Tuesday, May 02, 2017

Infinity Engine (Transformation #3) (Polity) ★★★★☆


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Title: The Infinity Engine
 Series: Polity: Transformation #3
 Author: Neal Asher
 Rating: 4 of 5 Stars
 Genre: SF
 Pages: 575
 Format: Digital Edition





Synopsis:

The End Game is in sight. Penny Royal, that black AI that nobody can seem to predict, control or even understand, continues to move the players like chess pieces.

Prador and Humanity move together as the Atheter makes it clear that it won't be kept on Masada. The Brockle is convinced that it is destined to take Penny Royal's place. There are a lot of players, a lot of threads and Penny Royal weaves them altogether with a Black Hole.

And pretty much becomes a god and watches the end of the universe and it's beginning and it tries to figure out how to stop the loop.



My Thoughts:

I thought this was the best of the trilogy. With various threads coming together, it is easier to understand what is actually going on. And the ending is the wry humor I expect from Asher.

The one thing I didn't care for was Asher's continued needling of religion. In several cases anyone who is religious is compared to a mentally ill person who obviously can't think straight. I've also realized that Asher always makes any Separatists idiotic douchebags just to show how awesome it is to always bow to a greater central authority. I spit on that. He continually makes his point [with battle axe bluntness sometimes] about how powerful the Polity AI's are and how much the humans really NEED them to run things. But this whole trilogy was about how poorly the AI's DO handle things. They are not omniscient, all powerful beings. They're just as flawed as their creators and even “self” improvement leads to problems half the time. So Asher pretty much argues against the case he makes in the first place. So phrack Central Authority. It's called Responsibility.

The character that I liked the most this time around was Sverl, the prador turned AI with a golem body. How weird is that? But Sverl does a fantastic job of showing multiple points of view from one character, as he has aspects of Prador, AI and humanity, all rolled into one. I don't know what it is, but something about him just appealed to me.

I think that for whatever Asher writes next, I am going to wait to read the whole thing instead of reading them as they come out. There was too much going on for me to remember everything from book to book and I know that lessened my overall enjoyment.

★★★★☆







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