Prador Moon
Neal Asher
248 pages
published in 2006

When I read The Voyage of the Sable Keech last year I dind't realise at first it was part of a series of novels and quite late in the series too, which rendered it slightly more confusing than it needed to be. What I should've gotten instead is Prador Moon. It's a prequel to the main series, set much earlier in its internal chronological order, doesn't depend on knowledge of other books in it and is also a much simpler story altogether. Prador Moon is a straightforward tale of interstellar war, proper space opera. It all starts when the Polity, Asher's star-spanning a.i.-cracy ruled from Earth central, comes up against the first alien race ever encountered by humans, the titular Prador.

Said Prador are a race of aliens looking something like a very large landcrab with slightly too many legs and which are very much a race of magnificent bastards, reveling in their evil. They can't help it, biology makes them do it. A Prador's life is full of danger, being reared in creches to serve their Father as loyal servants, stormtroopers and occasional food source, kept under control by pheromones. The biggest, meanest and most intelligent of the children become First Children, with some limited indepence and the potential to challenge their father's supremacy. Whether there are female Prador is not mentioned. A Prador lives to conquer and subjugate and their whole society is built around conflict, which is why the first diplomatic meeting between humanity and the Prador was cut short when the ambassador didn't surrender immediately, as was the ambassador himself...

Jebel Krong, an Earth Central Security monitor is part of the desperate fight to evacuate as many people as possible from the Polity space station where the meeting was held, through the Runcible teleportation gates linking the station to other Polity worlds. The Prador invaders are also trying to herd as many people as possible into their shuttle, actually stapling their hands together and in general getting frustrated with how fragile humans are. When Krong and his small group of soldiers attempt to ransom the leader of the Prador force in return for the hostages, he gives the order to kill them all -- and Krong's girlfriend is amongst the victims. It's from then on that Krong will earn his nickname ucap -- up close and personal -- for the way in which he jumps on Prador, sticks a Gecko mine on them and then lets them explode... Meanwhile the one Prador battleship present turns out to be more than a match for the Polity warships, having much more advanced armour that can actually absorb the energy released by p article beam attacks to charge its own weapons. The first engagement then sets the pattern for future battles: the Prador rule in space, but thanks to the Runcible and superior tactics on the ground have difficulty conquering human worlds without destroying them.

In a second storyline we meet Moira, who is one of the engineers working on the Trajeen Runcible cargo Gate, which is large enough to teleport huge freight ships. Working on technology that could've only been invented by artificial intelligences without becoming augmented yourself is hard, so she ups for the operationto have a cerebral augmentation -aug-- installed. But then it turns out the aug she got is far from a standard model while the surgeon who installed it in her turns out to be involved in illegal augmentatiton research and is wanted by the Polity... Nor is she the only one who has gotten a special model, as Conlan, a Separatist terrorist --a group wanting to liberate humanity from a.i. tyranny-- has gotten one as well and is using its capabilities to help him take over the Gate. Things come together in a nicely satisfying finale in which the somewhat generic title of this book is fully justified, as the Polity-Prador war moves to the Trajeen system and Conlan starts his attack with Moira stuck in the middle.

Prador Moon is reasonably short, fast moving and paced like an action movie. At several points however this pacing is slightly off, as between chapters the Prador war storyline seems to jump weeks or months ahead, while the Moira and Conlan secondary storylines seem to just plug along. The fact pace of the book means this never becomes more than a little niggle, but I have the feeling the timing doesn't work if you'd take the time to analyse it properly.

Neal Asher has a reputation for gore and it's present here as well, though nowhere near the level of The Voyage of the Sable Keech. The Prador reminded me of the Afdront from Iain M. Banks' Excession, while the Polity itself came across as a sligthly less advanced and a hugely more authoritarian and security conscious version of the Culture. Prador Moon isn't the best or most original space opera ever written but it's certainly fun.