Shadow of the Scorpion

This book follows in Asher's Polity series featuring secret agent Ian Cormac, deadly employee of the Earth Central Security forces, a series which began with Gridlinked (2001), Asher's first novel, and has so far continued through three others. It jumps back in continuity to explicate Cormac's youth and his start as an agent, filling in the past of someone we've already seen in mature form.

Cormac lives in a period when the galaxy is threaded by the runcible, an instantaneous teleporting device. Naturally, given this instrument, humanity has spread far and wide, aided by artificial intelligences and some cool tech. Our kind has recently concluded a war against the Prador, a weird and violent arthropoid race. But no member of the Prador is alluded to by the scorpion of the title. That entity is a enigmatic human-created war drone which has been shadowing Cormac for 10 years, ever since the death of Cormac's father when the boy was 8. (One track of the novel follows that youthful Cormac, his mother and his big brother Dax on Earth, in such exotic locales as the undersea city of Tritonia.) The drone seems to bear a message for Cormac, but one which will not be delivered until Cormac has gone through many mortal trials.

The main action of the novel takes place when Cormac is a young-adult soldier in the ECS. He and his two mates—Carl Thrace and Yallow N'gar—have just been assigned to the planet Hagren, to guard a crashed Prador warship being plundered by human scientists. The ship also contains awesome weapons, which are desired by the Separatist insurgents. When Carl is proven a traitor and closet Separatist early in the mission, Cormac's life and future get warped into a melange of vengeance and patriotism and personal questing for the truth of his own excised past. With his new comrades, including the android Golem Crean, Cormac will learn if he has the right stuff to make an ECS agent.

There will be weird wars

Every new war ultimately generates its own science fiction, perhaps with some time lag.

WWII and Korea gave us Starship Troopers (1959).

Vietnam brought us Joe Haldeman's The Forever War (1974).

Covert Latin American incursions led to Lucius Shepard's Life During Wartime (1987).

And now, in the wake of Iraq I and Iraq II, in a post-9/11, post-Abu Ghraib landscape, we are starting to see a different kind of military SF, most notably in the work of Richard Morgan and a few others. Oh, sure, there's still tons of military SF with its head in the ground, recreating old paradigms with real or false nostalgia. But a few writers with their fingers on the true pulse of events are beginning to depict a future with its roots in contemporary realities. Asher and this novel are part of this phenomenon, by which SF rejuvenates its core concepts.

The way the soldiers of the Polity are rebuilt after what would otherwise be fatal wounds; the way the Separatists wage an insurgency; the way the commanders of the Polity ruthlessly direct their war; the nature of an enemy like the Prador— All these elements and more bespeak close attention to 21st-century headlines. Asher even subtly connects sex and torture, as in the Abu Graib scandal. Here's Yallow seducing Cormac: "I'm going to need your undivided attention for a good hour." And here's ultra-tough Agent Spencer preparing to torture information out of a rebel named Sheen: "You are a very valuable piece of meat and you are going to receive my utter attention over the next few hours." Case closed.

The result is a rather grim yet compelling depiction of the oddball hells of future wartime, blended with the new characterization and motivation for Cormac. (Not to mention a goodly amount of hip and exciting technological and sociological extrapolation, and many convulsive, propulsive action scenes.) The book falls down only in retrospect, after the last revelation, due to its lack of larger meaning and significance. It's a novel intended primarily as a backfilling assignment, not concerned with larger galactic issues. So it's missing perhaps one leg out of a hypothetical three.