Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2641 in Books
• Published on: 2008-04-04
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 503 pages

SFX Magazine
'Asher is brilliant at conveying the vastness of space, the strangeness of alien life and the sweep of planetary horizons.'

Synopsis
The Polity is under attack from a 'melded' AI entity with control of the lethal Jain technology, yet the attack seems to have no coherence. When one of Erebus's wormships, kills millions on the world of Klurhammon, a high-tech agricultural world of no real tactical significance, agent Ian Cormac is sent to investigate, though he is secretly struggling to control a new ability no human being should possess ...and beginning to question the motives of his AI masters. Further attacks and seemingly indiscriminate slaughter ensue, but only serve to bring some of the most dangerous individuals in the Polity into the war.Mr Crane, the indefatigable brass killing machine sets out for vengeance, while Orlandine, a vastly-augmented haiman who herself controls Jain technology, seeks a weapon of appalling power and finds allies from an ancient war. Meanwhile Mika, scientist and Dragon expert, is again kidnapped by that unfathomable alien entity and dragged into the heart of things: to wake the makers of Jain technology from their five-million-year slumber. But Erebus's attacks are not so indiscriminate, after all, and could very well herald the end of the Polity itself.

Customer Reviews

Worth the time
Asher has dropped the ball a couple of times in his previous "Polity" novels - Line of Polity ends in a confusing blur, Brass Man just isn't very good, treading cautiously between fantasy and sci-fi, and Polity Agent basically has too much going on all the way to the end. Prador Moon might be great, but until the paperback is a fiver, I'm not paying any more for a 220-page novel.

I'm happy to say that Line War brings many threads of the Cormac series to a satisfying conclusion. Inside the first 50 pages you'll find an easily digestible 3-page summary of the plot shambles that was Line of Polity, Brass Man and Polity Agent. In unambigous terms, the origins of Erebus, Jain nodes, the fate of the Aetheter, and more are all revealed, then the current plot kicks off. This is an enjoyable and well-paced read, making it a stark contrast to the last 3 books.

The ending is a little unexpected in plot terms, and a couple of plot elements have been carefully held back, probably for future novels - which is good, since Asher is currently one of the best sci-fi novelists still actively writing.

A satisfying conclusion to the Cormac series
As far as I can make out this is the final instalment of the Cormac books, and it does tie up pretty much all the various threads of the Cormac series quite nicely.

As some other reviewers have said, although this is a good book in of itself, it is not the best Cormac book, nor is it the ideal introduction to Neal Asher's works.

The book is happily of similar length to the other Cormac books, so you're not going to finish it in a few hours.

The first half of the book feels a bit 'been there, done that', nothing much new and therefore not quite as compelling as I'd hoped.

The second half does get up to speed and I did not put the book down until I'd finished it.

Definitely worth getting to complete the series. A good book but not Mr Asher's best.

What ain't he got? He ain't got style
He's got the plotting. He's got the ideas. He's got the sweep. So he gets a couple of stars.

But the prose...I suppose the most flattering description I can muster is "workmanlike". The sentences are gramatically well constructed and communicate what's happening clearly. And that's about it. I was interested in what was going on, but utterly bored by the words being used to describe it. It's always been a problem with Asher, but it seems to be getting worse, rather than better. Unless I hear evidence to the contrary, I'm not sure I'll bother with his next one.