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A review by ornithopter1
Dark Intelligence by Neal Asher
1.0
DNF at 25%
Started well, with lots of concise world-building detail, or so I thought. Then, after growing bored with the book, I looked it up and realised this is book NINE in the author's universe, so maybe the world-building is simply laying out groundwork already developed and shared from those other books. No actual characters here: Just a cypher of a protagonist whose entire character is 'revenge'. Maybe there was more to it, but if so, it was held too close to the chest to see and I wasn't intrigued enough to find out either way. The shine of novelty very quickly fades from the protagonist and there's not much there once the introduction is over. The one thing I can say about him is he's apparently a world champion technobabble record holder. Technobabble on a repeat cycle. There's lots of alien/human body-horror which, again, seemed like impressive writing until I realised 20% further into the book that it seemed to be all the writer was inclined to do. It overstayed its welcome and became utterly tedious. After reading a quarter of the book and still failing to feel any connection with anyone or anything in the story, I decided to move on.
Started well, with lots of concise world-building detail, or so I thought. Then, after growing bored with the book, I looked it up and realised this is book NINE in the author's universe, so maybe the world-building is simply laying out groundwork already developed and shared from those other books. No actual characters here: Just a cypher of a protagonist whose entire character is 'revenge'. Maybe there was more to it, but if so, it was held too close to the chest to see and I wasn't intrigued enough to find out either way. The shine of novelty very quickly fades from the protagonist and there's not much there once the introduction is over. The one thing I can say about him is he's apparently a world champion technobabble record holder. Technobabble on a repeat cycle. There's lots of alien/human body-horror which, again, seemed like impressive writing until I realised 20% further into the book that it seemed to be all the writer was inclined to do. It overstayed its welcome and became utterly tedious. After reading a quarter of the book and still failing to feel any connection with anyone or anything in the story, I decided to move on.