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The Departure and Zero Point
Aug. 14th, 2012 10:06 pmThings have been moderately frantic around here for the last little while, so I'm declaring partial book bankruptcy. Here, then, are a couple of quick and not terribly considered thoughts on the first two books in Neal Asher's Owner Sequence.
The Departure by Neal Asher. After waking up in a crate in an incineration plant with near-total amnesia, Alan Saul decides to track down the person who almost killed him: an interrogator called Salem Smith. With the help of an AI program and his own super-intelligence, Saul breaks into the interrogation centre where he was tortured only to discover that Smith be made director of the Argus space station. With the help of Hannah Neumann, a former inmate of the centre who also happens to be an expert on neural enhancement, Saul upgrades his brain to seriously post-human levels and comes up with a plan to raid the Argus.
While not Asher's greatest work to date, The Departure is jammed full of enough ultra-violence and enthusiasm to get a free pass. The pseudo-Stalinist Earth from which Hannah and Saul escape is suitably horrible and the sections set on Mars, were a small group of scientists are trying to break way from Earth rule, are fairly gripping. But on the downside, Saul goes through the forces of Bureaucratic Evil without too much trouble, robbing the book of a certain amount of narrative tension.
Zero Point the second book in the series, is far more satisfactory. With Earth's bureaucratic government all but destroyed by Saul's satellite assault, the time is ripe for Delegate Serene Galahad to stage a takeover. Assisted a bioweapon she had the foresight to have implanted in every legitimate citizen, Galahad purges half the world's population and sets about re-wilding the planet. In order to achieve her goal, Galahad dispatches a warship in pursuit of the Argus, now on course for Mars, and for good measure blames Saul for her own bioweapon. But all is not well on Argus: Saul is in a coma after being shot by an assassin and his underlings can't quite decide what to do save the station.
Unlike its predecessor, Zero Point feature a real challenge for its protagonists: they may have stolen a giant space craft, but they're also being pursued by something larger and nastier and more heavily armed, whilst at the same time they have to come to terms with the unavailability of the guiding intelligence that forged them all into something like a crew. It also features a wonderfully over the top villain the form of Serene Galahad; someone whose exaggerated misanthropy and ruthless desire to champion all non-human life is presumable intended as a satirical take on voluntary human extinction — the catch being that Galahad doesn't believe in the voluntary part!
The Departure by Neal Asher. After waking up in a crate in an incineration plant with near-total amnesia, Alan Saul decides to track down the person who almost killed him: an interrogator called Salem Smith. With the help of an AI program and his own super-intelligence, Saul breaks into the interrogation centre where he was tortured only to discover that Smith be made director of the Argus space station. With the help of Hannah Neumann, a former inmate of the centre who also happens to be an expert on neural enhancement, Saul upgrades his brain to seriously post-human levels and comes up with a plan to raid the Argus.While not Asher's greatest work to date, The Departure is jammed full of enough ultra-violence and enthusiasm to get a free pass. The pseudo-Stalinist Earth from which Hannah and Saul escape is suitably horrible and the sections set on Mars, were a small group of scientists are trying to break way from Earth rule, are fairly gripping. But on the downside, Saul goes through the forces of Bureaucratic Evil without too much trouble, robbing the book of a certain amount of narrative tension.
Zero Point the second book in the series, is far more satisfactory. With Earth's bureaucratic government all but destroyed by Saul's satellite assault, the time is ripe for Delegate Serene Galahad to stage a takeover. Assisted a bioweapon she had the foresight to have implanted in every legitimate citizen, Galahad purges half the world's population and sets about re-wilding the planet. In order to achieve her goal, Galahad dispatches a warship in pursuit of the Argus, now on course for Mars, and for good measure blames Saul for her own bioweapon. But all is not well on Argus: Saul is in a coma after being shot by an assassin and his underlings can't quite decide what to do save the station.Unlike its predecessor, Zero Point feature a real challenge for its protagonists: they may have stolen a giant space craft, but they're also being pursued by something larger and nastier and more heavily armed, whilst at the same time they have to come to terms with the unavailability of the guiding intelligence that forged them all into something like a crew. It also features a wonderfully over the top villain the form of Serene Galahad; someone whose exaggerated misanthropy and ruthless desire to champion all non-human life is presumable intended as a satirical take on voluntary human extinction — the catch being that Galahad doesn't believe in the voluntary part!
