Review – Neal Asher’s Runcible Universe – The Agent Cormac Series
• Gridlinked – ISBN: 0-765-34905-1
• The Line of Polity – ISBN: 0-330-48435-4
• Brass Man – ISBN: 0-330-41159-4
• Polity Agent – ISBN: 1-4050-5498-0
All books published by Tor (http://www.tor-forge.com/)
Rather than reviewing a single book, I thought I’d do something different and review an entire series. Partly because in order to really enjoy the books you need to read them in the proper order. Partly because the author is really telling one giant story in multiple volumes and so in a way this counts as a review of a single work.
Synopsis:
Centuries in the future the Human Polity is ruled by superhuman Artificial Intelligences (because humans cannot be trusted), people can step across interstellar distances using the “runcible” a space warping transport gate that provides instantaneous travel, and humanity is starting to diverge into a variety of different forms due to genetic modifications, body mods, and direct neural interfaces and augmentations that can enhance intelligence and allow people to merge their minds directly with computers. Humans work in partnership with Golems, humanoid (mostly) sapient robots who, while not as smart as the ruling AIs are still rather a lot more capable than humans. To date there are various artifacts of past alien races but only one recorded instance of contact with an alien intelligence, which went very strangely.
Set against the ever expanding Polity are the Separatists, humans who claim that they are fighting for humanities “freedom” against the enslaving AIs, but who seem to spend most of their time committing acts of terrorism against civilians, torturing and killing people they don’t like (often other Separatists), and otherwise doing little to actually convince anyone that life under them would be more desirable than life under AI control. The Polity mostly only “Subsumes” worlds voluntarily (although it can make exceptions if there is a reason to do so, as well as having a strong influence on worlds associating with it) and worlds have even seceded from the Polity at various times (although the resulting chaos caused by humans attempting to rule themselves usually leads to a rapid return to the fold).
The law enforcement and covert ops arm of the Polity is Earth Central Security (ECS) and its foremost agent is Ian Cormac. Cormac is something of a combination of the James Bond type secret agent, military commander, and missionary for the cause. He is driven, ruthless, and unbending in the face of adversity but also somewhat troubled both by the occasionally enigmatic pronouncements of the AI and the equally enigmatic pronouncements of the one alien contact that the Polity has had and in which Cormac played a pivotal role. Unusually for Earth Central forces he is virtually unaugmented or altered except for his “gridlink”, an implanted direct neural interface that allows him to communicate directly with AIs and various other devices, control his bodies functions consciously, and write useful computer programs in his head to control both his mind, body, and external hardware if required. Unfortunately for Cormac, a side effect of the gridlink is a loss of humanity, limiting its use for most people to about 10 years. Cormac has had his for some 12 years and the effects have finally reached the point that Earth Central (the primary AI that rules the Polity) orders it turned off. Which makes Cormac’s life rather more complicated as Gridlinked (the first book in the series) gets going.
There has been a runcible malfunction on the world of Samarkand, essentially destroying that world (runcible travel involves rather a lot of energy and if something goes wrong the results can be…spectacular). Earth Central orders Cormac to investigate just as his cover is being blown during an anti-Separatist covert ops mission on the world of Cheyne III. Cormac kills one of the Separatist leaders and escapes but not before the leader’s brother, Arian Pelter, swears vengeance and sets out to find and kill Cormac.
Most of the rest of the book involves Cormac’s struggle with the loss of his gridlink while trying to investigate the event on Samarkand, the efforts of Pelter to find Cormac and assemble the forces to kill him (including using a mad Golem known as Mr. Crane), and indications that there is third party influencing events in the Polity and outside it. Things come to a head as Cormac and his associates learn that the accident on Samarkand was not and was probably caused by the vast alien entity known as Dragon which Cormac had encountered years before and which was thought to have been destroyed at the culmination of that encounter. Dragon it turns out is very much alive (although somewhat altered) and still very much interested in Cormac. Several climactic battle scenes later Pelter and his forces are dead, Dragon has been defeated and perhaps destroyed again, and there is First Contact with a new type of alien with indications that the future is going to be very interesting. Which takes us to books II and III in the series.
The next book of the Agent Cormac series is set some years after Gridlinked although many of the characters introduced in the first book are seen again here. The Line of Polity opens as Cormac and a strike force are attacking a Separatist base on an alien world to rescue the “bio-phsicist” Skellor who has been kidnapped (or so they believe). The reality turns out to be rather different.
Skellor , it turns out, is working with the Separatists, not because he agrees with their cause but because he finds Polity notions of morality and ethics in the pursuit of knowledge annoyingly restrictive and seeks to bypass them. During the resulting battle and its aftermath we learn that Skellor has gained access to an ancient alien device known as a “Jain node”. The Jain have been extinct for millions of years but during their heyday they apparently moved suns and planets and developed a nanotechnology that vastly outstrips the abilities of the Polity. A Jain node encapsulates that entire technology and all of its abilities in a ‘seed’ about the size of a chicken’s egg. A sapient being who takes a Jain node into their body is transformed into an entity of incredible power in their own right if they can control it. And Skellor has the means to control. He has linked his mind with an AI, a process that augments intelligence to superhuman levels (the core technology of the Polity, the runcible gate, was invented by such a union) but that is ultimately fatal for both the human and the AI. But with the Jain technology permeating his body Skellor can prevent this. The results of this union are both impressive and disturbing.
