© James Pyles

A few nights ago, I finished Neal Asher’s 2019 novel The Warship: Rise of the Jain, Book Two. I read and reviewed the first book in this trilogy a little over a year ago. That’s really too long a space between these volumes.

As with most of Asher’s novels (and there are plenty of them), the action takes place in the “Polity” universe (basically the Earth/human domain of space) and involves the primary protagonist the Prador, but they’re not the “big bads” in this story.

As with every one of Asher’s books I’ve read so far, one of the main challenges is keeping track of the numerous individual characters, their races and other things (the Spatterjay Virus for instance) that distinguishes one person/group from another.

This trilogy focuses on a species called the Jain or rather their technology and a number of mysteries that surround them.

Asher’s great at misdirection, so the Jain don’t necessarily occupy center stage through most of the scenes, even if the reader is led to believe they do.

Even though the front of the book provides lists of both characters and concepts, it’s still a dizzying affair to keep up with who is who, what they’re doing, and why.

Asher is also good at making aliens seem really alien and that includes not only life forms but various incarnations of AI which can equally be treated as characters.

The space battles are spectacular and the technology presented expansive. Imagine hiding ships inside an accretion disc and using a black hole as a power source.

The first book involved a Jain soldier and as the title suggests, this novel employs a Jain ship, or is it Jain?

Human authors have to rely on their imagination and the world around them as they understand it since we haven’t (as far as I know) encountered real outer space aliens yet. Asher has made heavy use of crabs, spiders, and insects in manufacturing this otherworldly intelligences along with what I refer to as “medical atrocities” (see Trike).

I wish I could give you a synopsis of “The Warship,” but Asher’s books are detail-dense and difficult to boil down to a cohesive paragraph or two (you can read Amazon’s descriptive blurb for that).

I love many different SciFi writers and I used to say only Harlan Ellison made me wish I could write. Now that’s also true for Neal Asher and it has been for a few years.

In “The Warship,” I felt like I was becoming lost in the multiple threads until the very end when it all seemed to come together, at least as far as the characters Orlandine, Trike, Ruth, and Cog (and a few others) were concerned.

As this is a trilogy, it also ended on an unfinished note with the last sentence being:

“Seems the Jain have arrived,” Orlik finished.

As much as possible, I try to get my reading material from the public library, but only the first novel was available through them. I actually had to buy (gasp) “The Warship.”

I can’t afford to purchase every book I want to read, so bypassed Amazon and bought this novel through a used book outlet (sorry, Neal). It actually is a decommissioned library book (from California).

Since I didn’t want another year plus to pass before reading The Human, I repeated my steps and bought it used. It’s on its way, so I’ll have it in my hands in a week or two (though I’m reading another book in the meantime).

Asher has created such a rich universe that all he really needs to do is leverage his own worldbuilding and populate another part of it with, if not the same individuals, the same species and variant his readers have seen in many of his other offerings. It’s an enviable thing for any writer.

Once you get into Asher’s writing in general and the Jain Trilogy in particular, there’s no turning back. You’re going to get hooked.