The Warship by Neal Asher
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is something quite amazing.
And when I say quite, I mean, "HOLY S*** what just HAPPENED here?"

It's been a while since I sat down to read SF expecting and eventually receiving a whole AWE effect. This is wide-brained high-tech imagination at its best, building on all the major developments and changes from all his previous books, giving us such massive scope and terror that both the combined might of the Polity AND the Prador are totally freaking out.

It's the Jain, folks. Their nanotech, just a minor sub-sentient bonder of biology and tech that seems so useful and uber-powerful on the surface, is designed to fulfill all your dreams. Too bad it's a tool designed to wipe out every intelligent race it ever comes into contact with, right? Old news from the previous books.

Unfortunately for everyone alive in this later tale, and despite some seriously major Space-Opera military improvements, the combined resources of all kinds of "people", be they Golems, hive minds, AI ships, Prador, Prador-Skatterjay, Human-Skatterjay, Haimans, or Prador-AIs, neither biological transformation or truly fantastic tech OR an old offshoot of the original Jain is quite able to handle this.

In fact, all of life is hopelessly outclassed.

This book is a cumulation of everything, but more than that, it's all battle, strategy, seeming success and bitter defeat. :)

I feel their horror, their desperate hope, and I'm left splattered on the floor.

This is Asher at the top of his game. :)

Earth Central, Dragon, Trike, Orlandine, The Client and the Prador have temporarily made peace to deal with a greater threat. There is activity in the accretion disc’s event horizon which means the Jain are waking up. The threat of Jain technology getting out into the universe at large is too great of a threat to allow.

This novel was filled with action, suspense, betrayals and new alliances. The plot was intense with tons of battles and fights. There wasn’t as high of a death count as some of his other novels (mainly the Owner Trilogy) but when the deaths did occur there was a bigger emotional impact.

The pacing was a little off as the middle-end was a little slow and the end was unbelievably intense. The middle-end focused on some characters realizing their new potential or taking care of loose ends which was necessary for character development but also a tad boring. The ending was insane as more about the Jain are revealed. I loved the new information the reader got as I really wanted to learn more about them and now I finally have.

Since I haven’t read any of the other novels in the Spatterjay Universe I was confused initially. As the novel progressed though everything fell into place and as such started to make sense.

The characters were hard to get to know as most of them are AI’s, cyborgs, or Golems so they don’t have the same human emotions. As such I couldn’t really relate to them. I loved how Neal Asher explained their thought processes and logical deductions as the reader could understand how and why they did what they did.

In summary this was a great, yet intense, science fiction novel. I loved the plot and the setting as there really wasn’t any dull moments. Another great novel by a great author.