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Title: Jenny Trapdoor
Series: Polity #25
Author: Neal Asher
Rating: 4 of 5 Stars
Genre: SF
Pages: 122
Words: 54K
The paper version of this book is about 170pages. My ebook version calculates at about 125pages. So why it is emblazoned as a “novella” is beyond me. That’s one of my pet peeves and will stay so until publishers stop Sandersonizing everything and calling everything below 850pages a “novella”. I blame a LOT of other authors as well, but they just aren’t as well known. So Sandersonization it is.
I enjoyed this much more than the previous Polity book, War Bodies. This is fully standalone and I don’t think you need ANY familiarity with Asher’s previous Polity stories to understand what’s going on. Having that knowledge will make this better, but it won’t detract if you don’t.
Penny Royal, the Black AI, turns a dead starship captain into a giant spider drone and drops her off onto a Prador controlled world (Prador are giant, xenophobic space crabs that want to kill us, period) so she can fulfill her wish of getting revenge against the Prador for killing her, her ship and everyone aboard it. Of course, everything with Penny Royal is a multi-edged knife that is sure to cut your groin open while you just look at said knife. So we get the lead up and then Jenny’s time as a Prador killing machine and then once Penny Royal “goes good” (as much as any AI can anyway, which is all chronicled in the Polity: Transformation trilogy) her own reclamation.
This wasn’t anything groundbreaking from Asher, but at this point, I don’t really want that. I want what has worked in the past and I get a ton of it here. Prador dying in horrific detail, psychological horror as Jenny merges with a trapdoor spider that’s been implanted in her head. Yeah, all that good gross Neal Asher stuff we’ve come to expect and love.
I will take a shorter story like this any time if it means he keeps pumping them out.
★★★★☆
From the Publisher
During the prador-human war the Dark Intelligence, the AI Penny Royal, fractured and went rogue. The manipulations of this insane and incredibly dangerous intelligence were grotesque. It granted wishes that were deals with the devil, and transformed its victims into chimeras of the technological and the organic. Hunted throughout the war and beyond, it finally found redemption and apotheosis, as it moved itself beyond time.
Though Jenny is terrified of the trapdoor spider that has taken up residence in her ship, the arrival of the war in her home system soon dismisses it from her mind. But the spider returns in a way she could never have conceived. . .
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