Dark Diamond

Over the years I’ve recommended a number of Neal Asher’s books. Although recently I haven’t found his stuff as compelling. Dark Diamond represents something of a return to form for him: epic space opera.

The story takes place in his Polity universe, one where Earth and its interstellar colonies are ruled by AI. The AIs ostensibly act in humanity’s best interests, but in a way that humans don’t always agree with. And apparently what’s in humanity’s best interests aren’t always in the best interests of individual humans. On top of that, not all of the AIs are benevolent. So we’re not talking about a utopia.

Not that there aren’t benefits. Faster than light technology exists, along with runcible gates allowing instant teleportation between many planets. And many humans have memplants installed in their brain, recording their mind. If they die but the memplant survives, a new body can be grown around the memplant. In many cases, people have backups registered at soulbanks, which upon receiving a death certificate, can resurrect the person back to where they were as of the backup. And everyone has nanosuites which work to keep them healthy, including against things that would quickly kill a baseline human.

Still, it’s a dangerous universe. There is an alien race called the Prador, an aggressive species the Polity fought a war with, but now a detente exists. Between Polity and Prador space is The Graveyard, a region of worlds desolated from the war, and where a lot of the stories in this universe take place. There are also ancient alien technologies lying around which are traps, including engineered viruses that, while providing strength and vitality, also threaten a person’s humanity.

Captain Blite is a survivor from the machinations of a rogue AI named Penny Royal. After seemingly turning over a new leaf and correcting many of the wrongs it had perpetrated, Penny Royal entered a black hole to reach the Omega Point and transcend the universe. But it left a small piece of itself with Blite, a piece of its black crystalline form, a dark diamond.

In the years afterward, Blite starts a successful company: Penny Transport. Well off, he decides to take a vacation. While on vacation, a woman steals his diamond. Distraught, Blite prepares to find her. But she ends up returning it a few days later, apparently forced to do so by the diamond itself.

Blite later discovers that any time he is killed, the diamond rewinds time a few minutes, preserving his memory of the minutes leading up to his death, and allowing him to make different decisions and survive. If he doesn’t, the diamond rewinds again to an earlier time, and keeps doing so until he survives.

Despite something about the diamond making Polity AIs incurious about it, the time anomalies get noticed by them and other parties. This interest in turn attracts the interest of Ian Cormac, another character from earlier books set in the Polity universe. Cormac used to be a Polity secret agent, but gained an ability to teleport and other superhuman capabilities, and began acting as a watchdog of sorts to keep the Polity AIs in line.

Cormac warns Blite that someone is trying to kill him. When one of the attempts results in mass casualties and Blite’s body having to be substantially rebuilt, he decides it’s time to take matters into his own hands. Escaping in one of his ships with a self picked team, he begins a quest to find out what’s going on. His first stop is to find the woman who had previously tried to steal the diamond.

At the same time, Cormac assembles his own team to catch up with Blite, provide support, and ensure that the Polity AIs aren’t abusing the situation. However, when a teleport goes wrong, he finds himself in a mysterious location and suddenly in a fight for his life.

As in Asher’s earlier trilogies, there are several viewpoint characters, four humans, an AI, and eventually an alien. I’ve never found Asher’s characters particularly vivid, but usually he makes up for it with lots of exotic viewpoints. We get a little of that with the AI and alien, but it seems a bit thin this time, making the sameness of the human characters more conspicuous.

But Asher’s strengths are in the ideas he plays with and the action he soaks into his stories. There are numerous fight sequences and a few space battles. This time he also mixes in time travel, with some references to the post-Polity future he’s covered in other recent stories.

Having read E. E. “Doc” Smith since the last time I read Asher, it’s now clear that he’s writing in the old school space opera tradition, albeit with much better writing and more of a noir take. This isn’t hard sci-fi, but a fun fantasy inspired by science. It’s an enthusiastic romp through what we’d like to be possible someday, whether ultimately plausible or not. His books, while not perfect, end up as a guilty pleasure for me.

The inclusion of Ian Cormac reminds me that I’ve only read the first book in the Cormac series. With a lot of references to events in earlier books, I probably need to rectify that before the second book in the new trilogy comes out.

So if space opera with a lot of action and adventure are your thing, this is worth checking out. Although if you haven’t read Asher’s Transformation trilogy yet, you might want to start there.