Prador Moon

[sawyl]

Another recent read, this time Neal Asher's Prador Moon. Set in the Polity but a few hundred years before the events of the Cormac or Spatterjay novels, this novel fills in some of the details of the Prador War and, as a subplot, covers the violent past of the Occam Razor. Here are my thoughts:

The Polity have finally found another sentient species, the Prador, and, having exchanged long distance communications, a physical meeting has been arranged aboard Avalon station. Upon arrival, the giant crab-like Prador rather undiplomatically demand the surrender of the station and, when this is not forthcoming, they chop the ambassador in half and go on a rampage, eating humans left, right and centre.

Watching the unfolding events on Avalon, Moria Salem, a senior technician on the Trajeen cargo runcible project, gets such a shock that she assumes her newly fitted cerebral augmentation is malfunctioning. When she attempts to follow this up with Sylac, her doctor, she quickly discovers that he has done flit and she's drawn the attention of the Trajeen AI. After interviewing her, the AI quickly discovers her enhanced mental capacity and starts assigning her more and more work on the cargo project.

As the Prador war gets underway in earnest, security monitor Jebel Krong and his crew, all bearing old grudges from Avalon station, follow the track of the ship that kick started the war in an attempt to get even with its captain, Immanence. Eventually, the path of the ship leads them to Trajeen, where they discover anti-earth separatists in league with the Prador and, with the assistance of Moria, come up with a plan to deal with the Captain, once and for all.

Prador Moon is a great novel, packed full of vicious exuberance. The Prador are really impressive villains: their savage delight in eating anything that moves, their paranoid and bullying society, their enthusiasm for slavery, human experimentation and more, all of which they seem to carry out with great relish. The part of the plot involving Moria and the Trajeen runcible is very satisfying, with the tension ratcheting up and up, only to resolve at the very last moment. All in all, most satisfying.