Polarity Series

Author: Neal Asher

Beginning with his first novel, Gridlinked, Neal Asher has consistently explored a fecund and violent future known as the Polity. In something like 13 novels to date, he has combined extravagant space opera invention, such as world-ruling AIs, androids, all sorts of aliens, interstellar matter transmission, and venomous parasites that can confer immortality, with the sort of gritty, violent storytelling more often associated with cyberpunk. In among all of this there are barely-human investigators, separatist movements, betrayals and wars, a constant thread of action keeps the books sizzling at a fast pace.There's over 13 books in the Polarity universe, with some of the books in their own stand alone series, and even some stand alones. A good starting point is the chronologically first book Prador's Moon. However, an equally good place to start is with Gridlinked, probably one of the more popular books in the series. And finally, another starting point is The Skinner, the first book in the Spatterjay trilogy which is a sort of biopunk heroic science fiction series set in the Polarity universe -- it's weird, strange, and yet entirely exciting (and a lot of action in this trilogy). Why itâ€™s on the listClearly influenced by Iain Banks, Neal Asher shows that space opera can have a contemporary political relevance.