Shadow of the Scorpion

[sawyl]

Having concluded the Jain storyline of his Agent Cormac series of Polity novels, Neal Asher's The Shadow of the Scorpion jumps back in time to explore Cormac's childhood and early years. The result is a most enjoyable novel that really lets Asher fill out the character of one of his main protagonists in a way that really works.

Ian Cormac grew up during the Prador War, his mother an archeologist and his absent father a soldier, dispatched to some remote part of the galaxy to fight on the front lines. Naturally, Cormac — he insists, aged eight, that he no longer wants to be called Ian — signs up to join Earth Central Security and ships out to fight the enemy. Dispatched along with his sqaud-mates to Hagren, an Earth-like world, to guard a downed Prador dreadnought, he quickly realises that the AIs who rule the Polity have goals that go far beyond merely watching a derelict hulk.

The narrative of the Shadow of the Scorpion is divided between Cormac's present experiences as a soldier and a set of formative interludes from his childhood, which head up each chapter. These interludes give the impression of an untroubled, isolated and rather insular child who isn't greatly touched by the events around him. But they also suggest, thanks to a series of mysterious encounters with a scorpion-shaped drone, that he might not be the most reliable of narrators, at least as far as his childhood might be concerned.

The structure is further split, with the first half covering Cormac's experiences as a regular soldier on Hagren and the second following him as he is assigned to an elite Sparkind military unit. It is his recruitment into the Sparkind that causes him to start to question his own early experiences, in an attempt to come to terms with his childhood and to discover why his memories are haunted by a scorpion drone. All of which goes quite some way to explaining why Cormac later shows up an emotionally ruin, unable to relate to other human beings, at the start of Gridlinked, whilst also allowing two dramatic climaxes, one mid-book and one at the end, rather than one big finish.