Prador Moon by Neal Asher – review

Prador Moon by Neal Asher is an action-packed book featuring as its heroes Jebel “U-cap” Krong, a legendary guerilla fighter with a personal score to settle with the crab-like Prador, and Moria Salem, a brilliant scientist with augmented intelligence. They and the Polity, a starfaring human civilization under the benevolent rule of watchful Artificial Intelligences, are fighting a (losing) battle against the incredibly voracious and ruthless Prador civilization.  The Polity does not have worse weapons or less technology than the Pradors – they just are constantly beaten to the punch by them, and at first don’t understand how the dreadnoughts of the Pradors seem to be impervious to any attempts to destroy them.

Though I count Neal Asher as one of today’s best military SF authors, and I enjoyed reading Prador Moon, I didn’t like it quite as much as the other two Asher novels I’ve read, Brass Man and Shadow of the Scorpion. It’s still a good read, and a good introduction that provides background info to help in one’s getting into the other novels in the series, so I’d recommend it – just rate it a little lower than the quality of Brass Man and Shadow of the Scorpion. Maybe this is because I read the other two novels before I read Prador Moon, which actually came out in hardback previous to the other two, in 2006.

The novel is presented from three different POVs, those of Jebel Krong, Moria Salem, and Immanence, the Prador captain of a starship that is responsible for much of the destruction and mayhem that occurs in the novel. This includes the annihiliation of most human life on any moons and planets the Prador encounter, and the death of the woman Jebel loved. Her death sparks Jebel’s intense desire for revenge, to kill any Pradors he can as a payback. Theirs is a losing battle, but Krong and the others fighting along him make sure that the Prador pay dearly for every inch of every planet they try to claim.

One technological advancement that the Polity has that the Prador doesn’t is runcible technology. Buffer types of runcibles are gateways or warps that take humans from realspace into U-space and to a destination runcible and back into realspace with no time having passed. The idea of runcibles was thought up by the scientist Iversus Skaidon, though they are all controlled by AIs. The name “runcible,” was first coined by Edward Lear in his poem “The Owl and the Pussycat,” and was a nonsensical sort of adjective used to describe a spoon. The humans who are transported via the runcibles are sometimes referred to as the “mince,” since the runcible spoon in the poem held mince. Asher’s references to the Lear poem, quoting parts of it at the beginnings of each chapter, was to me one of the coolest things about Prador Moon, apart from the practically nonstop action and vivid descriptions of the Prador’s brutality in it.

The military campaign Jebel Krong and the Polity forces wage must delay the main Prador advance to buy the AI time to craft a strategy to defeat them. Moria Salem is responsible for stopping the threat of a second prong of the Prador that is heading straight for the center of the Polity.  Krong makes use of the brute force approach of bombs and guns to fight his enemy, and, as such, he reminded me of the hero Ian Cormac of Brass Man and Shadow of the Scorpion.  (Krong is actually referred to in those books as someone Cormac admires and idolizes, to an extent.)  Salem, on the other hand, has a plan that is based more on an incredible amount of calculations she solves by using her Skaidon-designed augmenting and link with an AI. Of the two characters, I liked Krong the most, though neither one’s character development is taken very far. Action seems to be more the forte of Asher, though his major characters do show character development over the course of the books (for example, Cormac’s character is developed to a greater extent in the prequel The Shadow of Scorpion).

Immanence, captain of the Prador starship which destroys most of the first contact team and then sets forth to slaughter (and consume) all the humans he can get his claws on, is perhaps the most interesting character in the novel. That’s because when I read the chapters written from his POV, I really got the sense of exactly how ruthless the Prador are much better than if I’d just read what other characters think about the Prador. Besides eating his human captives, and having them be dissected and fed to him by his offspring, who form the crew of his spaceship, he is not above also eating his fellow Pradors, if they fail to meet his expectations or if they seem like they might be trying to compete with him for power. Also, his plans for enslaving humanity include having some of them cored or reamed out, becoming little more than mindless shells he can order to perform whatever tasks he sets them. He’s a particularly nasty and memorable villian.

I read Prador Moon out of sequence, as I’ve mentioned, so my reasons for liking and not liking aspects of it are tinged by this, but overall, I think it’s a good addition to the series. Though I’d read about Jebel Krong, it was only through Cormac’s perspective, looking back at him as having been a great war hero who inflicted massive Prador casualties. It took me awhile to warm up to Krong’s character, as I was more familiar with Cormac’s, and Cormac’s is better developed and rounded, on the whole. Still, Jebel Krong and Moria Salem make for two very interesting characters in their own right, and there’s plenty of high technology, space battles, ground assaults, and radical physics to likely please most military SF fans. Reading this Night Shade 2009 paperback edition of Prador Moon has got me eagerly anticipating reading Asher’s next book, Orbus.