that- old, worn and tedious. I will continue to read the Cormac series to see if Asher's writing matures at all, but it seems after three Cormac novels that he feels secure in his ways. Perhaps the rest of the series will continue on this juvenile action-movie-in-a-book sequence (minus the car chases) or maybe he will break the mold and create a shorter but more thought provoking book... one of these days.

Schizoid when he controls his impulses; psychopathic as his norm, the maniacal Golem Mr. Crane is an insane killing cyborg machine brought back from the abyss by the deranged Skellor who combines the most amoral human artificial intelligence with the ancient alien Jain bio-technology. Earth Central fears that the Jain destroyed other races and probably itself with their WMD technology so they worry that the lethal Mr. Crane is reported back this time as a more powerful BRASS MAN. Thus top agent Ian Cormac is recalled from dragon hunting to lead an expedition of mostly throwaway AIs whose objectives are to destroy Skellor and eradicate the Jain technology.

At about the same time on Cull, Anderson a half-breed Rondure Knight battles the Dragon at the same time Skellor seeks to ally with this Dragon who apparently can safely use Jain technology that is already inside him. As Mr. Crane, his puppeteer Skeller, Cormac, Anderson and Dragon head towards a supernova collision, some of Ian's AIs who reject the notion of being disposable pawns are considering joining the enemy.

BRASS MAN, the sequel to the wild GRIDLINKED, is as feral and violent as its predecessor as Neal Asher paints a forbidding dark distant future where violence is as civilized as apple pie in spite of great affluence. Through flashbacks and current events, the two prime rivals, Mr. Crane and Cormac, are fully developed as they head towards a high celestial noon collision with the booty being Dragon. Not easy to read, this novel paints a bleak brutal futuristic science fiction landscape.

Harriet Klausner

I'm now on Polity Agent, having read the first three books in the Ian Cormac series. Brass Man is the third (of four) books in the series, and another excellent addition. Reviving Mr Crane, the psychotic Golem from Gridlinked, Asher pits bad guys with nano-infused, alien technology against our series heroes in the usual hostile environment of leviathan monsters and AI-led ships racing through u-space overhead. Enjoyable for its dense plotting, imaginative flora & fauna, and action. I've mentally screened it as the last Bond melded with the first Star Wars, throttled up to Tarantino ultraviolence levels.

Neal Asher's BRASS MAN, the third novel in his Ian Cormac series and the fourth (I think) set in his Polity universe, is a distinct improvement over its predecessor, the overly-long and underly-stimulating THE LINE OF POLITY. Most of the events in BRASS MAN take place a year or two after the conclusion of LINE and a few more years after the conclusion of GRIDLINKED. Evil mad scientist Skellor, who had been thought dead, reappears, hijacks a spaceship, and decides for no particularly good reason to resurrect the psychotic metal-skinned android Mr. Crane, who had been destroyed at the end of GRIDLINKED. After bringing Mr. Crane under his control, Skellor uses him to help wreak havoc here, there, and everywhere. As Skellor's journey unfolds, we also learn through flashbacks about how Mr. Crane's crystalline mind was maliciously warped, how Mr. Crane has resisted his psychosis and his masters over the years, and how Mr. Crane might someday be able to heal himself. By the end of the book, we know more about Mr. Crane than we do about Ian Cormac, although that's not saying a lot.

Skellor's flight from Polity authorities eventually takes him and Mr. Crane to a colony world that lost contact with Earth hundreds of years in the past. We learn about this world primarily through the adventures of Rondure Knight Anderson and his not-entirely-trustworthy sidekick Tergal as they explore the desert wastes on their sand hog mounts. Anderson and Tergal are not exactly Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, but there are some echoes here of that storied duo. The final battles of BRASS MAN are fought on and around their world, and you can be sure that they play a role.

