War Factory

[sawyl]

Despite slurping through the first third of Neal Asher's War Factory in the first sitting, it took me the best part of two weeks to finish the rest thanks to my absurd schedule of late. The book is the second in Asher's Transformations series set in the same universe as his Ian Cormac and Spatterjay books. The majority of the action takes in a de-militarised zone between the Polity and the Prador Kingdom where the rogue artificial intelligence that calls its Penny Royal is engaged in a complicated scheme — carried out almost entirely through proxies — which it hopes will help to atone for its blood-drenched past.

The book opens with a flashback to Penny Royal's creation during the depths of the Prador War, when sheer desperation forced Room 101, the gigantic war factory of the title, to embody ships with damaged and fractured AI crystals. With that established, we return to the present and to Thorvald Spear, a resurrected soldier who has been bound to a fragment of Penny Royal containing the memories of the AI's many victims; needless to say, he finds himself struggling to assimilate vast flood of new personalities and experiences.

Father-Captain Sverl, another creature foolish enough to accept one of Penny Royal's faustian bargains, is slowly transforming from pure prador into a combination of prador, human, and artificial intelligence — something that is anathema to his former species. Father-Captain Cvorn, a conservative who hopes to use the proof of Sverl's transformation to lead a rebellion in the Kingdom, launches an attack on his rival which has catastrophic consequences for Rock Pool, the border world where Sverl has been hiding for decades. But Sverl, greatly changed from the creature he once was, does not immediately strike back against Cvorn but instead helps to evacuate the planet. Swept up in this evacuation is Trent Sobel, once an underworld enforcer for crime lord Isobel Satomi but now cursed with a conscience that makes it almost impossible for him to imagine inflicting any form of suffering on another conscious being.

The major players carefully manoeuvre around each other in search of advantage. Cvorn, determined to capture his prey, sets a complicated trap but becomes somewhat distracted by a growing desire to recapture his lost youthful vigour. Sverl, who believes that the answers he seeks lie in Penny Royal's past, tries to locate the long-vanished Room 101 whilst trying to avoid his rival's claws. And Thorvald Spear, caught up in a scheme that has layers upon layers, finds himself drawn into investigating Cvorn's trap.

As if all that wasn't enough, Captain Blight and a subset of his crew from Dark Intelligence revisit their roles as Penny Royal's transport and it's amanuenses — the post-human intelligence needing someone to explain things to. The missing members of Blight's crew also serve an important purpose. Transported to the prison hulk Tyburn, the current resting place of a forensic AI called the Brockle — whose idea of analysis involves chopping things up into very small pieces — the details of their encounters with Penny Royal so intrigue the grey AI that it decides the time has come to break its confinement and play a more active role in affairs.

War Factory is a solid, enjoyable space opera with a nice line in body-shock horror. As in Asher's previous novels redemption is a major theme, with almost all the main characters — Cvorn is a notable exception — attempting to come to terms with appalling crimes in their pasts. The post-human characters are well imagined, from the impossibly incomprehensible mind of Penny Royal, to the more manageable likes of Sverl and, increasingly, Thorvald Spear as he too becomes something other.

Asher has a lot of fun with the unreconstructed prador — they're just so delightfully nasty. Through Cvorn, we get more of psychology of their vast ships and warlike manner than in other books. Essentially old captains are like hermit crabs, their ships surrogate shells, and their agoraphobia such that they almost never leave their sanctums.

But for all the conservatism of the species — unsurprising given that it's basically a gerontocracy driven by rampant Darwinism — it is clear that tomorrow belongs to the post-prador. The King's Guard, who have an atypical ability to step outside their hardwired reactions, have come to rule through a combination of intelligence and collective loyalty that are at odds with the rest of their species. And while Sverl is an obvious exception, his first children, both of whose minds are augmented with Polity technology and both of whom have lived for over a century and accumulated a great deal of life experience, are intriguing characters in their own right, especially as it is clear that they are still engaged in a dialogue with their own lower instincts.