Teaser

Thorvald Spear died fighting the Prador, but he was killed by a Polity AI named Penny Royal. Resurrected by arcane technology, Spear is given a chance to have his revenge. But vengeance always comes at a price . . .

Review

Way back in 2016, I was a die-hard fantasy reader. Mark Lawrence, Joe Abercrombie, Brent Weeks. I was reading all the big names. But I was growing tired of the grimdark philosophies running through the genre. Fantasy had grown stale and repetitive, so I began making forays into the new worlds of science fiction. This was around the time I first encountered James S.A. Corey’s The Expanse and Michael Cobley’s Humanity’s Fire. I also started looking at the big names of British SF. Alastair Reynolds was one author I immediately latched onto. But at the time, Stephen Baxter seemed to technical (how wrong I was!) and Peter F. Hamilton’s books looked like the sort of bloated fantasy I was hoping to escape.

Enter Neal Asher. He’s an author who publishes on an annual basis, yet doesn’t seem to get any of the acclaim or even publicity one might expect of a decades-long career. But perhaps this is understandable. The first time I read Dark Intelligence, I hated it. It was grimdark to the extreme, rife with everything I’d been hoping to leave behind with my fantasy collection. There are some mitigating circumstances, of course. Dark Intelligence was apparently written while Asher’s wife was dying from cancer. I don’t want to dwell on an author’s psychological state, but it’s hard to imagine that not leaving a mark on the writer’s craft. Don’t get me wrong, Asher’s writing has always been dark, bordering on nihilism, but Dark Intelligence is grim to the point of being painful.

Coming back to Dark Intelligence with a little more Asher under my belt has been a revelatory experience. When the opening chapter features the protagonist returning from the dead, suffering flashbacks, and having sex with a cat-woman, stumbling is inevitable. But if you push past this, there’s a really good book in here. Personal tastes and aversion to relentless grimness aside, the only real fault I can slap the book with is the mix of first- and third-person narration and the constant hopping around in time and space. It can be a confusing read at times, can Dark Intelligence.

However, this is the book where I feel like a finally understand what Asher is about. There’s the old adage ‘hurt people hurt people,’ and that’s on full display here. Everybody in the Polity is broken on some fundamental level. And if every part of a system is broken, how then can the system ever hope to improve? Asher might not be incapable of writing a genuine hero, but he is far more interested in telling the stories of the broken, the beaten, and the hopeless. You won’t find any joy in this book, but once you accept that, you’ll learn to find depths to the darkness instead.

Having recently read some Iain M. Banks, it’s hard not to see the Polity as a cynical inversion of the Culture. There are uber-powerful AI, but they do not have our best interests at heart. There is a malicious alien species, but the prador are genuinely antithetical to human life. There is transhumanism, but these transformations are not for pleasure, but acts of torture. It is the dystopia to Banks’ utopia. Tragically more plausible in some ways, driven to ludicrous extremes in others. I’m admittedly not the biggest fan of either universe, but if you read either the Culture or the Polity, you owe it to yourself to see how the other half lives.

I walk away from every Asher book unsure if I’ll read another, and that is where I am once again. Dark Intelligence is a good book, but I don’t know when I’ll feel like immersing myself in that much darkness again. It might be tomorrow, or it might be never. Only time will tell.

Book Stats

• Transformation #1
• Part of the Polity Universe
• First Published 2016 by Tor
• 471 Pages