The Warship: Rise of the Jain, Book Two

This is pretty much the in vein that Asher has been mining -- wildly imaginative science fiction with real (or at least plausible) science at the core, convoluted plot, and interesting characters. Personally, I find the old, snarky, curmudgeonly war drones to be the most interesting. Probably a character flaw of my own... The sheer number of characters and points of view sometimes skirted the edge, but Asher managed to keep all his balls in the air and give each of the important characters a unique voice. So, I give The Warship a solid 4.5 stars. The Kindle formatting, however, rates zero stars. Numerous blocks of text should have had paragraph breaks. This often happened in dialog, making it difficult to follow. A lesser but still significant number of paragraphs had a paragraph break in the middle. A large number of spaces were elided, making forensic examination of a string of characters necessary to ascertain meaning. Extra spaces also occurred frequently. Soft hyphens had become hard hyphens on what seemed like every other page. And then there were the punctuation and capitalization gaffes... At the price this Kindle book commanded, this is an entirely unacceptable bolus of goof-up.

Great Syfy fun. Enjoyed this series so far and can't wait to read the final book. Great summer read. Enjoy.

Years ago, I wrote a review of Asher's early work and the level of excellence has not changed. Unlike other great science fiction authors whose claim to fame is a particular character, Asher's is his universe. In the Asher Universe Artificial Intelligences are many times a hell of a lot more interesting than the humans; diabolic aliens more fascinating and the intelligent war drones are always worth the price of admission. If you enjoy the humor of the AI warship names in the Culture Novels by Ian Banks, then you must love the drones. Will agent Cormac pop up? NO and you don't need him, which is what is so great about the work. Like his other novels, every character has depth and agenda and a past. These are not upright citizens marching to take on a threat filled with duty, honor, and moral correctness. These are driven, desperate, and damaged people trying to do the right thing with little to go on except the dread of making a mistake. Fear, pain, anger, and self interest exist in Asher's universe and that means things get complicated, violent, and unpleasant. What makes this work great is how he skillfully guides us through all this, so we get why things happen and are surprised and entertained when things go bad. Stakes are not just high in this book, they are towering, wobbly, and festooned with booby traps some visible and many not and the characters are not gonna get through unchanged....not always for the better. The triumphs are small, and the tragedies personal against a backdrop of looming threat and Asher knows how to make that fascinating. Read it.

So, I'm a huge fan of the outstanding world building and clever interlinked story arcs of Asher's Polity, and here is book two of the newest vector, involving the return of the always mysterious and fatally violent Jain. Characters new and old appear, always in interesting ways, as do classes of sentient beings, whose culture and history expand richly. I am quite enamored with the AI characters in all Asher's works, and there was plenty to interest me in that vien as well. You could pick up book one of this arc, The Soldier, and dive into the Polity from right here, but even better to read this in full Polity context. Either way, highly recommended!

Ran a little long in the descriptions of the space battles and not as much of the interesting characters like the war drones, but overall, a good read.

In an absolutely amazing story that has more characters and action than any of his other books, so many questions are answered, and so many perils are introduced, that you have to wonder about the survival of the Polity. If you thought Erubus was bad, wait until you see what pops out of this book on the last page. My jaw dropped open and chills ran down my spine. Just the scale of the thing alone was terrifying. Neal Asher sets up the Polity with the ultimate source of knowledge, and the ultimate source of destruction, to lead us into the next book (or books?) in the Jain series that should keep us riveted for years to come! YES!! Was it really a good idea to drop a black hole into the accretion disk full of Jain nodes? What happens to Trike and his wife? How do Orlandine and Dragon work together to protect the Polity? All these questions and more are answered, and with the style only Neal Asher can provide. Highly, highly recommended book.

Asher is a weaver of worlds filled with strange yet familiar creatures, all-too-human pairings of strength and weakness, vividly rendered pointy bits and, ultimately, more imaginative machinations in each of his single books than I've quite often seen in the entire oeuvre of most artists I've encountered. I sincerely hope he enjoys writing them as much as I do reading them. This second installment of the Rise of the Jain series keeps a fairly breakneck pace throughout. It, of course, escalates the situation seemingly resolved in The Soldier. There may be some slightly slower parts but I'd argue they're needed. It's hard to build a proper character arc if every scene is combat, conflict and action. Anyway if you're reading this then you already know Asher's style. This is more of that, but his worldbuilding of the Polity is really coming together here. It's almost Banksian levels, e.g. The Culture. Good job, Neal.

