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…