Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3405 in Books
• Published on: 2008-04-04
• 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

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.

A good pager turner but lacks the oomph factor of his other books.
If you are reading a review for this book, chances are you're a Neal Asher fan already. This is the 5th and supposedly final installment of the Ian Cormac series, so no persuasion to read it is needed. If not yet a fan, then a description of his writing for me is akin to a magic eye picture, in that his books are always interesting to start but not always very clear what they're all about. Then, suddenly concepts and stories, the brain did not think previously comprehensible, are thrust in to view. This is true of Line War but when it all becomes clear this book just slightly lacks that oomph factor of the other books. It pains me to give only 3 stars to an author of stratospheric dimensions, but, despite being a good page turner, for me Asher has not added anything extra to what has gone before. The Cormac books are all a bit bleaker and less humourous than the others, but even knowing this I did not root for the characters quite as much as I wanted. Gimme Sniper the War Drone over Knobbler any day. Brass Man was the zenith of the series in my opinion. For the uninitiated, read The Skinner and Voyage of the Sable Keech. They're the best sci-fi books I've ever read.