sawyl | 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.