The Technician

[nealasher]

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_7mGFJ7t-ea...hnician+HB.jpg

Twenty years after the fall of the Theocracy, a religious policeman, Jeremiah Tombs, the only living survivor of a hooder attack, has escaped his sanatorium. The scorpion drone Amistad lets him run, for though Polity technology could cure him, the AIs are reluctant to meddle since it was the near mythical Technician that attacked him, and it did something to his mind that even they don’t understand.

The amphidapt Chanter pursues the Technician in his mudmarine, trying to understand the grotesque sculptures of bones the creature makes with its victim’s remains, trying to understand its art. He is recruited by Amistad, along with ex-rebel Commander Lief Grant, and a lethal black AI everyone thought was dead.

Tombs could possess information about the racial suicide of the Atheter, but his self-destructive madness needs to be cured by confrontation with the reality about him, a reality in which the religion-hating Tidy Squad wants him dead. And meanwhile, in deep space, the mechanism the Atheter used to reduce themselves to animals, stirs from slumber and begins to power-up its weapons.

[nealasher]

[Seli]

Nice, sounds intriguing. Hooders are one of the many small building blocks that make the Polity universe come alive.

[nealasher]

And not in a pleasant way, generally!

[Seli]

So very true, and that is what contributes to the -if you can use the term this way- realism of the setting. Or maybe real-world grounding is a better description.
In life here on earth many gruesome things happen every day, of course most involve insects and the like but still. The viciousness of the wildlife (natural or otherwise) in the Polity books reflects nicely this completely natural behaviour.

[nealasher]

Glad to read that from you. The times I've read people talking about overly vicious life forms in The Skinner and wondered to myself, have these people ever seen Attenborough's Blue Planet?