Customer Reviews

Polity Agent (Ian Cormac, Book 4)

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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 excuses for his violent little wars and now he treats us to both the fantastic wars of his fervent imagination and the incomparable story-telling that justifies it and makes us unquestioningly believe in him and his stories.

In Polity Agent, Ian Cormac must once again contend with the spread of the civilization destroying "Jain" nanotechnology, we learn more of the Maker society that sent the enigmatic, moon-sized alien "Dragon" to human space, and also more about the equally enigmatic Horace Blegg. While some earlier mysteries are resolved, dangerous new foes are discovered as Asher continues his brinksmanship game of making each new novel a marvel of increasing complexity and deadlier, more dangerous enemies. Happily, nothing is ultimately resolved in this novel so we can look forward to more adventures. After all, the universe is a big place and there is always something new for Ian Cormac to contend with in his role as Polity Agent for Earth Central Security. New dangers that are invariably quicker, uglier, nastier, smarter, teethier, and more deadly than the last foe!

For those of you familiar with Neal Asher, forget about the anomaly that was Prador Moon. Asher is back with grace, style, and panache and his devious imagination and twisted plots are everything you could wish for. For those of you new to Neal, grab the books above, and then when you have devoured them, go back and read The Skinner and Sable Keech, an alternate Polity Universe series that is, arguably, even more fun than the Ian Cormac books.

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.

As Asher's "Cormac" series of space opera novels continues, his scope of Polity space and the outlying worlds widens, drawing us further into the universe that he has created. A history begins to take shape that, seeded in the previous novel, soon begins to reinstate itself. This fourth volume, "Polity Agent", draws upon the framework that Asher had already laid without falling into the trap of continually throwing in new elements to keep things "fresh".

The story is fine, although it is not a complete story. It's evident that Asher has probably signed a multi-book deal with his publisher as he's clearly holding back on any real conclusion; the book has no ending, merely ending with a significant event in what is clearly on ongoing storyline. It's a shame that Asher felt the need to do this, plant the seeds of the next novel so thickly that there's too much story to tell in a single volume. Hopefully the freshly-released fifth book with provide a satisfactory conclusion to an average, but open-ended novel.

5/10

The story definitely thickens at this point. I'm not sure how it would read to someone who has not read the other previous books up to this point, but Asher does a masterful job at weaving them all together into one big story. I'm not sure how much he actually planned before he wrote, but it very well though out.

Aside from a few minor grips here and there I thoroughly enjoy how he weaves themes of eugenics, determinism, and the whole thing had an existential feel to it as well (but I may have read that into it, I think a lot of science fiction has elements of existentialism... at a base level anyway.) And I probably missed a few themes but I'm not a scholar or an academic.

Over all it's sort of an apocalyptic story about the dangers of humanity maintaining a healthy tension between taking evolution in our own hands and and destroying ourselves, or keeping a steady pace of change and progress so thus staving off destruction from various ways and means. But also relates to our immediate world where people are glued to their phones, computers, or whatever deice they now depend upon.

He has a very colorful and fun cast of characters. They tend to be a bit one dimensional, but I think in this case it works great since it would take away from the overall storytelling aspect.

I did find this book to feature Ian Cormac a lot less than the previous books.

With nearly all my favourite Polity characters getting aired again in this tome in which Jain technology seriously threatens the Polity and we finally find out the truth about Horace Blegg, I don't know why I found this book so hard to finish. Neal Asher does a fantastic job of explaining how Polity and Jain technology works, rather than glossing over the deeper physics, making the technology so much more believable. I particularly liked the description of how the USER technology disrupts U-space travel and how that impacts the characters' plans. The attempt to curtail the spread of Jain technology throughout an arcology is brilliantly described and the end of book battle is to the usual high space opera standard, but frustratingly without any final resolution. For me, the book just seemed to drag, rather than drag me in as has been the case with the earlier Polity Agent books. Perhaps for me Ian Cormack has had his day.

Brandy consuming Cormac finds himself in a perpetual series of unfortunate events throughout the series. Each catastrophe-on-brink in the Polity universe finds Cormac directing the Polity goodness against the evil from elsewhere. This is how is has happened for the first three novels and the same is true with Polity Agent. However, where Asher failed in a minor way (three star reviews) in Brass Man and Line of Polity is in the fact that the entire plot revolved around an evil sprung from nowhere... nowhere meaning having very little connection at all to the first novel, Gridlinked. The following incidents in those two novels felt random and tied too closely to Asher's typical blow-scary-alien-wildlife-up-with-big-guns. It felt old.

