300 pages
English language
Published Nov. 8, 2004
The Line of Polity is a 2003 science fiction novel by Neal Asher. It is the second novel in the Gridlinked sequence. In this novel, Earth Central Security (ECS) agent Ian Cormac is placed at the center of a civil war on the planet Masada, where an elite Theocracy lives in cylindric habitats in orbit and violently rules over commoners enslaved to laborious agriculture jobs on the planet's surface. To complicate matters, someone has attacked a low-grav Outlinker habitat with a nanomycelium which bears a striking resemblance to that used by Dragon on Samarkand in the previous novel Gridlinked. Meanwhile, a brilliant Separatist biophysicist has apparently reactivated an extremely ancient relic of technology created by the Jain, an alien species that dropped out of the universe millions of years ago, and commanded forms of technology that the brightest AI minds of the Polity have difficulty comprehending.
I was not that much a fan of Gridlinked, but this one is already so much better, I really enjoyed being a part of the world of this book, and it was quite the journey, it took me a while to get through it, but I really enjoyed the time I spent with it.
While still more complex and interesting than your regular action page turner, Asher does seem to make it easy on himself with enemies and monsters that vie for the title of most villainous psychopath.
Thank god for Dragon for bringing some ambiguity to the story.
The Cormac story continues and improves. The stakes certainly are higher and I wonder where we'll go from here. Moving on to the Brass Man, which promises the return of an annoying villain.
The Cormac story continues and improves. The stakes certainly are higher and I wonder where we'll go from here. Moving on to the Brass Man, which promises the return of an annoying villain.
