PissWeakly Reviews: The Soldier / Neal Asher

Friday, October 26, 2018

The Soldier / Neal Asher

The Soldier

(Rise of the Jain #1)

by Neal Asher

read in October 2018

rated 6/10: read to pass the time

High tech possibly "hard" science fiction. Remember Clarke's "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" ? The Soldier's technology may as well be magic. Exciting for a while, ultimately annoying.

Okay, given the state of technology imagined in this book, the ideas are amazing. But not fascinating. Every entity is all-powerful and invincible -- until it meets another even more powerful entity. As OTT as but more detailed than Doc Smith.

Unfortunately there is very little room for humanity. This is super-powered humanity of the future, fair enough. Except that the AIs seem to have more "human feelings" than the humans. And the AIs are certainly not human. What this means is, there are no characters who gain my sympathy.

This is a story of a far future and very violent universe. Believable, nasty, not at all pleasant. Sudden death -- and technological resurrection -- are everywhere. Except, perhaps, on the planets where entire populations are destroyed as the planet itself is destroyed. The author gives barely a thought to those billions of civilian casualties.

The violence itself is not a problem. The technology is not a problem. What is a problem, is the space given to descriptions of the technology in use. Imaginative ? Yes. Realistic extrapolations of current ideas ? Possibly. Waving of magic wands ? May as well be.

There is a lot of extremely high tech. A scale of millions of years, across an entire galaxy -- at least. What is missing, is a character with whom I can sympathise. Human or alien or AI, I need someone who I hope will survive to the end of the series. I have the feeling that very few major characters will *really* die... but I don't really care enough about them, to care.