Two important narrative threads emerge in BRASS MAN and are bound to be followed in later novels. The first is that the alien Jain technology that gives Skellor his power is, as the alien called Dragon intimates in LINE, designed or evolved to destroy starfaring cultures. The existence of weapons designed to seek out and destroy technological cultures is also a major thread in Alistair Reynolds' REVELATION SPACE series. It will be interesting to find out where Jain technology really came from and how much destruction it has caused over the eons. Second, not all of the Artificial Intelligences that rule the Polity and run its "runcible" stations and spaceships actually like or want to have anything to do with humans. The AIs in BRASS MAN are more heterogeneous and have more personality than those the first two novels; they are beginning to more closely resemble the Minds of Iain Banks' Culture novels. Some of these AIs not only resent being wasted in the service of humans, they are also prepared to do what it takes to pursue their own interests, even if humans and other AIs get hurt in the process. I hope that Asher continues to think about AI psychology, sociology, and evolution.

What most pleased me about BRASS MAN was the sense that everything in novel needed to be there, something that I didn't feel when reading LINE. I was also pleased that although Skellor remains a comic-book villain, Asher gave us a more ambiguous baddy in Mr. Crane. Furthermore, I was pleased that Asher pushed the limits of his universe, digging deeper (but not deep enough, if you ask me) into the nature of the sentient aliens previously and currently living in and near human space, and looking more critically at the relationships among AIs and between AIs and humans.

On the minus side, although I didn't mind that Ian Cormac had only a very limited role in the novel, I was disturbed by the growing body of evidence that Cormac might be either more than human or other than human. I don't think that superpowers would make Cormac more interesting, and I don't want to hear down the road that Cormac and his mentor Horace Blegg are really Cylons. We'll see where Asher takes this. Also, although I don't mind Asher's fascination with alien fauna, in BRASS MAN as in LINE characters wind up spending way too much time fighting against clawed and armored and fanged adversaries. I hope the struggle of man against non-sentient monster occupies a less-central place in future Polity novels.

Bottom line: I recommend BRASS MAN to anybody who has read the preceding novels. It is probably possible to read and enjoy BRASS MAN without having read the two prior novels, but it would not be as enjoyable as it otherwise would be.

Brilliant! The fantastic murderous android from "Gridlinked" returns amidst shadows of mystery and splashes of blood. Asher is as on form as ever with his to-the-point, indomitable style as he resurrects the fan favourite.

Thankfully this isn't just a piece of mindless action for the fans, like many cash-in sequels. It is a well thought out thriller constructed around the resurgence of an ancient technology, a feature of Asher's Polity world that has been hinted at earlier in the series. Here we see a step away from technological threats toward organic threats, and interesting change in direction for the series that keeps things fresh. The characters have yet to become stale after three novels, particularly the dracomen and the massive, Delphic entity Dragon itself.

Frustratingly, the most mysterious character of the series remains a flat non-entity; Horace Blegg, who is deliberately kept as an enigma, features more as an annoyance now than an intriguing sub-plot. Presumably Asher caught on to this as the fourth book "Polity Agent" finally provides us with some answers to this flagging mystery. Similarly there are problems with additional characters added to the mix, such as the "knight" who is searching for his figurative dragon, who ultimately has little impact on the story. No doubt Asher will tie up this loose end in later novels, but it remains neglected entirely from the fourth book and the character seemed to have little, if nothing at all to do with the overall storyline.

These are small issues though, and the overall enjoyment of the book is left mostly unspoiled. Overall it's another wonderful and entertaining deep-space yarn that had me at least ordering the sequel before I'd even finished it ... 3.5 stars, but since I'm not allowed half measures I'll bump it up to a respectible 4!

At times it was slow going because characters fleshed out in previous novels of the series are introduced here with no explanation. However, I thought it was an excellent sci fi read, up there with novels like Starship Troopers, Ender's Game, Forever War, et. all. Tons of stuff going on, great prose style, very cool characters and engrossing good v evil plot. Highly recomended.