PRADOR MOON

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Neal Asher takes on first contact, Polity style. This original novel recounts the first contact between the aggressive Prador aliens, and the Polity Collective as it is forced to retool its society to a war footing. The overwhelming brute force of the Prador dreadnaughts causes several worlds and space stations to be overrun. Prador Moon follows the initial Polity defeats, to the first draws, and culminates in what might be the first Polity victory, told from the point of view of two unlikely heroes.

The back cover of Asher's latest has the heading, "It's first contact . . . Polity style!" If you guessed that involved tea and crumpets, you're slightly off the mark. The opening chapter describes the first meeting between Prador emissaries and a human Polity ambassador, the latter being promptly lifted by one claw belonging to the former, and then snipped in two. The first diplomatic meeting between the two races thus marks a bloody and explosive beginning to total war. -- J J S Boyce (Green Man Review)

This being a Neal Asher novel, however, these issues do not tend to incite esoteric, multi-page conversations exploring the finer points of morality. As in the previous five Polity books and his extra-continuum novel Cowl, Asher is content to raise the issues for the reader to think about while his enraged combatants proceed to rip each other's intestines out. -- Scifi.com

I wasn't sure I was going to really enjoy this book when if first fell into my hands, but by the end of the first chapter, I had become convinced that this was a new universe I was going to want to explore. -- Paul Haggerty (sfrevu)

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