Thankfully, Asher steps away from the broken record and tries to reinvigorate the Cormac series with Polity Agent. With the main villain Skellor having been plastered against a brown dwarf star in the third novel, a new evil must naturally arrive to replace the `ying' where the `yang' has been lost. But again the replacement villain is conceived from the ether and pursues a unidirectional goal- explore the Jain node and deceive the Polity. There's also malcontent AI bent on the destruction of the Polity and to approach the technological singularity with other merged AIs. As ever, Dragon (the remaining two spheres at least) take a prominent position in the novel. More detail about the Dragon, the Makers and the Jain technology are given, which enriches the story and the entire series, as a whole.

If only every character didn't `grimace' or `grin' so much. Asher obnoxiously oversues some words like this to generically characterize a kill-for-joy character.

In Neal Asher's second and third Ian Cormac novels, mad scientist/evil genius Skellor becomes infested with alien technology granting him immense powers. This technology, apparently left behind by the extinct Jain civilization, is rumored to be a weapon designed to detect and destroy advanced intelligent species. The Polity, a human star federation ruled by a benign dictatorship of artificial intelligences, ultimately defeats Skellor and neutralizes the threat he poses. Jain tech is still out there, however, so the next task for the Polity and its agent Ian Cormac is to find Skellor's source and eliminate it. When an outbreak of Jain tech on planet Coloron threatens the lives billions of people, the urgency of Cormac's mission increases.

POLITY AGENT is filled with familiar characters, including Polity agent Ian Cormac and his sort-of supervisor Horace Blegg, the Sparkind supertrooper Thorn, the incomprehensible alien ship/being Dragon, the laconic dragoman Scar, the free-thinking ship/AI Jerusalem, which hosts the most advanced research on Jain tech, and the irreverent ship/AI Jack Ketch, now entwined with another mind and rechristened "Not Entirely Jack". Adding to the cast are several potential bad guys including "haiman" (human/AI hybrid) engineer Orlandine, who kills her lover in order to hide her secret cache of Jain tech, an android called "the Legate", who travels the stars spreading the joy of Jain tech, and a secretive entity called Erebus.

Repeat readers will probably be pleased to learn that POLITY AGENT features the same mix of invention, action, mystery, suspense, and lurid violence as earlier novels. They will also be pleasantly surprised at the number of secrets Asher reveals, including the true nature of apparent immortal Horace Blegg. Those enamored of contemporary Left-leaning Brit-SF, however, will continue to be distressed by Asher's elitist and authoritarian tendencies; Asher is the Tory version of Iain Banks. Some readers will complain that POLITY AGENT is not a complete novel, but I disagree; while much is left unresolved, the ending is not a cliffhanger, only a promise of more story to come. While hardly perfect, POLITY AGENT is Asher's best and most engaging Cormac novel since GRIDLINKED and possibly his third-best novel overall after THE SKINNER and GRIDLINKED.

N.B. POLITY AGENT continues a story in progress and doesn't do a great job of orienting new readers, or even assisting repeat readers who don't have a clear memory of the previous volume; new readers should begin with GRIDLINKED.

So many other reviewers have already slathered on praise, I just wanted to add my two cents: Asher's Polity is a limitless vehicle for imagination and action, and he uses it exceptionally well in this installment of the Ian Cormac saga. Thanks again, Neal, for an thrilling, entertaining and thought provoking series!

I've been reading the Cormac novels, one after the other, without stopping for other reading. Taken on their own, I could see that they might appear as mere trifles, scifi adventures. But pushing on directly in sequence, I find them as something more akin to an old fashioned Dumas or Hugo epic. And--as the series has progressed--the issues that Asher addresses have become more apparent, the issues around which all good fiction ultimately revolves: what it means to be human, the temptations and costs of progress, and the struggle to find love and meaning in the never ending flow of events. The prose may not be as polished as that by Alastair Reynolds, nor as hyperkinetic as Ken Macleod, but is in its own way damn good.