 |
Gridlinked | Rating | |
| C | |||
| Neal Asher | |||
| Series | Related Books | ||
| N/A | N/A | ||
In the far future, mankind has spread through much of the galaxy. The Polity's AIs rule most of humanity in a kind of benevolent dictatorship, and AI-controlled "runcibles" permit instantaneous transport anywhere. Keeping the peace is Earth Central Security. And Ian Cormac is perhaps their best agent. But he's been gridlinked - hooked into the AI network for instant communication and information access - for thirty years. It's robbed him of much of his humanity and blew his cover on the latest mission. Now, with his gridlink terminated, he must investigate a runcible disaster that eliminated the entire population of a frontier planet. How could this happen? Was it sabotage, and by whom? At the same time, the remnants of that blown mission are gathering their forces to take their revenge.
Asher does two things right, here, that are not so easy to pull off. The first is that he casually tosses about terms that are not immediately explained. Done poorly, it confuses readers with words that obviously should mean something but mean nothing at all to the reader. Asher avoided that, and instead they give the story a real sense of being set in the future and not some incremental advance on the present. This is not the present day with the addition of teleportation. These words and phrases are common to the setting; explaining them would have been unnatural. It works because understanding just what chainglass is, for example, isn't critical at any point, yet it's obvious from context how it is used. If that's not good enough, every chapter starts with an excerpt from one of several texts. Through them, nearly all the esoteric terms get explained by the end of the book.
The second, and far greater, achievment is in Archer's characters. For one thing, they are nearly all distinct without resorting to extremes. It comes across in actions, preferences, and ocassionally speech. But they never fall into roles. There is no "funny one" or "mean one" or "gun nut." It's all in a normal range, but it's a range. Secondly, I could really tell Cormac was having trouble especially at first, relearning how to think for himself, how to interact with other people again, how to be human and not a machine in a flesh chassis. And his change back to normality was gradual, as well. There was no point where he suddenly got it, suddenly realized exactly what he was doing wrong and afterwards he was a normal person again. It was very well done.
But Asher also did two things wrong. The first was the long, long lead up to a confrontation. Cormac's antithesis, Arian Pelter, is followed on his own story path, and it takes most of the book before they meet up again. A proper villain needs to interact more with the hero than just at the very start and end of the book. It kind of makes sense if you think of Pelter as a second protagonist with his own goals, opposite ones from Cormac's. But that's not how he was presented on the cover blurb, nor on the first few scenes we see him.
Secondly, the ending was confusing. The orchestrator of the disaster was punished, true, but it was never explained why the disaster was created in the first place. Nor was it ever shown how Cormac figured it out, or how he figured out how to punish the offender as he did. At the very least it could have been explained what this "Maker" is, and it's not.
I was all ready to give this a better grade. Most of the book deseves it. But the ending left me sour. That Cormac never explained things, never told anyone what he concluded and how, grated on me. Even in the epilogue, after it was all over and couldn't affect events. Even with his superior, for which "need to know" couldn't possibly apply. I've never liked not knowing, and I've never liked guessing when I could know for certain. Especially when there's so little information given to guess with. A page or two of exposition added at the end would have changed my opinion in a major way. As it is, I closed the cover with an angry grimace.
| By Title | By Author | By Rank |