I’ve described Neal Asher’s Polity universe many times. It’s a future interstellar civilization ruled by AIs, who took over in a basically bloodless “Quiet War”, but who seem to rule humanity more or less benignly, providing a society where everyone is immortal, if they choose to be. Although as anyone who’s read the books knows, the “more or less” here is doing a lot of work. The AIs aren’t without faults, and some of them can be pretty bad apples.
The Technician is a standalone novel, but it takes place on a planet first introduced in the second Agent Cormac book: The Line of the Polity. In that book, the planet Masada is just outside of Polity territory (just beyond “the line”) and ruled by the Theocracy, a brutal religious regime that severely represses the human population on the planet, ruling from their space colonies in orbit.
There is a rebellion, which is literally an underground, existing in tunnels beneath the planet surface. Much of the population, hearing rumors about how much better Polity life is, would love for the Polity to come in and take over. However, the Polity will only come in if at least eighty percent of the population votes for it to do so. Eventually events in that novel lead to recorded votes reaching that threshold. There is also a Jain (ancient evil technology) infestation, which leads to other reasons for the Polity to come in, but the Theocracy is destroyed even before they arrive.
The Technician takes place about twenty years after the rebellion. The central figure is Jeremiah Tombs, who was a Proctor under the Theocracy, one of the society’s religious police. During the rebellion, Tombs was attacked by a hooder, a large worm-like creature, one of the planet’s most vicious predators. But the hooder that attacked him is known as “the Technician”, a particularly large albino hooder, which has a habit of carving statues out of the bones of its victims.
Tombs is the first person to ever survive a hooder attack, but it initially leaves him severely mutilated and insane. The Polity takes care of him, but withholds full treatment when it is realized that the Technician has physically modified his brain, downloading something into it, although eventually his caregiver is allowed to regrow his face. The early parts of the story are Tombs regaining his sanity, struggling with his faith and what the world has revealed about it, and learning what the Technician has put in him.
Tombs is eventually pushed on his path by Amistad, an old Polity war drone, who has an interest in insane minds. Amistad has an assistant, an AI named Penny Royal. Penny Royal was a sadistically insane AI who attempted to load an alien Atheter mind into the body of a gabbleduck, which resulted in it getting attacked by an alien mechanism designed to ensure that there are no Atheter minds. Amistad found Penny Royal and recuperated it, excising the insane “eighth state” which was making it insane.
The Atheter were an ancient alien race whose home planet was the one currently known as Masada. The Atheter, were infected by Jain technology, and found themselves fighting endless civil wars. In other to end it, the Atheter committed racial suicide, wiping out their higher order intelligence, leaving their descendants as apparently simple minded creatures on the planet, now known as “gabbleducks” due to their tendency to babble human words nonsensically.
The hooders turn out to be bioengineered war machines, who were tasked with ensuring that nothing remained of a gabbleduck after they die, resulting in the particularly gruesome way the hooders attack and eat their prey. The Technician is a particularly large and powerful hooder, which is theorized to be the original prototype for the species. There is evidence that it has existed for two million years, since the Atheter eliminated their own intelligence.
And the mechanism that attacked Penny Royal is the one that was built by the Atheter to eliminate their intelligence and to continue ensuring it remains eliminated. As Tombs begins his journey, something reawakens the mechanism in deep space. It senses something happening on Masada, the old Atheter homeworld, and begin traveling there, with Polity war vessels monitoring its approach.
There is also political intrigue on Masada. Many of the old revolutionaries are not happy with the general amnesty that the Polity imposed, and continue to hunt down, torture, and kill the old Proctors and other Theocracy officials. Tombs is the most prominent of this category still alive. As he begins his journey, these groups make plans to take him down.
So there’s a lot going on in this book. As usual with an Asher book, I enjoyed it. But also as usual, I have my gripes. The pacing often feels slow, particularly in the early parts, which for me detracts from the experience. And Asher continues the trope where characters who are able to make backups of themselves haven’t, apparently just to provide a feeling of jeopardy when they get in trouble. But the characters in this book feel a bit more distinct than in most of his other books, which helps.
It’s also interesting to see Penny Royal in this book as a supporting side character. That AI goes on to become the central figure of the Dark Intelligence trilogy, which I read many years ago, and only have a hazy memory of at this point. (I’d consider rereading it, but Asher’s prose is just too much work.)
This book is a standalone, so you could read it without having read any of Asher’s other Polity books. However, you’ll understand a lot more about what’s going on if you’ve first read The Line of the Polity. And of course it’s now clear to me I would have understood Dark Intelligence better if I’d read this one first.
Asher’s not for everyone. But if you enjoy old fashioned space opera, with FTL, titanic weapons, and ancient evils, with some modern concepts thrown in, he’s worth checking out.
If you’ve read it, let me know what you think. Any recommendations on similar books to check out? Or reading anything else interesting lately?
