Brass Man

This review is written with a GPL 4.0 license and the rights contained therein shall supersede all TOS by any and all websites in regards to copying and sharing without proper authorization and permissions. Crossposted at WordPress, Blogspot & Librarything by Bookstooge’s Exalted Permission

Title: Brass Man
Series: Polity: Agent Cormac #3
Author: Neal Asher
Rating: 4 of 5 Stars
Genre: SFF
Pages: 505
Format: Digital Edition

Synopsis:

Skellor, that lovable rapscallion who just wants to kill Ian Cormac and destroy the Polity with Jain tech, is back! His personal infestation of jain seems to be out of control, so he digs up Mr Crane (the titular Brass Man) and starts looking for another Dragon sphere. Because sure as shooting, the Dragon knows show more all about the Jain tech.

Obviously the Polity can't have this, so they send in Agent Cormac, again. His abilities are growing and it would appear that he's on the path to becoming Horace Blegg Jr. He tracks down Skellor to a small world that lost their Polity roots hundreds of years ago. Skellor thinks it's a great place to hide, which is what the Dragon thought too, until Skellor found it. Skellor spreads jain tech willy-nilly to take over a bunch of people and begins killing them. Cormac becomes his hostage and they all head out to space. Where they have an encounter with a brown hole and Skellor gets his and Cormac is rescued by a rogue AI. Another leg of this book is about Rogue AI's who want the jain tech for themselves and cause problems for everyone, including their daddy, who has to kill some of them. Tough love baby.

Mr Cranes segments are all mixed up memories from his inception to his present state. He was hexed with some schizo software, stolen by rebels and loaded up with a killer's memories and instincts. All served to break his ego into pieces and he's been playing at trying to put himself together again. With the help of Dragon, and an AI in the body of a vulture, he succeeds and walks off into the sunset.

Finally, there is a storyline about 2 people from the little planet. One's a knight who is on a quest to kill a dragon and the other is a young man who was going to rob him until he realized what a badass the knight actually was. A mentor storyline.

My Thoughts:

Asher likes AI's that are messed up and multiple personalities. That was the whole gist of his later Transformation trilogy that ended this year.

Anyway, this was violent. Between jain tech & Skellor invading peoples brains, Mr Crane's memories, Ian Cormac and monsters on the little world, you run the full gamut of dismemberment to “light mist” splatterification.

That Skellor was a total psyche job. He made for a great villain though, as he was just ruthlessly “bad” and there was no moral grey areas. I like my badguys to be really despicable, the kind of badguy who you can't help but root for their downfall. Skellor filled that admirably. But with his ending up in a brown hole (I kind of glossed over Asher's pseudo-science explanation of WHAT a brown hole is) I hope Asher can come up with a suitably good Bad Guy for the final 2 books of the Agent Cormac series. Jain tech and its completely destructive nature goes on, but that type of threat needs a face to make it a villain.

Mr Crane's storyline, while interesting, just didn't have the punch you'd expect from being the Title of the Book. He seemed more like the marinade of the story instead of the steak. And speaking of marinade, that knight/mentor storyline. It had nothing to do with this, except it took place on the small world (I am refusing to look up its name because it is too small for me to care about), and they overlapped with the big climactic ending with Skellor, Ian, Dragon and the various AI's. If this book was an RPG (role playing game), the knight's story would have been the backstory of a NPC (non player character) who dies 2 minutes after you meet him. It filled up space and allowed us a wider view of the little world, but it didn't advance the story any.

While I rated this the same as I did back in '10, I suspect I would have rated it 4.5 back then and dropped it to 4 this time. A lot of my attraction last time was the newness factor and with that gone, blood and guts only gets you so far. Still thoroughly enjoyed it, but I won't be raving about this book like I might have back then.

★★★★☆ show less

In a lot of ways, this is primarily a character-driven novel.

It may not seem that way because we're surrounded by more Ship and World-AIs than we can shake a stick at, Jain mushrooms infecting whole civilizations with super-high-tech hacking monstrosities (that are mycelium), androids, cyborgs, messed-up alien ecologies, and alien BDOs that aren't so dumb.

