Prador Moon: A Novel of the Polity Book

2.5 stars.

Neal Asher makes Alastair Reynolds look like soft science fiction, and Vernor Vinge look like fantasy.

I picked up this book after hearing that a) Neal Asher was a lot like Alastair Reynolds, and b) that this particular book was a good place to start his Polity series. And, I will admit, the plot sounded just ridiculous enough to be a good summer read: humans finally meet their first non-human sentient species, only to be appalled to find that they're ginormous carnivorous crab-like critters, that immediately start pillaging and, wait for it, eating people!

But, the book itself I found to be utterly mediocre. First of all--it's not at all like Alastair Reynolds. The book was only about 1/3 of the length of an Alastair Reynolds book, and had about 1/5 of the complexity and depth. The characters were flatter than flat--as in, the sociopath narrator, a few paragraphs into his narration, has to tell you that he's a sociopath. This is necessary information, I suppose, because all of the characters behave exactly the same, sociopath or no. The plot was just as expected from the back cover--linear, predictable, etc. Which wouldn't be too bad if there had been support, but there wasn't.

I was also really bothered by the fact that there were a lot of typos in the book. I was singing the praises of Wool Omnibus Edition a couple of weeks ago--because, in that self-published book, there was not a typo to be found from first page to last. And yet this was a fully edited book (as far as I know), and yet it had a plethora of typos, missing articles, and so on. It just kept giving me the impression of sloppiness--if they can't fix the typos, what about the rest of the book?

What it comes down to, is that this is one of those books that exists solely to be the author's vehicle to share his vision for the future, and for the technology that said future contains. And if you go for that kind of stuff, then maybe this book was great. I will admit, there were a few flourishes that were pretty cool. However, though I might have been misinformed when I was told that this was a good starting point in the series, damn it, a lot of the technology just made no sense. It was one of those classic books that just drops you in to TONS of gibberish, with no explanation, or description, so you don't even really know what the technology that is being described looks like, much less what it does. And unfortunately, the book wasn't really in depth enough or fleshed out enough to give the reader time to learn and become comfortable with the gibberish as the book progresses. In all too many cases, it seemed as if the author wrote his characters into a corner, got stuck, then a character would go "but Ahhh! This piece of tech will get us out of here, let me just concentrate a little harder."

So, the book wasn't terrible, and if I find myself in an airport with nothing to read and a long plane flight ahead (unlikely), and I happen to see a Neal Asher book, maybe I'll pick it up, but otherwise, I can't see myself returning for another of his books.