Product Description

From 800 years in the future, a runcible gate is opened into the Polity and those coming through it have been sent specially to take the alien ‘Maker’ back to its home civilization in the Small Magellanic cloud. Once these refugees are safely through, the gate itself is rapidly shut down – because something alien is pursuing them. The gate is then dumped into a nearby sun.

From those refugees who get through, agent Cormac learns that the Maker civilization has been destroyed by pernicious virus known as the Jain technology. This, of course, raised questions: why was Dragon, a massive biocontruct of the Makers, really sent to the Polity; why did a Jain node suddenly end up in the hands of someone who could do the most damage with it? Meanwhile an entity called the Legate is distributing pernicious Jain nodes . . . and a renegade attack ship, The King of Hearts, has encountered something very nasty outside the Polity itself.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #15683 in Books
• Published on: 2007-07-06
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 562 pages

About the Author

Neal Asher was born and bred and on the Essex coast, and still lives there. His previous novels include Gridlinked, The Skinner, The Line of Polity, Cowl and Brass Man.

Customer Reviews

Another superb Cormac novel
The forth book in the Ian Cormac series following on from Gridlinked, The Line of Polity and Brass Man is another fantastic book with Asher again showing that he is one of the few British authors that deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as Iain M Banks (who incidentally gets a nice acknowledgement in the foreword along with Richard Dawkins).

Set in a time where inter-stellar humanity is governed by enlighted AIs, this book sees Ian Cormac again thrown into the middle of trying to save the Polity from the threat of the Jain. To call Ian Cormac a super-agent undersells the character massively. He is no one dimensional futuristic James Bond but rather an interesting and flawed man with a hint of mystique that might explain why an unaugmented human is in charge of AI minds magnitudes more superior to his. Other previous characters are also back, such as Mika and Horace Blegg. The storyline of the latter is particularly good as it raises as many questions as it answers.

The Jain have been previously mentioned in this series as the source of Skellor's (a previous adversary) abilities. Polity Agent fleshes out more details of the threat these Von Neumann machine-like objects pose, the history of the Jain and who is orchestrating the current situation.

Polity Agent is a gripping read, both involving and exciting. All in all, this is another excellent book richly deserving of 5 stars

Pretty Good. Racy paced adventure
Neal Asher is a great writer. The only reason I didn't give this book 5 stars was that there was a short period two thirds of the way through when things seemed to get a bit similar with battles and megaweapons everywhere. But that is only a minor criticism, and don't let it stop you reading an excellent high tech novel. Very Iain Banks (and Asher credits Banks for some ideas), and if you are a Banks fan you will love this book.

Polity Agent
Very good indeed - back to form after Prador Moon. This is a strong Cormac novel.