Shadow of the Scorpion
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4.4 • 74 Ratings
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
Seamlessly blending space opera, hard science fiction and cyberpunk, Neal Asher's Shadow of the Scorpion is a gripping prequel to the compelling Agent Cormac series.
Following the devastation of the human-prador war, Ian Cormac is employed by the Earth Central Security. Yet he is haunted by childhood memories of a sinister scorpion-shaped war drone and the burden of losses he doesn’t remember.
Tasked with restoring order on worlds ravaged by alien warfare, his cold capacity for violence soon makes him one of Earth's top agents. But chilling discoveries propel Cormac onto a path of revenge and revenge, where he'll have to use all his hard-won skills just to stay alive.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
An energetic, gory prequel to Asher's "Polity" novels (Gridlinked, etc.), this far-future novel alternates the youthful memories of Ian Cormac, Asher's complex soldier-hero, with Cormac's brutal adult efforts to master lethal-force training as an undercover agent in Earth Central Security's conflict with the terroristic Jovian Separatists. Amistad, an anthropoid war drone Cormac had glimpsed as a boy, resurfaces periodically throughout the novel, a relic of the half-century-old war between humanity's galactic Polity and the vicious alien Prador. Gradually, Cormac's recollections merge with his ECS missions, until finally Amistad reveals what Cormac most needs and fears to know: his father's fate in an earlier battle. This blasting indictment of war forces readers to ponder whether winning can be worth the struggle if it turns the "good guys" into something worse than their enemies.