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@selfawarepatterns.com looks like it's currently free to hear on audible. I'll check it out.
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Hope you enjoy it!
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I liked this too! (Ha!)
With your retelling some of it came back. But there’s Another story that I think I recall mentioning… The Skinner, yeah, that’s one that I’d recommend if you haven’t read it. Something to do with sailing, I think.
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Thanks for the recommendation!
I actually started reading Orbus some years ago, and remember it being okay. But then I realized it was the third book in the Skinner trilogy, and so started the first book, and really just bounced off of it. Looking at the publication timeline, The Skinner is actually very early Asher, when his prose was particularly leaden (at least in my experience).
Although it might be worth trying the third book again and just powering though any gaps from skipping the earlier books. Maybe at some point.
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I noticed this post on my last visit but put off reading it until I read the book. Which I did at the end of October. I’ve been too busy since to drop back in until today.
I liked it a lot, but I’m really glad I happened to have just read The Line of Polity, and just as you say, it would be nice to read the Dark Intelligence trilogy again. Would make a lot more sense now.
I found it pretty gripping even so and burned through it in just over a day. There is something about Asher that I respond to more than I do Reynolds or Banks. Something to do, I think, with tone and the nature of his characters.
I’m still waiting for Gridlinked to become available and in frustration went on to read Brass Man, which I also greatly enjoyed. Mr. Crane is a neat character. But Cormac keeps making references to what happened in that first book, so I’m not going to read any more Cormac books until I read that one.
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Damn it, WordPress. It accepts HTML in the Reader but not in the blogs. And when you do comment in the blogs it wraps your comment in a bunch of cruft that I often end up going in and removing on comments others make on my blog.
If you would be so kind as to clean up the comment…
Why, oh why, is our technology still so chaotic after all these years? 🤬
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Yeah, WordPress commenting. Have to hate it. They’re responding to their competition on other fronts. I wish they’d get it together in this area.
No worries. I edited it. Let me know if I got anything wrong.
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Gridlinked must be pretty popular for it to be taking this long to become available. And I have to admit I went back to the Cormac series primarily to understand all the references Asher drops in Dark Diamond. The latter part of the Cormac series also shows the early history of characters in his Rise of the Jain series.
I can see you preferring Asher over Reynolds and Banks. I like Reynolds’ generally harder science but his stories are uneven. And Banks has a literary bent that I’m not always wild about. Asher seems more interested in producing straight commercial fiction. My only dig against Asher over the others is his characters often aren’t very vivid for me. Although the ones in this book, The Technician, seemed pretty fleshed out.
At some point I’ll probably try his Spatterjay series again. And there remain a few standalone books I’ll need to swing back around to eventually.
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I know what you mean about Banks. I read The Quarry and spent the whole book wondering when the SF would show up. It never did. The story was engaging enough but not really the sort of thing I’d pick to read.
I find myself hot and cold with Reynolds. I really liked the first one I read. House of Suns, I think it was. Thought I’d stumbled over another contemporary SF author I was going to devour. But then I found myself disengaged by both the verbosity and my reaction to some of his characters. But then I enjoyed Chasm City, so who knows. Asher, at least so far, is batting 1.000 with me.
Both Reynolds and Asher like cutting back and forth between plot threads, which can be very cinematic but also a bit jarring. We talked before about how ebooks often don’t capture whatever typography the printed version used to set off such changes.
Ever since you mentioned it, I’ve noticed how Asher does something start with a paragraph of description before mentioning the character(s) in the second paragraph. It feels like he does telegraph them. Many of his scenes end with a character’s quip or significant look or unexpected meeting. Then, boom, Asher takes you away.
It actually starts to get a little old after a while. I just don’t need minor cliffhangers every few pages.
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You have to be careful with Banks. He wrote a lot of non-SF fiction. Usually it was published under “Iain Banks”, where his SF was under “Iain M. Banks.” I’ve never tried his non-SF, and doubt I ever will. Like you, just not my cup.
Verbosity is something I struggle with for all these guys. I sometimes wonder if it’s a British thing, but some authors, like Charles Stross, don’t seem to have that issue. And there are verbose American authors too.
Asher’s propensity of starting scenes with lengthy description, without naming the characters, actually drives me nuts. Banks does it too. I can’t recall if Reynolds does. I get impatient fast if I don’t know why I should care about details I’m being fed. Asher’s books become more readable for me once he starts putting the viewpoint character’s name at the top of each scene. (Not sure when he started that. I know it was in place by Dark Intelligence.)
Yeah, the cliffhanger thing is the conventional wisdom about how each scene should end. But I agree that with Asher it often feels like he’s just tacking it on as an afterthought. I’m the same; as long as the overall story is compelling, I don’t need all those cliffhangers. And if the story isn’t compelling, I doubt the cliffhangers would help.
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