Anyone who reads my reviews here at Green Man knows I really do love long SF series where characters and plot can develop at length as the author feels fit. Certainly Asher’s Polity series is one of those as it is now so sprawling that it has three separate series within it — Agent Cormac (Gridlinked, The Line of Polity, Brass Man, Polity Agent, and Line War), Spatterjay, (The Skinner, The Voyage of the Sable Keech, and now Orbus), and Polity (Prador Moon, Hilldiggers, and Shadow of the Scorpion), and let’s not overlook the collection of short stories called The Gabble and Other Stories which fills in some of the back story in the series in a highly entertaining manner. Well over five thousand pages of material written by Asher so far with no end in sight — bliss!
Orbus takes the Polity series in a slightly different direction, as the Prador society is at the heart of this tale – more about that in a minute. First, though, Tor UK has a nifty description of the novel that doesn’t give away too much so let’s quote it in full:
In charge of an old cargo spaceship, the Old Captain Orbus flees a violent and sadistic past, but he doesn’t know that the lethal war drone, Sniper, is a stowaway, and that the past is rapidly catching up with him. His old enemy the Prador Vrell, mutated by the Spatterjay virus into something powerful and dangerous, has seized control of a Prador dreadnought, murdering its crew, and is now seeking to exact vengeance on those who tried to have him killed. Their courses inexorably converge in the Graveyard, the border realm lying between the Polity and the Prador Kingdom, a place filled with the ruins left by past genocides and interplanetary war. But this is the home of the Golgoloth, monster to a race of monsters, the place where a centuries-long cold war is being fought. Meanwhile, the terrifying Prador King is coming, prepared to do anything to ensure Vrell’s death and keep certain deadly secrets buried …and somewhere out there something that has annihilated civilizations is stirring from a slumber of five million years. The cold war is heating up, fast.
I mentioned in my review of the The Mote in God’s Eye by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle that that novel ‘is really more about looking at a human society that is every bit as alien as the Moties.’ Even more than that civilization, Asher’s Polity humans are as far removed from us as we are from hunter-gathers of ten thousand years ago – human but not human as we define it since humanity has long transcended the frailties of both mind and body and even perhaps soul in ways that would appear god-like to us. Or perhaps akin to monsters too. But as alien as this human society is, the Prador are far more alien as described here in Prador Moon
However, researchers managed to work out some facts from the data returned. The Prador were creatures at home on both land and in the sea. The design of their ships and some nuances of their language indicated they might be exoskeletal, maybe insectile. They had not developed sophisticated AI, so it seemed likely they were highly individualistic, highly capable as individuals, and definitely somewhat paranoid in outlook. They communicated using sound, and the larger components of their sensorium were compatible with those of humans: their main senses probably being sight and hearing, though scanning of their ships’ hulls indicated their ability to see might stray into the infrared with some loss at the other end of the spectrum, and analysis of communications revealed hearing straying into the infrasonic. Their language, just by usage, also indicated a sense of smell as a strong characteristic. Polity AIs claimed, with a certainty above ninety per cent, that Prador were carnivores, hence the corruption of the word “predator” resulting in their name.
But such ominous assertions about these creatures aside, they created, without the aid of AI, a space-faring civilization, a workable U-space drive, and by some quirk of their development it seemed their metallurgical science lay some way ahead of the Polity’s. They didn’t possess runcibles, which by their very nature of being based on a technology completely at odds with the straight-line thinking of evolved creatures, required AI. From this the Ambassador for humanity felt there to be grounds for constructive dialogue. The Ambassador eagerly anticipated facilitating that dialogue for the technical, moral and social advance of both the human and Prador cultures. It was the kind of thing ambassadors said. Jebel remained highly suspicious, but then, as an Earth Central Security monitor, that came with the territory.
I find that most alien species in SF are little more than extremely thinly disguised humans and human societies. Not so the Prador. There is nothing at all human about them either biologically or in terms of their civilization. They are vicious crab-like creatures who willingly eat their own still growing offspring and mine the same offspring for replacement parts as they get damaged by age or in the course of battle. Like the Protectors in Niven’s Known Space universe, no Prador thinks beyond the survival of his direct line. Unlike the Protectors, a Prador will willingly sacrifice his young for his own needs without even thinking about it!
Now imagine fighting a Prador armed to, errr, its mandibles. Not a pleasant idea is it? It gets worse. Without giving away anything (or at least not too much), consider that there is something even worse than the strongest Prador. Much worse. And that being is manipulating the entire Prador race here in an attempt to make sure what that being wants to happen will happen. Throw in extremely deadly military hardware that can literally destroy planets if need be, thousand year-old post-humans who are perhaps more alien than the Prador are, and a well-armed military drone with its own agenda. This ain’t state of the art space opera of thirty years ago, or even a decade ago – it’s perhaps the best space opera I’ve ever read, and that’s saying a lot as I’ve read space opera for over thirty years now.
I believe Orbus concludes the Spatterjay series which started with The Skinner (2002) and continued in The Voyage of the Sable Keech (2006). Do read those novels first as much of the story here will otherwise make no sense at all. And all three novels read back to back to back are entertainment enough for many a night this winter!
(Tor UK, 2009)
