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Title: Brass Man
Title: Brass Man
Series:
Polity: Agent Cormac #3
Author:
Neal Asher
Rating:
4 of 5 Stars
Genre:
SFF
Pages:
505
Format:
Digital Edition
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Synopsis: |
Skellor, that lovable rapscallion who just wants to kill Ian Cormac and destroy the Polity with Jain tech, is back! His personal infestation of jain seems to be out of control, so he digs up Mr Crane (the titular Brass Man) and starts looking for another Dragon sphere. Because sure as shooting, the Dragon knows all about the Jain tech.
Obviously the Polity can't have this,
so they send in Agent Cormac, again. His abilities are growing and it
would appear that he's on the path to becoming Horace Blegg Jr. He
tracks down Skellor to a small world that lost their Polity roots
hundreds of years ago. Skellor thinks it's a great place to hide,
which is what the Dragon thought too, until Skellor found it. Skellor
spreads jain tech willy-nilly to take over a bunch of people and
begins killing them. Cormac becomes his hostage and they all head out
to space. Where they have an encounter with a brown hole and Skellor
gets his and Cormac is rescued by a rogue AI. Another leg of this
book is about Rogue AI's who want the jain tech for themselves and
cause problems for everyone, including their daddy, who has to kill
some of them. Tough love baby.
Mr Cranes segments are all mixed up
memories from his inception to his present state. He was hexed with
some schizo software, stolen by rebels and loaded up with a killer's
memories and instincts. All served to break his ego into pieces and
he's been playing at trying to put himself together again. With the
help of Dragon, and an AI in the body of a vulture, he succeeds and
walks off into the sunset.
Finally, there is a storyline about 2
people from the little planet. One's a knight who is on a quest to
kill a dragon and the other is a young man who was going to rob him
until he realized what a badass the knight actually was. A mentor
storyline.
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My Thoughts:
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Asher likes AI's that are messed up and multiple personalities. That was the whole gist of his later Transformation trilogy that ended this year.
Anyway,
this was violent. Between jain tech & Skellor invading peoples
brains, Mr Crane's memories, Ian Cormac and monsters on the little
world, you run the full gamut of dismemberment to “light mist”
splatterification.
That
Skellor was a total psyche job. He made for a great villain though,
as he was just ruthlessly “bad” and there was no moral grey
areas. I like my badguys to be really despicable, the kind of badguy
who you can't help but root for their downfall. Skellor filled that
admirably. But with his ending up in a brown hole (I kind of glossed
over Asher's pseudo-science explanation of WHAT a brown hole is) I
hope Asher can come up with a suitably good Bad Guy for the final 2
books of the Agent Cormac series.
Jain tech and its completely destructive nature goes on, but that
type of threat needs a face to make it a villain.
Mr
Crane's storyline, while interesting, just didn't have the punch
you'd expect from being the Title of the Book. He seemed more like
the marinade of the story instead of the steak. And speaking of
marinade, that knight/mentor storyline. It had nothing to do with
this, except it took place on the small world (I am refusing to look
up its name because it is too small for me to care about), and they
overlapped with the big climactic ending with Skellor, Ian, Dragon
and the various AI's. If this book was an RPG (role playing game),
the knight's story would have been the backstory of a NPC (non player
character) who dies 2 minutes after you meet him. It filled up space
and allowed us a wider view of the little world, but it didn't
advance the story any.
While
I rated this the same as I did back in '10, I suspect I would have
rated it 4.5 back then and dropped it to 4 this time. A lot of my
attraction last time was the newness factor and with that gone, blood
and guts only gets you so far. Still thoroughly enjoyed it, but I
won't be raving about this book like I might have back then.
★★★★☆
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