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Even from this brief plot teaser you can see that with ''Polity Agent'' we are firmly in the realm of high-tech space opera: interstellar travel through U-space, anti-gravity transport, spaceship battles, anti-matter guns, violent annihilation of whole planets. On top of this we have a good dose of post cyber-punk motifs including benign ruling AIs, humans augmented with electronics, Virtual Reality, a mighty information grid (presumably descendant of The Net) and memcrystals. Add genetic modification, bio-machines and a powerful nanotechnology that breeds like a combination of biological and information virus and you have an author that clearly knows his stuff and confidently uses the whole science-fiction toolkit.
All of this is combined quite well into a consistent and believable world which to me strongly resembles Banks's Culture though Polity is of somehow more obviously harsh and warlike, masculine character. There is an acknowledgement of Asher's debt to Banks though it only mentions drones; but the book also owes a lot to the cyberpunk tradition - in fact the cover of ''Polity Agent'' reminded me instantly of the cover of my copy of [[''Neuromancer]]''.
It's all there, and by all accounts ''Polity Agent'' should be, if not exactly inspiring, then at least fun. However, this novel fails on the main criterion of genre fiction. It is, despite all those plot strands and characters and fireworks of undoubted technical inventiveness, bit boring. I could put it down pretty easily and I felt no compulsion to take it everywhere with me, as a true page-turner would induce. In fact I stopped reading ''Polity Agent'' for a day to devote it to a short but extremely interesting (and funny) book about origins of English language.