Where's the character-driven stuff? They're now on a tech-race about to turn all the intelligences in the galaxy into greed-monsters inciting war on a REALLY huge scale.

Well, fortunately, the Brass Man, a robot built like a literal tank and so full of split personalities that he's almost become SANE, is a great character. Cormac is great, too, and he definitely gets a powerup here, show more but mostly the novel is all about the bad guys and these two. :)

Oh, the bad guys get a LOT of time and they're pretty much entirely a Bond-Villain schtick. :) I don't care. It's fun as hell. :)

I will NOT say that this novel was as good as the others in terms of plot or twists, but the ambiance was pretty awesome. :) As a space-opera, I was constantly thinking about how this ranks up to Iain M. Banks and it does, very admirably. Not in the same quality, mind you, but when we're dealing with huge AI-mindships and the whole Polity behaving badly, I had a LOT of great flashbacks. :)

I think I'm going to be having a lot of fun with all these books in the very near future. show less

Interesting technologies and concepts, an interesting hero, and some great set-piece battles on both cosmic and human scales - but the complexity of the multiple plot lines and the large cast of minor characters work against Asher's otherwise impressive and entertaining imagination.

The cover blurb and the first few pages of Brass Man piqued my interest and gave me high expectations. Instead, over the course of the next almost 300 pages I often found myself about ready to give it up. By that last 200 or so pages the story of a sociopathic killer robot, machinations of ruling AIs, alien dragons, primitive dragon slayers, government agents, rogue AIs, resurrected killers, and a random assortment of minor characters turned in to enough of an action chase scene to at least keep my interest.

The story concerns Mr. Crane, a Golem (robot) and the Brass Man of the title, that has been turned into a sociopathic killer with a literally shattered mind. Except that it takes probably half the novel to find that out. Eventually show more you realize that he is on some sort of inexplicable quest to pull his "self" back together and become his own again. Except that how that is managed doesn't make much sense, and by the time it happens, I didn't much care.

It also concerns an inscrutable alien intelligence/partial-collective-being called Dragon that is manipulating things on an up-until-now lost and isolated human world where it is hiding from the rest of humanity and from some alien McGuffin technology called "Jain fibers". And maybe Dragon reaches some kind of truce or salvation, but again by then I didn't care.

And those Jain fibers control or are controlled by a super-criminal who exists to be, well, a super criminal. And to abuse the Brass Man even more.

Who is hunted by Ian Cormac, an agent for the Artificial Intelligences that run everything. Who have deep secret plans of their own for the betterment of all. Or something. The actual role of the AIs is never clear, and Cormac simply runs around after the bad guys, rather like James Bond, but with slightly less motivation.

Oh, and then there is the ship AI named "Jack Ketch" with a fascination for the machinery and mechanisms of execution. Who turns out to be just another super-agent type with no particular motivation or ultimate relevance.

Actually any one of these sub-plots would probably have made a decent adventure story by themselves, but all together and at 485 pages, they just turn in to a mess. Asher doesn't help matters by elaborately justifying a re-definition of a scientific title 358 pages in, just so he can start to use it to refer to the bad guy for no apparent reason. Or using abbreviations that are either undefined, or so obscure as to be meaningless.

I think Asher was enthralled by Ian Banks and the complexity of the motivations of the ships and people of Special Circumstances. I think he tried to create something of that same depth and grandeur, and unfortunately weighed his own perfectly good space-opera down with so much baggage it collapses under its own weight. show less

Enjoyed this. Jumping back and forth between two time plots was a little jarring, but Asher made it come together ok.
I found it very interesting to find out more about Mr Crane and his past and some of the hints about his future.
Not a letdown in this Polity" universe."

This is a sequel to "Gridlinked", and a good one, but since one of the main characters is a psychotic killer robot and another is a kind of superman secret agent, there are lots of people killed in particularly gory ways. Several times, I wondered why so many gruesome deaths were needed...but I'd still recommend it with that caveat.

I understand what the other reviewers have said and to a certain extent agree, however the imagination involved in writing this book is great and regardless of certain aspects, the bottom line is it is a great read, holds your attention to the end (as long as you get through the middle) and the characters are fantastic. I have book 4 and 5 to read, will review the series in more detail after reading them.