The Technician
I’ve described Neal Asher’s Polity universe many times. It’s a future interstellar civilization ruled by AIs, who took over in a basically bloodless “Quiet War”, but who seem to rule humanity more or less benignly, providing a society where everyone is immortal, if they choose to be. Although as anyone who’s read the books knows, the “more or less” here is doing a lot of work. The AIs aren’t without faults, and some of them can be pretty bad apples.
The Technician is a standalone novel, but it takes place on a planet first introduced in the second Agent Cormac book: The Line of the Polity. In that book, the planet Masada is just outside of Polity territory (just beyond “the line”) and ruled by the Theocracy, a brutal religious regime that severely represses the human population on the planet, ruling from their space colonies in orbit.
There is a rebellion, which is literally an underground, existing in tunnels beneath the planet surface. Much of the population, hearing rumors about how much better Polity life is, would love for the Polity to come in and take over. However, the Polity will only come in if at least eighty percent of the population votes for it to do so. Eventually events in that novel lead to recorded votes reaching that threshold. There is also a Jain (ancient evil technology) infestation, which leads to other reasons for the Polity to come in, but the Theocracy is destroyed even before they arrive.
The Technician takes place about twenty years after the rebellion. The central figure is Jeremiah Tombs, who was a Proctor under the Theocracy, one of the society’s religious police. During the rebellion, Tombs was attacked by a hooder, a large worm-like creature, one of the planet’s most vicious predators. But the hooder that attacked him is known as “the Technician”, a particularly large albino hooder, which has a habit of carving statues out of the bones of its victims.
Tombs is the first person to ever survive a hooder attack, but it initially leaves him severely mutilated and insane. The Polity takes care of him, but withholds full treatment when it is realized that the Technician has physically modified his brain, downloading something into it, although eventually his caregiver is allowed to regrow his face. The early parts of the story are Tombs regaining his sanity, struggling with his faith and what the world has revealed about it, and learning what the Technician has put in him.
Tombs is eventually pushed on his path by Amistad, an old Polity war drone, who has an interest in insane minds. Amistad has an assistant, an AI named Penny Royal. Penny Royal was a sadistically insane AI who attempted to load an alien Atheter mind into the body of a gabbleduck, which resulted in it getting attacked by an alien mechanism designed to ensure that there are no Atheter minds. Amistad found Penny Royal and recuperated it, excising the insane “eighth state” which was making it insane.
The Atheter were an ancient alien race whose home planet was the one currently known as Masada. The Atheter, were infected by Jain technology, and found themselves fighting endless civil wars. In other to end it, the Atheter committed racial suicide, wiping out their higher order intelligence, leaving their descendants as apparently simple minded creatures on the planet, now known as “gabbleducks” due to their tendency to babble human words nonsensically.
The hooders turn out to be bioengineered war machines, who were tasked with ensuring that nothing remained of a gabbleduck after they die, resulting in the particularly gruesome way the hooders attack and eat their prey. The Technician is a particularly large and powerful hooder, which is theorized to be the original prototype for the species. There is evidence that it has existed for two million years, since the Atheter eliminated their own intelligence.
And the mechanism that attacked Penny Royal is the one that was built by the Atheter to eliminate their intelligence and to continue ensuring it remains eliminated. As Tombs begins his journey, something reawakens the mechanism in deep space. It senses something happening on Masada, the old Atheter homeworld, and begin traveling there, with Polity war vessels monitoring its approach.
There is also political intrigue on Masada. Many of the old revolutionaries are not happy with the general amnesty that the Polity imposed, and continue to hunt down, torture, and kill the old Proctors and other Theocracy officials. Tombs is the most prominent of this category still alive. As he begins his journey, these groups make plans to take him down.
So there’s a lot going on in this book. As usual with an Asher book, I enjoyed it. But also as usual, I have my gripes. The pacing often feels slow, particularly in the early parts, which for me detracts from the experience. And Asher continues the trope where characters who are able to make backups of themselves haven’t, apparently just to provide a feeling of jeopardy when they get in trouble. But the characters in this book feel a bit more distinct than in most of his other books, which helps.
It’s also interesting to see Penny Royal in this book as a supporting side character. That AI goes on to become the central figure of the Dark Intelligence trilogy, which I read many years ago, and only have a hazy memory of at this point. (I’d consider rereading it, but Asher’s prose is just too much work.)
This book is a standalone, so you could read it without having read any of Asher’s other Polity books. However, you’ll understand a lot more about what’s going on if you’ve first read The Line of the Polity. And of course it’s now clear to me I would have understood Dark Intelligence better if I’d read this one first.
Asher’s not for everyone. But if you enjoy old fashioned space opera, with FTL, titanic weapons, and ancient evils, with some modern concepts thrown in, he’s worth checking out.
If you’ve read it, let me know what you think. Any recommendations on similar books to check out? Or reading anything else interesting lately?
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