Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing

And so to Neal Asher's Jupiter War, the final novel in the Owner Sequence, which follows on directly where Zero Point left off. Thus the increasingly post-human Alan Saul has gained himself some breathing space by pounding the warship Scourge into something approaching scrap and is using the time to rescue his sister, Varalia Delex from the remains of the Committee's mission to Mars

Having come up with a way to recruit or repurpose the Mars mission crew, Saul uses on his sister's spaceship designing expertise to begin an aggressive program to convert Argus from an unwieldy space station into the first proper starship. In concert with Var and Hannah Neumann Saul introduces a series of reforms, allowing a series of grey markets and encouraging competition between the human and robot teams of workers. With everything proceeding smoothly, Saul moves the station closer to the sun in order to make use of all the free solar energy. But by doing so, he risks exposing himself to his enemy: Chairwoman Serene Galahad, Earthy's psychopathic dictator.

For Galahad too has been strengthening her position back on Earth. Having set the ambitious Professor Calder the task of coming up with a way to counter Jasper Rhine's implementation of an Alcubierre drive, Galahad finds her star pupil has outdone himself: not only does Earth now have three ships capable of engaging with Saul, but they also have a particularly nasty weapon that combines the ability to knock out a warp bubble with a thermo-nuclear warhead. Observing a test firing of Galahad's weapon, Saul retreats to Jupiter to continue work on his ship using power from the Io flux tube, while Earth prepares the warships Vision, Command and Fist for a strike against their enemy.

I'm not quite sure how I feel about Jupiter War. On the one hand I loved the big climactic ending and I enjoyed Serene Galahad in all her psychopathic glory — especially the way she believes, right up until her very sticky end, that nothing can happen to her because she's just too important and everyone around her is nothing but a pawn to be manipulated.

I also appreciated what Asher was trying to do with Alan Saul: to give an insight into the mind of a character who starts out a mere human genius and through his integration with technology becomes something completely post-human. As with in the Polity novels, Asher rejects the idea of a singularity, for although the major characters around Saul — principally Hannah and Var, who know him best — worry that he is going to take the arbitrary decision to exterminate all human life aboard Argus for the sake of improved efficiency, Saul actually finds that parts of his compassion and humanity are strengthened by his own post-humanism so that instead of wiping out the troublemakers, he engineers situations that allow some of them to redeem themselves through their own actions.

On the other hand, I had some doubts about the pacing — there's an awful lot on the engineering work required to convert the space station into a starship — and I thought the book suffered a little for dwelling a little too much on Saul's point of view and not showing enough from some of the other characters.

But despite my doubts, I slurped this down in a couple of enjoyable sittings. Asher has a real flair for a furniture chewing villains that somehow remain internally consistant and although his novels' politics don't generally match with mine, I think that's one of the reasons I have such a soft spot for them!