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Title: The Infinity Engine
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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