Neal Asher, Hilldiggers (Tor, 2008)
Centuries ago, some of the earliest interstellar pilgrims completed the longest human journey yet in history. This distant voyage culminated in the long-awaited claim-staking of a planetary system of the travellers' own, which boasted not one, but two planets, neither quite suitable for human inhabitation. Yet both were settled, though only after a disastrous factional split amongst the colonists led to centuries of intermittent but violent interplanetary war, whenever the planets drew close enough together in orbit. And this further led, ultimately, to their isolation from the rest of the expanding but unified human race. Now an envoy has arrived, alien, yet familiar, a different sort of human being, with a message from home. And he's about to be caught in the middle of the greatest power struggle the system has seen yet.
This novel marks a bit of a departure from previous entries in the Polity series. In it, Asher takes a step back from the vast and rich galaxy-spanning society he's built up over the course of many thousands of pages, and starts almost from scratch. By introducing us to a new human-run star system, long isolated from its parent planets, and, more importantly, those planets' powerful AIs, he's able to bypass the usual situations and concerns he addresses in his novels, and instead to examine other fascinating, different questions.
The result works well as a stand-alone story for those unfamiliar with the Polity universe, while maintaining a spin-off's degree of connection with the original series. The powerful computer intelligence and political leader, Geronamid, makes only a brief appearance near the opening of the story, and though two of our main characters, the virally-altered human diplomat, McCrooger, and the spy drone, Tigger, are from the Polity and under the AI's orders, we hear little about the place they come from, the focus instead centering on the unusual, decidedly non-parallel development of the human societies on these two neighbouring planets.
In the case of both planetary societies, more technology has been lost than gained since the initial conflict. Bioengineering tools were used to adapt to the two planets, cool Brumal and boiling Sudoria, both outside the range of normal human tolerance, but that initial technology has since been lost. The humans on both planets have both changed significantly enough to be alien to each other, not only morphologically, but culturally. For the visiting Polity diplomat, himself from a human-colonized alien planet, both groups prove equally strange.
What's more, a true alien, an incomprehensible multi-dimensional being, known only as "The Worm," has been under intense study since its capture by the Sudorian military decades ago, leading to advances in gravity technology, and the infamous Hilldigger war machines, a critical advantage for the single planet possessing it. But there is almost certainly more to this mysterious entity than meets the eye, and it may prove to be more than just another bargaining chip in the eternal inter- and intra-planetary politics of the system.
As ever, Asher's plotting is multi-faceted and fast-paced, shifting fluidly between many viewpoints. Characterization is not overwrought, but proceeds through action and only brief introspection. The Polity series tends to have a high page to reading time ratio for this reason. Hilldiggers is no exception, and I polished it off rather quickly, despite the small pockets of time I had for reading these last few weeks.
From a technical perspective, Asher's science fiction is amongst the hardest of far-future offerings, but I've always appreciated his equal appropriation of science screen time to both cutting-edge biotech and more traditional physics tropes like space battles and robots. In Hilldiggers, his consideration of an ancestral human population spawning two separately evolving groups, both biologically (self-directed) and culturally, under different environmental conditions, is interesting from a societal and bio- and geo-sociological perspective, but it was also very interesting from a technological perspective.
What we have here are two highly-advanced human societies (relative to our 21st century abilities), accomplished via very different technological routes. One derives most of their engineering from applied physics, the other from applied biology. Sometimes we see equivalent results from different means, other times we see the different strengths and weaknesses of each. We also see how individuals in each society interact with their technology in different ways depending on its origins and history.
Although the characters and situations in his latest are in many ways different from some of Asher's other works, Hilldiggers still has this much in common with previous Polity novels: it makes your heart pump faster and it makes your brain work harder. If you like high-octane science fiction, you can't ask for any more than that.
Other Polity novels reviewed at Green Man: Brass Man, The Voyage of the Sable Keech, Prador Moon, Polity Agent, Gridlinked. You can check out Neal Asher's official fan site for more info on him and his books.
