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Books like The Line Of Polity

The Line Of Polity

2004Neal Asher

4.4/5

Asher is acceleration, getting better, faster and wittier and taking a place right next to the behemoths of Sci-Fi, especially space opera.It´s how the old ideas are carved to new forms, how they are mixed, combined and confronted with each other and how much is condensed in this amazing novel.And the man is funny, probably just Banks, Scalzi, Hamilton, and some authors mix quick laughs with cool, pointy wit and badass comments and deeper humor, build on the perfectly constructed scenes, plotlines, confrontations, and dialogues. I would call his work an amalgam of the epic world-building of Hamilton, Scalzi's wit and Banks´ innuendos without any, for some audiences, hard to digest Hard-Sci elements or lengths.The mixture of settings integrates elements of horror, fantasy and a cyberpunk-dystopian-middle age world and contrasts it in clear detail, what is always the sense of such constellations, duh, and switches between hardcore primitive to high techie beyond all categories.My absolute favorite are my highly appreciated, close to beloved, elements of grey and green goo and alien technology. Seen and described, written on hundreds of pages of all popular Sci-Fi authors, the very detailed description of how assimilation, evolution, symbioses, parasitism, conflicts, etc. may arise out of an inner and outer plot mix of one or all of those technologies going haywire is always a pleasure to read. Reminds me of the transformation of one of Iain M Banks´ characters infested with the Melding Plague and one of Alastair Reynolds´ grey goo scenarios.How much is enough is a tricky question in Sci-Fi and especially other Hard-Sci authors tend to both infodump, bore and overexert a general audience with too complex and too detailed descriptions, but Asher finds the perfect balance of understandable descriptions in developing settings without ever being static or boring. All Sci-Fi fans united, read this man if you ran out of series, this is Sci-Fi worldbuilding at it´s best! Tropes show how literature is conceptualized and created and which mixture of elements makes works and genres unique: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.ph...

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