Kind of fun, a bit like Altered Carbon, the basic premise is that of an enhanced secret service agent helping to keep humanity safe (ish) against various threats. On to the next Polity novel - based on the order they were written and published in and not the usually used chronological one. And it is entertaining and absolutely worth reading. Weirder really.I actually enjoyed this novel a lot - characters may not be fully developed and it may never get its technology fully explained but as a first novel in a series and a debut of an author it is great. Add to this an immortal man that had survived a nuclear explosion (on our Earth? On a parallel one?) and things get weird.

On top of that, the terrorist Ian spared (and is now half-mad) had found his own half-mad robot and really want to kill our agent.

Because he meets an old friend - an alien he had seen before one with weird reasons for his actions. So when he is sent to investigate an accident that killed everyone on a colony, he is pulled of the grid. And Ian had been like that for 30 years, longer than anyone should have been. All agents are gridlinked - a way to directly connect into what amounts to interplanetary internet. And he decides not to kill their leader which will end up causing issues down the road. At the start of the novel, Cormac is deep undercover with a terrorist anti-Polity group - figuring out how they find weapons and connections. It is a human-based - there are no real aliens (well, that is not exactly true but for the most part) although humanity had both evolved and changed itself - mostly to ensure their survival but sometimes just because they could. Meet Ian Cormac - an agent of the Polity, the organization that rules the universe (or that contains most of the planets in the living worlds anyway). So now it seemed like the time - and I wonder why I waited for so long. I had been planning to read the Polity novels for years and somehow never got around to it.

Neal asher gridlinked