Space Opera for the eXtreme generation

kw: book reviews, science fiction, space opera, aliens, first contact

Here is everyone's blackest nightmare "first contact" story. Mysterious aliens have been contacted over a number of years by robotic and AI spacecraft of The Polity, an AI-ruled space empire. No image of the aliens' likeness, or of their spacecraft, has so far been permitted to return, only a few sparse records and distant views of a technological civilization on some of their outlying worlds.

Finally, a meeting is arranged. The docking bay specified by the Prador is unnervingly huge, big enough for them to be animate locomotives. They are, instead, big crabs. Very big crabs with very tough shells, nearly irresistible weapons, unthinkable hostility, and a taste for human flesh. They are looking for slaves and food, and we seem to fit the bill.

In Prador Moon, Neal Asher pulls out every stop on this old nightmare. Of course, humans just have to win, even at a terrible cost. It takes the confluence of an entirely fanatical warrior who has seen his lover wantonly destroyed and macerated, a couple of AIs with their own mysterious ways—using human or humanoid bodies—, and a woman with a mysteriously enhanced computer implant, a few million times more capable than the implants most folks wear; all these combine to drive off the alien attack. But there's plenty of grist for sequels...and The Polity has already been the subject of a few of Asher's books.