Tag Archives: polity

Book Review of “The Human: Rise of the Jain, Book Three” (2020)

the human

© James Pyles

I know it seems like it took forever, but yesterday, I finished reading Neal Asher’s novel The Human: Rise of the Jain, Book 3 (2020).

To read my reviews of the first two books in this trilogy, see The Soldier (2018) and The Warship (2019).

This was another book not available through my local library system (boo on them) so I bought a used copy, another former library book, in order to finish the saga.

Like so many of Asher’s other books, this one is also set in the Polity universe and sometimes references a wider collection of places and characters.

As you might imagine, this novel wraps up the Jain’s incursion and the struggles of the Polity, the Prador empire, and a number of other interested parties in trying to stop the Jain but also learn from it.

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Book Review: “The Warship – Rise of the Jain, Book Two” (2019)

warship

© 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.

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Review of “The Soldier: Rise of the Jain, Book One” (2018)

soldier

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.

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Book Review: “Prador Moon” by Neal Asher

Prador Moon cover art

I’ve previously read and reviewed Neal Asher’s “Polity series” novels Dark Intelligence (2015) and War Factory (2016), both part of the “Transformation” trilogy.

Frankly, Asher has written so many novels, just within this one series, that I was stumbling blind when I read those two, and although I enjoyed them, I couldn’t figure out how everything fit together.

I needed some sort of context to make sense of the universe I was experiencing. Although it’s not the first “Polity” book Asher (metaphorically) penned, Prador Moon records the first encounter between humans and AIs in the Polity and the Prador.

It’s not a complex novel, but it does introduce some of the key elements presented in all of these stories, including “Augs,” “AIs,” “Golems,” “runcibles” (basically stargates), and of course, the utterly ruthless, crab-like Prador.

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