Asher is acceleration, getting better, faster and wittier and taking a place right next to the behemoths of Sci-Fi, especially space opera.
It´s how thAsher is acceleration, getting better, faster and wittier and taking a place right next to the behemoths of Sci-Fi, especially space opera.
It´s how the old ideas are carved to new forms, how they are mixed, combined and confronted with each other and how much is condensed in this amazing novel.
And the man is funny, probably just Banks, Scalzi, Hamilton, and some authors mix quick laughs with cool, pointy wit and badass comments and deeper humor, build on the perfectly constructed scenes, plotlines, confrontations, and dialogues. I would call his work an amalgam of the epic world-building of Hamilton, Scalzi's wit and Banks´ innuendos without any, for some audiences, hard to digest Hard-Sci elements or lengths.
The mixture of settings integrates elements of horror, fantasy and a cyberpunk-dystopian-middle age world and contrasts it in clear detail, what is always the sense of such constellations, duh, and switches between hardcore primitive to high techie beyond all categories.
My absolute favorite are my highly appreciated, close to beloved, elements of grey and green goo and alien technology. Seen and described, written on hundreds of pages of all popular Sci-Fi authors, the very detailed description of how assimilation, evolution, symbioses, parasitism, conflicts, etc. may arise out of an inner and outer plot mix of one or all of those technologies going haywire is always a pleasure to read. Reminds me of the transformation of one of Iain M Banks´ characters infested with the Melding Plague and one of Alastair Reynolds´ grey goo scenarios.
How much is enough is a tricky question in Sci-Fi and especially other Hard-Sci authors tend to both infodump, bore and overexert a general audience with too complex and too detailed descriptions, but Asher finds the perfect balance of understandable descriptions in developing settings without ever being static or boring. All Sci-Fi fans united, read this man if you ran out of series, this is Sci-Fi worldbuilding at it´s best!
The entry point of another great, complex space-opera series, Asher´s Polity universe, offers everything a Sci-Fi fan can wish for.
Like the behemothsThe entry point of another great, complex space-opera series, Asher´s Polity universe, offers everything a Sci-Fi fan can wish for.
Like the behemoths of the genre Hamilton, Scalzi, Banks, Reynolds, Simmons, etc., Asher has created an authentic, complex world, bursting with fresh, creative Sci-Fi ideas.
Especially interesting is the idea of the influence of human and alien AIs that are not just entities of their own, but may be open or even dependent on a second kind of evolution. They may, parallel to lonely learning, expanding and rewriting and optimizing their own code and added machinery and production capacity, unite and fuse with aliens and humans in different grades of severity.
This can be symbiotic, parasitic, psychotic, traumatic, etc. for both involved, depending on how much feelings an AI can perceive and control. The motive or programming of the AI to share its immense capacity with something as slow as an alien or human opens up the option to describe both the AIs and the persons' main plot goals. Both parties could, with or without consent or noticing it, assimilate, manipulate, destroy, help, etc. each other. Does the machine become humanoid or does the soft shell become like an AI and what is the better model, if it is even possible to objective point the finger on the more attractive lifestyle?
This concept is a fresh, unspent idea and could find use in Social Sci-Fi, for instance with different, competing transhumanist concepts like a technocratic, cold, more machine than cyborg woman slowly getting interested in a Gaia-hyping, bioengineered, eco-friendly terraforming Psiguy. It would be an interesting exaggeration of gender stereotypes when the male and female roles are reversed and caricatured.
Mario the lone bookwolf
>
Books:
asher-neal
(3)
Loading...
