Friday, January 16, 2015

Dark Intelligence Review

This one from Booklist:



Dark Intelligence: Transformation Book One
Asher, Neal (Author)
Feb 2015. 352 p. Night Shade, hardcover, $26.99. (9781597808248).

Asher returns to his popular far-future series, Polity Universe, with another fast-paced space opera filled with his trademark technological marvels and elaborate world building. In a world where consciousness is portable, artificial, and alien—the Prador are crablike carnivores who are quite nasty— Thorvald Spear awakens a century after his death in a new body but with full recollection of dying during the Prador-Human war. Asher drops readers straight into the action, as Spear seeks to avenge the death of his soldiers by the rogue AI ship, the Penny Royal. (The AI ships have personalities of their own, some not so nice.) On his search, he encounters Isobel Satomi, a perversely augmented human who turns her body into a vicious weapon for her own ends. Asher shifts the point of view in each chapter to various players in his galactic game—the ships get chapters, too—and the result is an exciting, intricate, and unabashedly futuristic story rife with twists and turns. Fans of Hannu Rajaniemi’s The Quantum Thief (2010) will feel right at home in Asher’s Polity Universe.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi Neal,
got both the hardcover and Kindle edition on pre-order, can't wait.
Sorry to sound a bit thick, but which of your books would you recommend I re-read in order to reacqaint myself with Penny Royal's antics prior to the arrival of Dark Intelligence?

Mya said...

I cannot wait to get my hands and eyes on this!!!

Neal Asher said...

Bascule, if anything The Technician. You could also reread Alien Archaeology in The Gabble too.

Unknown said...

Hi Neal,

Pre-ordered it a while ago, and I should have it within a day or two.

With the rise of ebooks, I've been reading a lot of stuff on an ebook reader. But there are some authors whose work I always get the old-fashioned paper version of, like yours.

Can't wait to read it.

Unknown said...

Yes, those Prador are indeed "quite nasty"; confiscating children's football's accidentally kicked into their cave, saying unkind things about immigrants, reading The Sun, causing fracas at McDonald's etc.

Anonymous said...

"Bascule, if anything The Technician. You could also reread Alien Archaeology in The Gabble too"

Done and done. Thanks for that Neal, now primed for Thursday!