Here over at Rick Kleffel’s Agony Column is an interesting review/column:
Oh how we love our monsters, as does Asher. More importantly, he knows how to put them to work in a novel, in this case, ‘Orbus,’ where the main character, the title character is a creature that most normal humans would say is utterly monstrous. But he’s just the tip of the iceberg here. What Asher excels at is giving readers sympathetic monsters, giving us the comic relief characters who are AI “subminds,” sprouting tentacles and spewing bile. These are the “good guys” in Asher’s universe. And the good are just as grotesque and deformed as the bad; sometimes they’re also as bad as the bad. Situational ethics have permeated the fabric of Asher’s Polity universe.
And here at concatentation:
Is this Asher’s best book? Not from a question of plot, characterisation, and action? But more importantly, from the viewpoint of the writing itself, and his control over his own labours. Maybe he just keeps getting better which makes you wonder what his next book might be like, because Orbus is a cracker from start to finish.
Thank you very much.