The cover of Neal Asher’s 2018 novel, “The Soldier.”

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Last night I finished Neal Asher’s novel The Soldier: Rise of the Jain, Book One (2018). This one was harder for me to get into than some of the others.

I’ve read a number (but only a fraction of those published) of Asher’s novels, both series and stand alone.

One of the challenges in general is keeping track of all the different characters. It’s not just the Polity and Prator, but now we have the Species, the android Angel, the haiman Orlandine, various AIs including Earth Central (EC), not to mention the mysterious Dragon and the more mysterious Librarian.

I love the names “Cog” and “Trike” for the Splatterjay hoopers.

But as I said, it’s a lot to keep track of.

The action is pretty much non-stop but sometimes one battle blends into another and I found I lost track of who was shooting at who with what and why.

Since a ton of Asher’s novels are in the Polity/Prator universe and since I don’t read them in any particular order (trilogies, yes – the entire universe, no) I’m sort of “unstuck” in the timeline.

This happens after the events in the “Dark Intelligence” trilogy, so I picked up on the references to “Room 101” and “Penny Royal.”

The Soldier isn’t what you might imagine, but nothing in Asher’s novels ever is. This is a Jain (I mentally pronounce the word “Jane”) technology that is immensely powerful. But then again, we’re talking about a story where characters launch black holes and rupture suns, so there’s a lot of power going around.

It’s easy to get lost in the narrative, but with Asher being from the UK and me from the US, I always come to a brief halt when he says something like “the black hole will hoover up anything around it.”

If there are any future British characters in the tale, they might use “hoover” as a synonym for “vacuum” or “suck” or “inhale,” but Asher uses “hoover” every time something like that is called for.

The action takes place in a part of space in-between the human Polity worlds and the crab-like Prador realm. Within an accretion disc lies remnants of Jain technology, which is extremely dangerous and absolutely seductive. The Jain have been extinct for eons, but that might not be entirely true.

Everyone wants the technology, not the least of whom is Orlandine who is working with a large, spacegoing alien called Dragon. The accretion disc is a trap but one that the multiple characters in this drama are willing to risk in order to achieve their goals.

Out of the disc comes the Soldier, but it is something that can be controlled or that must always destroy?

The novel ends on a cliffhanger (of course) and like Asher’s universe in general, isn’t really about the fate of humanity. Human beings (or what we evolve into) are some of the players, but there’s the overarching backdrop of the galaxy to consider.

While Asher typically has the ability to draw me into his world, for some reason “The Soldier” wasn’t quite as compelling as I expected. I don’t know what it was exactly, but I had a hard time summoning up the will to pick up the book once I’d put it down. I think it had something to do with the amount of attention the narrative requires. I couldn’t be tired or otherwise distracted. I also needed large blocks of time with the book. It’s not something I could consume in five or ten minute snippets while on coffee break.

I think I’ll take a pause before I continue the series with book two The Warship. Maybe a temporary change of style and venue will clear my cognitive cobwebs.