I HATE disliking a Polity novel, but Asher seems to have forgotten how to write dialogue, and so we have page after page after page of exposition, much of it pretty meh if you're familiar with the Polity universe. It is description posing as plot, and occasionally the sentence structure seems incomplete; certainly, when you're having parse the words more than once to glean the meaning in what is straightforward sci-fi writing, then an author - or editor - has not done a good job. Then there are the alternating point-of-view chapters, where we cycle between story snippets. It's standard Asher, but for some reason it seems more disjointed in "The Warship" than I recall his other novels being, and it just seems so much paint by numbers writing. I think the paucity of direct character interaction exacerbates the disconnectedness to the overall story, because we just don't get the emotional punch that earlier Polity stories provided. And it is not that being familiar with the tech, the AIs, the weaponry, etc dilutes the emotional content. Cormac was genuinely and convincingly conflicted as he battled against becoming an unemotional ECS robot in 'Gridlinked'. Blegg's surprising abilities and mysterious past were entirely engaging on a archetypal level in the early novels. By contrast, Orlandine's "struggle" to retain her humanity seems trite and unconvincing, and she is drawn more deeply than the rest of the cast, who are pretty much shadows on the wall. Her erstwhile lover is superficial and that whole thread of intent is a thinly woven story arc. And even the reliably aggressive prador have been entirely civilized so as to be indistinguishable from the main Polity players. Then we come to the Jain. Over many novels, Jain tech has been a shadowy cast member, evil by most accounts, but generally enigmatic, occasionally aggressively destructive, typically seductive, and always a wonderful metaphor for the issues and problems inherent in personal ambition and species-wide progress. Now, we are seeing the Jain in all their virulent, violent, literally magical glory, and they are entirely mundane. Hostile, inimical, murderous: pick your synonym, the Jain are all that and more. We learn about their dog-eat-dog genetic imperative in a series of painfully described sequences using the mechanism of racial memories so comprehensive that the characters involved could no doubt tell you what a 5-millions years dead Jain ate for their last breakfast. It doesn't make a lot of sense that a picotechnology so pernicious that it overwhelms everything it touches can be both integrated into Orlandine's physiology, yet by necessity, vaporized on sight lest it consume everything and everyone. Indeed, the battle stations guarding the accretion disc should have vaporized her under their hard coded prime directive. Honestly, this novel is just OK. And less so for the price. Indestructible characters evaporate a lot of the tension in the (extended) fight scenes. Orlandine and a few other cast members undergo supposedly transformational experiences, but while they are pivotal to the plot, it is hard to care that much. Earth Central and the various infallible ship AIs seem to have all the answers...except the ones that matter, and there is no obvious reason for that. Basically, about a third of this novel could have been culled with little impact on the story, and zero impact on the tension, which is neutral at best. Asher presents us with a litany of descriptive events in "The Warship" with a small amount of dialogue to supposedly connect us and the cast to the story, but that does not a terrific novel make. Perhaps he is tired of the Polity? Perhaps not, but I sure am getting that way. Not recommended, there are more engaging, less expensive novels to buy. Go spend your money on them!

Bought as a gift, do not plan to read it myself. Requested so I guess the first book was good. Book arrived in good condition.

I'm only half way through but that doesn't matter (I think I'm probably reviewing the author). I've read 95% of Neals stuff long and short (the exception, some of the SF magazine bits and Masons Rats ... oh and the Cowl sequel). This book marks a return to form not entirely absent in the previous six books (the Owner series and the Penny Royal series which I read and enjoyed) but, in my humble opinion (and I know why) there was a period when writing seemed, not really a joy but a task like a cavitating round trying to push its way through a mountain because it `F?@#ing well must'. But this one even in comparison to the Soldier is better, the gallows humour, Gordon, Heinlein, it flows, it references the history and invites new readers to find out the why and the where from? And because Neal spends time rooting through Physorg.com the science as crazy as it sounds is based in our real and emerging future. It makes me happy on a number of levels, but especially because I feel like I did when I fell into the Polity via Brass Man 14 years ago.

Packed with hard tech weaponry and more twists and turns than ever. Happy endings come with a price as you would expect in the real world. Heroes are not perfect, villains are not just evil...or are they? The only thing more I could ask for is the return of Penny Royale in book 3 to complete the madness & genius of this series.

Great trilogy if you enjoy sci-fi and alien tech style books

Great, 5 star rating