Line War (the incoherent review)

 

Line War, by Neal Asher.

 

Fifth and final volume in probably one of the best space opera series ever, in-my-very-humble-but-increasingly-well-read-in-the-genre-opinion (IMVHBIWRITGO?? kthxbye). In Line War, loose ends are tied up, megadeath becomes gigadeath (two million dead and a planet razed in the first twenty pages), Cormac and the AIs suffer a ‘falling out’ (my understatement gland just spontaneously imploded) and I enjoyed it so bloody much I’m going to gibber away in ridiculously uninformative dot points, sue me:

• Jain tech — how can you not love a biological weapon that’s designed to eliminate intelligent society by the trillions? Especially when people infected with Jain tech don’t die when the ‘good guys’ kill them, but rather sprout horrible slaughterous organic weaponry from the death-wounds
• Did I put ‘good guys’ in parenthesis? There’s a very good reason for that
• Scale — hello Erebus and your tiny invading army of a mere 20,000 wormships. Yes, wormships. And a big shout out to the Cable Hogue, a close contender for largest battleship ever described, which finally makes a suitably apocalyptic appearance (and can’t orbit worlds because it’s big enough to affect tides)
• Dragon — an organic lifeform/weapon/future intelligence many kilometres across… and the notable fact that several of those kilometres of subcutaneous matter are ‘weaponizing’…
• War Runcible! And more war drones! Including a massive iron bedbug called Bludgeon and much more of Arach the spider drone with his twinned abdominal Gatling cannons, amongst many others.

And, yep, I am enjoyed and satiated into comprete complete incoherency now. Go forth and acquire as soon as possible, along with its predecessors in order: Gridlinked, The Line Of Polity, Brass Man and the utterly brilliant Polity Agent (poor Four-Pack). The man’s a genius, and he writes science fiction with the impact of a scotch bottle to the side of the skull: up there with Alastair Reynolds and Richard K Morgan.

Which is to say, the best you can get.