The Sensic augmentation behind the man's left ear told him things he did not want to know. The vogue slick-pants and corsair shirt told him all he needed to know. Typical well-hugger trying to look like a member of the runcible culture, he thought.

On Samarkand it was raining Dragon scales. Tropes show how literature is conceived and which mixture of elements makes works and genres unique:Ĭatadapts, ophidapts and lots of other weird stuff.Ī blue snow was falling on the roof of the embarkation lounge, where it melted and snaked across the glass in inky rivulets. It would be an interesting exaggeration of gender stereotypes when the male and female roles are reversed and caricatured. This concept is a fresh, unspent idea and could find use in Social Sci-Fi, for instance with different, competing transhumanist concepts like a technocratic, cold, more machine than cyborg woman slowly getting interested in a Gaia-hyping, bioengineered, eco-friendly terraforming Psiguy. Does the machine become humanoid or does the soft shell become like an AI and what is the better model, if it is even possible to objective point the finger on the more attractive lifestyle? Both parties could, with or without consent or noticing it, assimilate, manipulate, destroy, help, etc. The motive or programming of the AI to share its immense capacity with something as slow as an alien or human opens up the option to describe both the AIs and the persons' main plot goals. for both involved, depending on how much feelings an AI can perceive and control. This can be symbiotic, parasitic, psychotic, traumatic, etc. They may, parallel to lonely learning, expanding and rewriting and optimizing their own code and added machinery and production capacity, unite and fuse with aliens and humans in different grades of severity. Like the behemoths of the genre Hamilton, Scalzi, Banks, Reynolds, Simmons, etc., Asher has created an authentic, complex world, bursting with fresh, creative Sci-Fi ideas.Įspecially interesting is the idea of the influence of human and alien AIs that are not just entities of their own, but may be open or even dependent on a second kind of evolution.

The entry point of another great, complex space-opera series, Asher´s Polity universe, offers everything a Sci-Fi fan can wish for.

Gridlinked by Neal Asher