In short order, Skellor escapes the Polity although Cormac is determined to find him again. However, Cormac is diverted to investigate an apparent nano-attack on a Polity space station which bears troubling similarities to the attack that destroyed the runcible on Samarkand years before and which is described in Gridlinked. He and his team are involved with this investigation as well as trying to locate Skellor and are traveling on the ECS dreadnought Occam Razor when they once again encounter the alien Dragon (thought to be destroyed twice now). Dragon is injured and drifting in space but the Occam Razor is able to attach it to the hull and continue its journey. But then things get complicated.
Skellor (who stowed away on the ship during the attack on the Separatist base) attacks and takes over the entire ship, killing its captain and controlling AI both. He attempts to kill Cormac and his fellows but they escape with the help of Dragon. Undeterred Skellor takes the Occam Razor and after some delay seeks to follow, with both parties ending up in the Separatist colony system of Masada. Masada is a thoroughly unpleasant place, with a ruling religious hierarchy living in orbital habitats and a slave population of humans living on the planetary surface where they work various farming projects and dodge the planets voracious lifeforms.
Cormac and his party arrive at Masada first and with some help from Dragon (who appears to die yet again) manage to get down to the planetary surface and into hiding. Shortly thereafter Skellor appears, wipes out or enslaves the ruling orbital population, and sets out to locate Cormac on the surface for the purpose of killing him as painfully as possible. After various adventures (during which humanity gains new allies from Dragon’s legacy) Cormac again manages to escape and leads Skellor into a trap that destroys the Occam Razor and apparently Skellor as well. But it is not to be.
In the third book, Brass Man, we learn that Skellor was not destroyed but only much reduced in capability. Discovered by an itinerant asteroid miner he escapes again and heads out in search of Dragon. Skellor is noticing some troubling behavior in the Jain technology that he has incorporated into himself and thinks that Dragon (as an example of alien technology itself) may be able to explain what is going on. Before setting out on his quest however, Skellor decides he needs some backup and heads to the world of Veridian. Veridian is the world from the first book, Gridlinked, where Arian Pelter and his mad Golem Mr. Crane were destroyed but Skellor is not one to let a little thing like death stop him. He locates and resurrects Mr. Crane and then sets out to find Dragon.
While this is going on Cormac and his fellows (who have been in quarantine for a year along with entire solar systems where Skellor operated) learn of his survival and escape and set out to locate him again. Ultimately they track him to the previously unknown world of Cull where he has gone seeking Dragon. Cull is a primitive world, colonized centuries before by an early FTL starship crewed by a combination of humans and human tweaks adapted to live on the planet. Centuries after the initial colonization there is a low tech but rapidly advancing civilization that seeks to develop the means to get back into space and into the orbiting colony ship that was abandoned above.
Trapped on Cull by the crash of his spacecraft and determined not to be taken by Cormac who he knows must be close behind, Skellor sets out to enslave the population and transform them into hostages and servants to get him off the planet and away. At first it seems that Cormac will successfully capture (or more likely kill) him anyway but then a new wrinkle develops. Rogue AIs, who think that the Polity’s partnership with humanity is a bad job attack and seek to deal with Skellor to gain access to Jain technology themselves. Things start to get complicated.
In the end Dragon (actually yet another aspect of the original being) manifests once again and helps Cormac to defeat the rogue AIs. Skellor tries to escape using the ancient colony ship but is defeated by a combination of bad luck, continuing odd behavior from his Jain technology (which is disturbingly showing increasing signs of having an agenda of its own), and the manifestation of new abilities in Cormac even the Polity agent is surprised to discover. Skellor is defeated and this time, instead of being destroyed, a segment of Dragon is actually captured.
The final segment of the series to date, Polity Agent, picks up just after the end of Brass Man. This time however events are taking on a greater scope. A Polity Outlink Station, essentially a traveling border outpost that slowly expands the sphere of Polity space, receives a signal from 800 years in the future and the general vicinity of the . It seems that the runcibles that allow instantaneous travel across space can also send things across time (although doing this is horrifically dangerous). In response to the incoming signal the station and the Polity Earth Central AI prep the station for incoming travelers and then open a transport gate across 800yrs and over 150,000 light-years to one of the Magellanic clouds. And people come through, chased by something very much not human.
