Dark Intelligence

Starred review from December 15, 2014
Asher (the Owner trilogy) delivers an exciting beginning to a new trilogy set in his Polity universe. During a war between humans and the crablike alien Prador, Thorvald Spear was killed by Penny Royal, a warped AI. More than a hundred years later, he’s revived to discover that the war is long over but Penny Royal is still around. Isobel Satomi made a deal with Penny Royal so she could become powerful in an interplanetary crime syndicate, but it granted her wish by starting her slow transformation into a carnivorous centipede. Both Spear and Satomi desire vengeance, which is complicated by several questions: not just where Penny Royal is and how to destroy it, but how much they are playing pre-ordained parts in its incomprehensible plan. This beautifully paced book does just as well at slam-bang action scenes as at painting frightening pictures of Isobel’s changes, and provides an interesting climax while leaving plenty of space for the next two books. This is space opera at a high peak of craftsmanship.

February 1, 2015
Asher returns to his popular far-future series, Polity Universe, with another fast-paced space opera filled with his trademark technological marvels and elaborate world building. In a world where consciousness is portable, artificial, and alienthe Prador are crablike carnivores who are quite nastyThorvald Spear awakens a century after his death in a new body but with full recollection of dying during the Prador-Human war. Asher drops readers straight into the action, as Spear seeks to avenge the death of his soldiers by the rogue AI ship, the Penny Royal. (The AI ships have personalities of their own, some not so nice.) On his search, he encounters Isobel Satomi, a perversely augmented human who turns her body into a viscous weapon for her own ends. Asher shifts the point of view in each chapter to various players in his galactic gamethe ships get chapters, tooand the result is an exciting, intricate, and unabashedly futuristic story rife with twists and turns. Fans of Hannu Rajaniemi's The Quantum Thief (2010) will feel right at home in Asher's Polity Universe.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)