Neal Asher

In this mind-boggling, fascinating and irresistible sequel to Gridlinked, Asher returns us to his Polity future. The benevolent but firm hand of the Earth Central AIs the Polity senses that enormous trouble is brewing, so they dispatch Ian Cormac, legendary Earth Central Security Agent, to stop it. Cormac knows that he must find a powerful alien entitynicknamed The Dragonand the Jain technology that it controls if he is to combat the growing threat. For Skellor, Cormac`s old nemesis, is back,...

Thorvald Spear wakes in a hospital to find he`s been brought back from the dead. What`s more, he died in a human vs. alien war that ended a century ago. Spear had been trapped on a world surrounded by hostile Prador forces, but Penny Royal, the AI inside the rescue ship sent to provide backup, turned rogue, annihilating friendly forces in a frenzy of destruction and killing Spear. One hundred years later the AI is still on the loose, and Spear vows for revenge at any cost. Isobel Satomi ran a...

Cormac is a legendary Earth Central Security agent, the James Bond of a wealthy future where runcibles (matter transmitters controlled by AIs) allow interstellar travel in an eye blink throughout the settled worlds of the Polity. Unfortunately Cormac is nearly burnt out, gridlinked to the AI net so long that his humanity has begun to drain away. He has to take the cold-turkey cure and shake his addiction to having his brain on the net. Now he must do without just as hes sent to investigate the...

In the outskirts of space, and the far corners of the Polity, complex dealings are in play. Several forces continue to pursue the deadly and enigmatic Penny Royal, none more dangerous than the Brockle, a psychopathic forensics AI and criminal who has escaped the Politys confinements and is upgrading itself in anticipation of a deadly showdown, becoming ever more powerful and intelligent. Aboard Factory Station Room 101, the behemoth war factory that birthed Penny Royal, groups of humans, alien...

Neal Asher, whom Tor introduced to the American audience with Gridlinked, takes us deeper into his unique universe with an even more remarkable second novel, The Skinner. On the planet Spatterjay arrive three travelers: Janer, acting as the eyes of the hornet Hive mind, on a mission not yet revealed to him; Erlin, searching for Ambel -- the ancient sea captain who can teach her how to live; and Sable Keech, on a vendetta he cannot abandon, though he himself has been dead for 700 years. This...

The beginning of a new series from a master of space opera featuring Alan Saul Visible in the night sky the Argus Station, its twin smelting plants like glowing eyes, looks down on nightmare Earth. From Argus the Committee keep an oppressive control: citizens are watched by cams systems and political officers, it`s a world inhabited by shepherds, reader guns, razor birds and the brutal Inspectorate with its white tiled cells and pain inducers. Soon the Committee will have the power to edit...

The outlink station of Miranda has been completely destroyed by a nanomycelium. Nobody knows why, but all the signs of devastation point to Dragon, a gigantic bioconstructed creature. In The Line of Polity, Agent Cormac is sent to the scene to investigate this disaster aboard the titanic Polity dreadnought, the Occam Razor. In his thrilling quest to seek the truth, Cormac navigates through the tolling and difficult remote world of Masada ready to be subsumed as the Line of Polity is sketched...

Thorvald Spear, resurrected from his death over a hundred years earlier, continues to hunt Penny Royal, the rogue AI and dangerous war criminal on the run from Polity forces. Beyond the Graveyard, a lawless and deadly area in deep space, Spear follows the trail of several enemy Prador, the crab-like alien species with a violent history of conflict with humanity. Sverl, a Prador genetically modified by Penny Royal and slowly becoming human, pursues Cvorn, a Prador harboring deep hatred for the...