Dark Intelligence

[sawyl]

After finishing the fantastical The Goblin Emperor, I opted for some from the opposite end of the SFF spectrum in the form of Neal Asher's Dark Intelligence. A return to the Polity universe after a short gap, the book focuses on a resurrected military scientist and a crime boss who both find themselves caught up in a plot devised by a crazed artificial intelligence called Penny Royal — who, I think, first appeared, in The Technician back in 2010.

Dark Intelligence features many of of Asher's trademarks: plenty of visceral body-shock horror, weird biological creations and bizarre eco-systems, and, as ever, he excels in creating convincing if unlikeable post-humans. But the principal focus on the book, in keeping with the series title, is that of transformations: Faustian pacts that turn people into killing machines; alien monsters who find themselves gradually becoming human; people whose personalities and memories have been transformed, changing them into something new; and damaged artificial intelligences who want to escape their past conditioning and become something new.

While it's obviously not a good point to dive in to the series — a casual familiarity with the events of the Cormac and Spatterjay novels is assumed at many points — it's an excellent and enjoyable addition to the canon.