Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
Fresh, 14 Dec 2003
Its nice to see a modern day sci fi author doing something different, Richard Morgan, William Gibson and Neal Asher all have managed to bring genres together.In The Line of Polity Asher builds a mixture of a futuristic spy thriller with an awesome imagination and charecterisation. Ian Cormac, Earth Central Security is in pursuit of his old foe Dragon a confusing malicious intergalactic being. However as ever Cormac picks up a series of enemies who in typical elite spy style are almost beneath his notice. With the witty Gant and a team of powerful individuals the action is non stop. But wait, theres a story here as well, a story that is very well told. The story of a rebellion against a Theocracy, a tale of a young girl seeking freedom from her environment and a young man coming to terms with a completely new world. Sound a bit musshy for yah? Don't worry theres still plenty of gun fights, shuruken based decapitations and raging scifi to keep the biggest scifi nut happy. Damn fine show!
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17 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
Peter Hamilton's Competition, 22 May 2004
Having just put down this book - and instantly lent it to someone else to enjoy - I have to say that it is an excellent, miss your stop on the tube, read.If you like Peter Hamilton (and I read this back to back with Pandoro's box which was a mistake cos there is some conceptual overlap between the two) then you will deffo like this. Its space opera on a grand scale with lots of real believable human (and plenty not so human) characters, hideous monsters and super duper gadgets. The plot is 007-esque with not a dull moment and the various plot strands tie in well to a satisfying crescendo. It IS worth reading Gridlinked (its prequel) before this, as although Ascher does sufficient back tracking in the text of this to allow a 'cold' reader to keep up, I would think that you would miss large amounts of sub-text otherwise. Luckily that's good news for you, cos Gridlinked is equally excellent. The bottom line? Dont delay, get it today.
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12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
Asher's universe continues to mesmerize, but..., 15 Jun 2003
Asher's latest is a sequel to "Gridlinked" and has all the good and the bad qualities of the latter. It is an action-packed space opera romp. Asher excells at painting alien ecologies with horrifying creatures and never lets the pace of his novel slump below maximum overdrive. However, this manic pace does not do much good to the fleshing out of his main characters (Gant, Cormac, Thorn and Stanton) who are disturbingly similar (tougher-than-thou humans or post-humans, all excelling at various skills of war)and cardboardy shallow. This similarity amongst the main characters is so striking that it becomes confusing : keeping track of who did exactly what in the course of the story got me in trouble several times - but hey, I have never been any good at remembering names. Tough luck : Asher continues to bombard you with new names - and sometimes rather superfluous subplots - all through the novel. The fact that I read "Gridlinked" two years ago - it beats me why Asher first published "The Skinner", before coming up with this sequel - was not very helpful either : in order to enjoy this one you 'd better reread "Gridlinked", as the author often refers to events in that novel, without too much elaboration, so you are expected to have those events very fresh in your memory. I did not. The structure of the story, with its many intertwining subplots, rather lengthy description of war events on the planet Masada and then its pretty abrupt ending (a criticism that was also valid for "Gridlinked"), could have been better.I don't want to be too harsh. Asher's imaginative universe is well worth exploring, his style is very entertaining and I'll keep buying whatever he hammers out. Of the three novels mentioned here, I personally enjoyed his second,"The Skinner", best. A fact that got my hopes for this one maybe a bit too high up.
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