Neal Asher is one of those authors who’s big in the UK, but not so much in the US. He gets talked about a fair bit, but it’s only fairly recently that I’ve started seeing his stuff in stores here. He’s been on the list of authors I mean to check out for a while, and I finally got around to picking up Gridlinked, which was the earliest book they had of the loosely connected Polity series.
The capsule review is “Iain M. Banks without the literary ambitions.” This book offers pretty much all the special-effects sequences you would expect from a Culture novel, with none of the literary games.
Ian Cormac is an agent for Special Circumstances Earth Central Security, one of their top fixers for interstellar skullduggery, and when the book opens, he’s working undercover to infiltrate a separatist group. Problem is, he’s been wired into the interstellar computer grid– “gridlinked,” hence the title– for so long he’s starting to lose his humanity, so he botches the assignment, and things get bloody.
He’s ordered to the distant world Samarkand, where there has been a disastrous accident involving the “runcible,” the FTL teleportation device that ties the Polity together, leading to a 30-megaton blast that wiped out a transfer station and terraforming project. Cormac is sent in with the crew going to replace the runcible to sift through the pieces, and find out what caused the explosion. At the same time, he’s being tailed by a psychopath left over from his first job, who will stop at nothing to see Cormac dead. And then there’s the gigantic alien construct known as Dragon, which is somehow involved in the whole mess, though it’s not clear how.
The “what happened to the runcible” and “watch the psychopath kill people” plots didn’t integrate terribly well, in my opinion, but they’re each enjoyable enough. The psycho killer plotline basically provides Asher with an excuse for some colorful gore to liven things up from time to time, while the slower-moving mystery story gets going. When they re-connect at the end of the book, though, it felt kind of forced.
As a popcorn read, though, it’s pretty good. The action sequences offer a good amount of spectacle, the gadgetry used by heroes and villains is pretty cool, and the book moves along pretty well. It doesn’t exactly say anything deep about the human condition, but it’s a decent read.
Does it make the runsible/ansible link explicit?
The only explicit connection between “runcible” and anything is to the poetry of Edward Lear– the key component of the teleportation device is called a “spoon,” and “runcible spoon” appears multiple times in Lear.
The “ansible” connection is probably there, but it’s not mentioned.