Never a dull moment in this wicked fun tale. The story is sort of mix of Dune, Moby Dick, Star Wars, and The Thing. The action takes place on the dangerous planet of Spatterjay. With the exception of a few islands and tiny atolls, Spatterjay is mostly a vast ocean teeming with very hungry, very aggressive wildlife. One of the most common life forms on Spatterjay are the leeches. The leeches are anywhere from finger-sized to elephant-sized things who want to eat anything and everything. If you spend longer than a few seconds in the water you're going to have some chomping on you. (Spatterjay doesn't do well as a vacation destination.) To get bitten by a leech is to become infected with a virus. One of the side-effects of this virus is near immortality. And wounds seems to heal extremely quickly. But if you're then not too careful about your diet you'll find yourself slowly turning into a leech. It's happened. These immortals, known as Hoopers, are very tough to kill and the older they are, the stronger they are. Spatterjay was named after a pirate named "Spatter" Jay Hoop, a man hated by everyone for reasons I won't go into. About seven centuries ago, Hoop and his crew did some very bad things and one man, Sable Keech has been relentlessly hunting them down ever since one of Hoop's crew killed him. Huh, what? Yeah, Keech is a corpse, a reification who has some of his original brain left and one eye and the rest of his body is kept from rotting away by a special filtration system. He's sort of a cyborg-corpse and very dangerous (as some contract killers find out). Keech is intent on finding Hoop himself who is known as the Skinner for gruesome reasons you could probably guess at. And get this, the Skinner's head and body are living apart. I could go on and on about this cool book. Some other elements in it involve some nasty aliens, war drones, a planetary AI monitoring system, an intelligent hornet hive mind, dragons that work as sails for the Old Captains of Spatterjay, and some very tricky characters and nasty villains whose paths all intersect in one crazy, exciting sci-fi yarn, that's equal parts adventure, revenge tale, and horror story. What a rush. I loved it. ( )

this was, although full of newfangled stuff like nanotech, hiveminds, AI, basically an exhilarating oldfashioned romp. the central image is the vicious Great Chain of Being cycle on the planet in question, and what it means for the question of character change in an arena of unstable competing imperatives, give the nature of the (post)human condition and the ex machina operations of quite a lot of aliens pursuing their own sometimes dastardly agenda. there's even a brisk look at how to parse redemption in various circs. and the fun part's partly in predicting where they'll all end up if this, or that, or you know the other thing. think i better go collect the whole Polity series and read them all in chronological order. ( )

On the planet Spatterjay, sudden death is the normal way of life. It's a planet with a savage thing-eat-thing ecosystem and a virus that permeates everything native that means that those things that don't get eaten live more or less forever. Including some of the human beings, those who have been bitten by the leeches at the top of the feeding chain and survived.

Some eight hundred years ago, during the Polity/Prador war, the planet was the base of operations for as unpleasant a bunch of sadistic psychopaths as you could hope to avoid meeting. Led by Jay Hoop, who rumour says is still out there in the islands somewhere, there were terrible things done by and for The Eight, as they came to be called, that have taken until now to come home to roost.

The book is well and densely plotted, as I've come to expect from Asher, with the usual depth and colour of the Polity Universe. The only thing that struck a bit of an off note here was the final resolution of the relationship between old war drone Sniper and the planetary AI, Warden. You'll probably see what I mean when you get there - it's ironic and funny, but it doesn't really make sense to me that this could happen.

That aside, I really enjoyed the book and look forward to further developments in this Universe. ( )

Mildy entertaining, but overlong and mean spirited in a dreary sort of way. The author seems not terribly interested in his human characters, and spends the last third of the book with his wise cracking sentient drones blowing things up. But if you're a guy under 25, you'll probably love it to pieces. ( )

Good read with some very intersting ideas. I found it hard to get into initially and it required a fair bit of concentration early on to understand the setting. Once I got the hang of this the story moved quickly and was very enjoyable. ( )