Book Review: Orbus by Neal Asher

Orbus by Neal Asher is the follow-up to Asher's The Skinner and The Voyage of the Sable Keech, and part of his larger Polity future history (Gridlinked and the subsequent Ian Cormac books, The Technician, Hilldiggers, etc.) It continues where The Voyage of the Sable Keech left off and has a number of recurring characters, but while it's not strictly necessary to have read them to follow what's going on here I'd recommend reading them in order.

Spatterjay is a marginally habitable planet that lies just outside the territory of the the AI-ruled interstellar society known as the Polity, best-known for the virus that pervades its bizarre ecology. Transmitted by the bite of a leech-like creature native to the planet and able to infect almost anything, it gradually transforms its carriers, making them stronger, tougher, and virtually immortal- and, in the case of non-native life like humans, transforming them into monstrous, mutated creatures if they don't get sufficient nutrients from their species' native environment to maintain enough of their natural biological processes enough to prevent the virus's genetic material from supplanting them entirely.

Both the planet's name and its human population, commonly called “Hoopers,” are a legacy of the devastating war between the Polity and the alien Prador, when the infamous war criminal and collaborator “Spatter” Jay Hoop aided the Prador by helping round up millions of human prisoners into concentration camps on Spatterjay. Beyond Spatterjay lays the Graveyard, a vast and mostly uninhabited expanse filled with the burnt-out ruins of worlds ravaged during the war. It is now neutral territory providing a buffer zone between the Polity and the Prador Third Kingdom, inhabited only by a few isolated settlements eking out a living in the ruins and by criminal elements using it as a refuge where the warships of both great powers are forbidden to go.

Jericho Orbus is one of the oldest Hoopers of all- one of the original humans imprisoned by Jay Hoop, and one of the very, very few to actually survive. His sanity shredded by the horror of what he saw and suffered, and of what he had to do to survive, Orbus became brutal even by the standards of Spatterjay's frequently violent culture. He spent centuries sailing the  fearsomely dangerous seas of Spatterjay, eventually becoming  the captain of a crew of other shattered men and women who served as outlets for his all-consuming rage- as masochistic as he was sadistic, and able to survive the punishment he dished out thanks to the superhuman resilience granted by the virus.

This might have gone on indefinitely, were it not for a near encounter with death during the events of The Voyage of the Sable Keech that nearly led to a total takeover of his body by the virus. The psychological and physiological shock of having almost his entire body irrevocably altered by the virus and then returned to something at least resembling human jarred something awake in him, the parts of himself he had to bury to do what he had to do to survive the unimaginable horror of his past- his humanity.

Sniper, an artificially intelligent polity war drone built during the Prador War and since gone freelance, has decided to make himself scarce after receiving a summons from the ruling AIs of the polity, who have some questions for him about his role in recent events on Spatterjay. Lying low, he and his companion Thirteen, a fellow free drone, stow themselves away in the cargo hold of a small freighter, the Gurnard- a freighter captained by none other than Orbus, who has found a new life for himself as he tries to overcome the brutal centuries-long nightmare of Spatterjay. They are caught by the Gurnard's AI- which allows them to remain as passengers and seems oddly sanguine about the discovery of a fugitive war machine hiding in its cargo holds.

Meanwhile Vrell, a rogue Prador infected with the Spatterjay virus and transformed into something even more fearsome than the rest of his kind, has seized control of a Prador dreadnought and is headed to the Graveyard to lie low. The King of the Prador Third Kingdom has taken an interest in a relic of the Prador's past that now resides there, a powerful, monstrous entity that is thought to be mythical by most of his species- and will be at the heart of events driven by something older and more horrifying still. And when Orbus finds himself and his ship recruited for a covert Polity intelligence operation in the region, it becomes apparent to sniper that the sequence of events that led to a superhumanly dangerous man with a burning hatred for the Prador and a rogue war drone with centuries of experience that was literally born to fight them finding themselves together on a freighter bound for the graveyard was not a coincidence

Orbus is an excellent space opera and a great addition to Asher's future history. As usual, Asher's action sequences are top-notch here, and the events of the story provide plenty of scope for them. The central story is interesting, with lots of action and some well-paced and well-executed revelations about the Prador, the Spatterjay virus, and the nature of Orbus' mission into the Graveyard.

It was nice to see more about the Prador, a race of crab-like aliens that have been enormously important to the history of the Polity but have usually been peripheral figures, at most, in the events of most of the books. Orbus helps drive home just how disturbingly alien they are. Prador society is staggeringly oppressive, exploitative, and cruel by any sane human's standard. This is not out of malice, but because Prador are highly competitive organisms whose biology- specifically their high fecundity combined with the ability of adult Prador to control their children through pheromones- makes it possible for groups of Prador to work together as a cohesive unit without the sorts of instincts, behaviors, and emotions that human social bonds depend on. There was no selective pressure favoring the evolution of the capacity to feel sympathy or pity or loyalty, so Prador don't feel them. It's nothing personal.

Orbus was a side character in The Voyage of the Sable Keech, and a rather disturbing one, so it's interesting to see him given a larger role as he retries to regain his humanity. He doesn't stand out as much as some of the other characters, but in this case it works. Rather like Asher's portrayal of an autistic boy in The Shadow of the Scorpion, some of the criticisms of Orbus' characterization that I've seen elsewhere were directed at the very aspects of the character that I liked and thought made the character ring true. Orbus is generally fairly subdued, quiet, has a somewhat flat affect, and doesn't stand out as much as those around him-  in other words, he acts the way people trying to put themselves back together in the aftermath of devastating psychological trauma very often act, and that made him quite compelling to me.

I definitely recommend Orbus to fans of Neal Asher's Polity universe, and Asher's work as a whole to any fan of space opera. Frustratingly if you're an American reader, most of his books have seemingly been released in every industrialized country on Earth except the United States, but they're well-worth seeking out. (I strongly recommend The Book Depository if you're an American looking for something from the United Kingdom; they ship free worldwide and I've had nothing but positive experiences dealing with them. Third-party sellers at Amazon.com can also be helpful.) Neal Asher continues to impress.