Orbus [Paperback]

First things first...I am a huge Asher fan. I have read everything he has offered and eagerly await each new volume and when I heard this was a "Spatterjay" novel I could hardly contain my enthusiasm. Asher has consistently delivered breathless action, gory violence, interesting characters, laugh out loud humor, and sumptuous galactic eon spanning stories all set in his rich "Polity" universe.

Second things second...To truly appreciate the characters, personalities, and Polity infrastructure of Orbus I highly recommend you at least read the two previous Spatterjay novels..."The Skinner" and "The Voyage of the Sable Keach" prior to reading "Orbus". Although the cover jacket for Orbus states this is a Spatterjay novel, it seemed more like a self-contained stand alone novel populated with Spatterjay characters persuing the type of political interests and intrigues usually found in his Ian Cormac ECS Polity Agent storylines.

I am going to quote Budd from Kill Bill to help set the parameters for this review...
"If you're gonna compare a Hanzo sword, you compare it to every other sword ever made...that wasn't made by Hattori Hanzo."

Likewise...this Neal Asher story compared to any other sci-fi space opera novel that wasn't written by Neal Asher would garnish an enthusiastic 5 star rating, but compared to his earlier work it seems to fall just a little short.

What's great about Orbus...

Orbus-an Old Captain...to steal and paraphrase from Jerry Maguire..."You had me at Old Captain", I love these ancient, intelligent, belligerent, interesting, and immensely powerful characters.

Sniper-War Drone...a mechanical version of an Old Captain. Old, menacing, intelligent, dangerous, unruly, and also the funniest character in the Asher cannon.

The Prador-old alien war adversaries are back with Vrell, King Oberon, and The Golgoloth. Each are cunning, powerful and treacherous as they pursue there own conflicting interests and fight old prejudices before unleashing and encountering a much more dangerous common enemy.

The return of an ancient deadly race (NO SPOILERS)..."and something that has been dead for four million years starts to open its eyes".

What's not so great about Orbus...Bollocks!

-It's frustrating reading when characters as familiar as old friends react in "un-characteristic" ways.
-Placing these same characters in situations where they can not play to their strengths and in the case of one central character actually taking away a portion of their key essence, knowledge, and personality...permanently? I don't know how or if Asher can fix this and keep this character as significant and interesting in future novels.
-It all seems a bit formulaic as if Asher painted this by numbers.

With all that being said, Orbus is still a great read and is the case with all Asher's work...Huge Fun!
Hopefully the "taking an Old Captain into space" story framework might be expanded in future Polity/Spatterjay novels.

Again...I can hardly wait!

The most remarkable thing about this book is that Asher seems to be writing in the present tense... I don't remember him doing that before but it is a bit refreshing.

As for the rest, it is a rehashing and recycling of plots he has already used. Asher has got to slow down on the production as he seems to have run out of ideas. The Cormack novels started with fireworks and ended with page flipping wanting to get it over with.

There is I think a finite limit to the number of times I want to read the word "virus" and "mycelium" in my life. So once again we have a misfit band of brothers going up to battle against opponents with godlike powers that border on magic.

I wonder how it's all going to turn out *this* time.

Asher created a very rich world, he owes it to himself to slow down the production and give us something a bit more interesting than this recycled stuff. It's not a bad book, die hard fans will eat it up I'm sure, but it's definitely not as good as what comes before it because it's recycled the structure and plot.

In Latin, "Orbus" means something along the lines of an `orphan, deprived, destitute'. And given how formulistic Asher's most recent Polity-placed novels have been, I have to wonder whether it might also reflect an author who has mined a seam of ideas dry.

Not that there is anything wrong with the novel per se, but Asher's earlier work was richer and more sophisticated, with a level of introspection and emotional tension that "Orbus" fails to provide. Basically, Asher's Spatterjay cast have become so indestructible that there is little worry as a reader that something untoward might actually happen to them.

In "Orbus", this ability to absorb punishment extends from the familiar humans of novels such as "The Skinner" and "The Voyage of the Sable Keech" to the apparent arch enemy, the Prador. Fair enough, for the Spatterjay virus is known to be virulent and indiscriminate. But eventually these interchangeable "can't be killed" characters make for trivial reading. They don't really suffer much - the Prador protagonist has various arms, eyes and legs pulled off but give him a chapter...or a few pages...and they've grown back again, better than before. Even our eponymous Orbus endures steadily mounting damage with little more than a headache and a massive appetite.

But enough of that. What's "Orbus" all about, anyway?

The basic scenario is pretty simple. Orbus is leaving the planet Spatterjay in order to find himself - bad things have been done to him, and he's done bad things himself, so redemption and personal exploration seem to be at the heart of his motivation. His long-standing sidekick, Iannus Drooble, comes along for the ride because he's Orbus' side-kick and that's what a side-kick does, apparently. And in a coincidental turn of events, the old war drone, then Warden AI, now war drone again, Sniper and his side-kick happen to be along for the ride as well. They're all passing acquaintances from a previous fire fight, though there is no love lost amongst them, at least not at first.

On the side of the notional bad guys, we have Prador Vrell, nominated as Orbus' "old enemy" on the dust jacket of my book. For sure he is, but it's more than a decade after they last crossed high-tech blunderbusses, so I guess we're talking one degree of separation here, not the usual six. Ah well, you can suspend disbelief for them meeting again like that, surely?

Also weighing in for the bad guys is an ancient Prador mutant called the Golgoloth - seriously - and of course, the numero uno of the Prador kingdom, King Oberon.

That's pretty much the main cast of characters, apart from some incidental AIs and the odd Imperial Guard or human geneticist here and there.

Suffice to say, in the course of them trying to kill each other, they unleash something much bigger, nastier and more wonderfully evil than all of them put together, and after a brief interval of "are you with me or against me" thinking, Human's and Prador alike align to defeat the really bad guys.

And that's where "Orbus" started to unravel for me. I can't give too much away because it's a spoiler, but the premise underlying Spatterjay and the virus seemed flimsy, especially if you've read the Ian Cormac novels where a succession of wars were fought over snippets of alien technology supposedly long dead. Here, information about those long dead aliens is revealed and the actions and restraint of the AIs (in particular) are at odds with the whole basis for "Brass Man", "Polity Agent" et al.

Indeed, "Orbus" reveals that the response we saw in those previous books was justified. Really scary monsters are dredged up...and yet, after a bit of rough of tumble, Orbus and crew show them who's boss. This is despite fighting demons who can twist U-space in ways not even Polity AIs knew could be done. What the...?

Being somewhat more picky, the opening interludes 'From How It Is' by Gordon, lecture notes from the E.B.S. Heinlein and the 'Quince Guide' are not written in a sufficiently different tone to the main narrator to make me feel that they actually are separate and distinct from the main story. Having just re-read L.E. Modesitt Jr's richly rewarding "The Eternity Artefact", with its compellingly truthful diverse character voices in each chapter, I just didn't think that Asher was trying hard enough.

So, the summary. "Orbus" was like one of those Hollywood blockbuster movies - and the recent `Wolverine' springs to mind as a perfect example - where style and sparkle triumph over strong characters and a plot that makes sense. Asher could have easily led us to a cliff hanger ending,with "Orbus" being the start of a galaxy pot-boiler that spanned a few novels. Sadly not. We get "Orbus", a novel painted by numbers, and I really hope that the underlying meaning of 'destitute' does not apply and that Asher gets his mojo back.

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