After the crisis, Ian Cormac is sent in to interview the people who came through the gate, survivors of an expedition to the homeworld of the Maker, the alien entity discovered at the end of the first book in the series, Gridlinked. The Polity had decided to send an expedition to return the Maker to its home civilization in the Small Magellanic Cloud. The trip would take over 800 years to accomplish even with Polity hyperdrive but the crew would spend the time in cold sleep and was chosen from those who liked the idea of such an adventure. However, when the ship arrived in the Cloud it discovered that the Maker civilization was destroyed, consumed by what appears to be Jain technology. It seems that the Makers had encountered and fought against infestation by Jain technology millennia ago but had then seemed to master it and use it to advance their own civilization, among other things creating the biological probe that would eventually be called Dragon. Turns out they were wrong.
It seems that Jain technology, in particular Jain nodes, is actually a sort of trap designed to destroy technological civilizations. In the normal course of things it gives individuals and cultures enormous power, prompting them to use it more and more. But then it also replicates, producing more Jain nodes and causing the host to spread them as far as possible before the ‘seeding’ of the nodes causes the host’s destruction. The Makers knew this but thought they had bypassed the technologies function to their own advantage. And when they sent an expedition to the Milky Way they brought some of the ‘normal’ nodes with them (it seems the Maker’s intentions were rather less than benign). Skellor somehow gained one of the nodes. But there are others that appear to be turning up and Earth Central wants them found and wants to know what is going on. And Ian Cormac is on the case.
Through the rest of the book we watch as Cormac and his team work to track down the infiltration of Jain nodes into human civilization. We learn that there are other elements at work beyond the Makers, and we see the results of other Jain nodes being put to use. A fourth and final(?) aspect of Dragon emerges and contacts the Polity. It all culminates in a massive climax that ends with the Polity learning it just may not be the biggest kid on the block anymore and a promise that the future is about to get very interesting.
OA Relevance: High:
Asher’s Runcible Universe, and the Cormac novels in particular is pure space opera and makes no attempt to be a hard science series. At the same time a lot of the elements contained in OA are found here. There are superhuman AIs ruling humanity, directl neural links, humans altered into various new species either to adapt to new environments (think OA Tweaks) or for the sake of fashion. There is even mention of Singularity, although the AIs of the Polity seem to have said Thanks, But No Thanks to the notion.
The best way I can think to describe Asher’s work is as being something like Banks’ Culture universe or the OA universe but much less cerebral and much more action packed. Readers who would like the Culture or OA more if they had more action will be thrilled. Writers who want to appeal to those readers should treat this whole series as a learning experience and take pointers appropriately. The action and interesting characters aren’t generally dependent on the science in the story and the same principles could be carried to OA (while still maintaining the hard science outlook) with relatively little trouble.
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly:
I find the Runcible Universe and this series in particular great fun and a must read. After reading Gridlinked, I wondered for some time if Asher would ever write a sequel and after learning about the other novels, I immediately ordered them all from Amazon and then lost lots of sleep reading them one right after the other. The characters are interesting, the storyline is fairly compelling, and the OA-esque elements make it all the better.
Now all that said I do have some issues. Asher is writing space opera here and by tradition space opera bad guys are supposed to be Bad. But Asher takes this to such extremes that his villains often come off as raving psychopaths rather than believable people. They also have issues with not being able to shoot straight (at least where Cormac and the other principle characters are concerned) and with being so obsessed with getting Cormac and making him suffer before dying that they miss perfectly good opportunities to just kill him and be done with it. But what the heck, it’s worked in space opera and elsewhere (pick a James Bond movie, any James Bond movie) for decades.
Also, as mentioned previously this is not a hard SF series. There are all the standard tropes: hyper-drives, artificial and anti-gravity, force-fields, and hand-held ray guns of various levels of destructiveness and so on. As mentioned the series makes no claim to be hard-SF and the tropes are standard ones (but occasionally with a nice twist), easily forgiven in the face of a good story. What is perhaps more troubling are those points where I almost got the feeling that Asher was on the verge of losing control of his story or not keeping track of his own rules.
The biggest example of this is with his hyperdrive. In Gridlinked it is described as requiring a ship to get up to a certain speed before being activated and as leaving ships moving at a large fraction of light-speed when they exit ‘underspace’ from which they then have to slow down. Yet in later scenes in the other books ships either require minimal speed up to go FTL or need none at all or drop out of hyperdrive practically in planetary orbit and with little or no need to slow down. And Asher occasionally seems to want to put life-bearing planets around stars chosen more for dramatic effect than scientific plausibility. Basically, my feeling is if you’re going to violate science as we know it, at least be consistent about it. Here and there the Runcible Universe fails that test.
The good news is that Asher also appears to be growing as a writer as he progresses through the books. His villains in the later books actually start to have an agenda beyond just being evil, and there is a growing list of characters whose ultimate disposition and fate is not a foregone conclusion from the moment you meet them. And if there is a bit of a disconnect between the science in the first book and the later books, after the initial shock of transition Asher seems to settle down more and be fairly consistent or at least leaves the door open to the possibility that the difference is due to advances in ship design or something.
Overall Rating: Great Fun and a Good Read:
As long as you go into it prepared to forgive the author having some lapses, you’ll really enjoy this series and have a hard time putting it down. Recommended.
More about the author, Todd Drashner, here.