Ex Machina, Volume 4: March to War

Time for another episode in the life of Mitch Hundred, retired superhero turned Mayor of New York — yes, the Great Machine is back again.

Confronted with yet another difficult political choice, the Mayor has decided to allow anti-war protesters to march on the UN building, reasoning that peace activists are unlikely to be terrorist targets. How wrong he is. After the crowd is attacked with poison gas and the Mayor's former youth affairs adviser, Journal Moore, ends up in a coma, the race is on to track down the perpetrators. The question is, was the atrocity committed by an old enemy from the Great Machine's past or was it carried out by a terrorist organisation?

After agreeing to a radio interview, the Mayor is caught off guard by a question about capital punishment. While mulling over his answer, his thoughts turn to his former arch-nemesis Jack Pherson, a man able to talk to and control animals in the same way that the Hundred can talk to machines. After a number of close encounters, the Great Machine and Pherson finally have their showdown, during which Mitch has to decide what to do about the clearly crazy Pherson. Needless to say, all of this has an important bearing on the Mayor's stance against capital punishment.

Ex Machina: March to War is another great comic that doesn't pull its punches and doesn't duck the difficult issues. It's interesting to see Hundred wrestle with his conscience — something he gets to do because he's an independent rather than a party politician — over tough issues like freedom of speech and behaviour, and to see the way he deals with the tough consequences of his actions: friends getting hurt and innocent bystanders being killed. It's also nice to see a character come out firmly and eloquently against capital punishment, despite his former history as a vigilante. Good stuff.

The Voyage of the Sable Keech

Another Neal Asher novel, this time it's The Voyage of the Sable Keech, which forms a sequel to The Skinner.

A decade after usurping the Planetary Warden, Sniper has started to tire of his duties and has come up with a plan to upload himself into the new, illegal, drone body he has finally managed to smuggle down to the planet. It looks like he has picked his moment: things are starting to hot up on Spatterjay once again.

Lead by the egomaniacal Taylor Bloc, the walking corpses of the Cult of Anubis have decided to build a vast windjammer to take them on a pilgrimage, following in the footsteps of Sable Keech, the only reif ever to successfully achieve bodily resurrection. Elsewhere, Vrell the Prador has somehow managed to survive being entombed in his father's ship for ten years and is feeling strangely full of vim and vigor, Janner has returned to Spatterjay in pursuit of a rogue hive mind, while Erlin has managed to upset a very large, very homicidal whelk.

As events develop and Vrell starts to make something of a nuisance of himself, the Polity find themselves unable to offer any direct assistance to the Warden, but instead are forced to make use of their new alliance and call on the Prador for help. Help, if help it is, turns up in the form of Captain Vrost of the King's Guard and his shoot-first-ask-questions-later attitude.

As with The Skinner, the star of the show is Spatterjay and its bizarre biology: all major lifeforms are infected with a virus that keeps them alive in the planet's hostile environment, but also has the unfortunate side effect of turning humans into monsters if they're deprived of off-world food. This gives the Hoopers — the infected humans — a nice new worry, for although they're stronger than normal humans and better suited to survive a seafaring life, they're left with the constant nagging concern that they might find themselves in circumstances where they might want to die, but can't.

While some of the characters are familiar, many are new. The sadistic Orbus, captain of the Vilette, and his crew of masochists are particularly worrying, while Taylor Bloc is everything you'd expect from a major league villain: clever and ruthless, but with all the fatal weaknesses of the extremely proud. It was also nice to see Vrell again, but this time as a cunning and competent adult, rather than the whiny, ruthless adolescent I seem to remember from The Skiner.

All in all, most enjoyable.