Brass Man

By Neal Asher

No one can outrun the past in Brass Man, is the third novel in Neal Asher's popular Agent Cormac series.

Imperfectly resurrected by Jain technology, Mr Crane is back from the dead. The brass killing machine is haunted by a violent past he can’t fully forget or truly remember. He seeks to heal his shattered mind as his new master, an old biophysicist enemy of Agent Cormac, sets him on an improbable mission: to hunt a dragon on the frontier world of Cull.

On Cull, each day is a struggle for survival. Ferocious insectile monsters roam the volatile planet. And the low-tech human settlers are desperate to reach their ancestors’ starship – orbiting tantalisingly out of reach. An entity calling itself Dragon assists them, but what are its real motives, and why is the biophysicist really here? Cormac must find the answers, and face multiple threats to the Polity.

Brass Man is followed by Polity Agent, the fourth book in the Agent Cormac series.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pan Macmillan
• Release date: Aug 21, 2009
• ISBN: 9780330464819

Neal Asher

Neal Asher divides his time between Essex and Crete, mostly at a keyboard and mentally light years away. His full-length novels are as follows. First is the Agent Cormac series: Gridlinked, The Line of Polity, Brass Man, Polity Agent and Line War. Next comes the Spatterjay series: The Skinner, The Voyage of the Sable Keech and Orbus. Also set in the same world of the Polity are these standalone novels: Hilldiggers, Prador Moon, Shadow of the Scorpion, The Technician, Jack Four and Weaponized. The Transformation trilogy is also based in the Polity: Dark Intelligence, War Factory and Infinity Engine. Set in a dystopian future are The Departure, Zero Point and Jupiter War, while Cowl takes us across time. The Rise of the Jain trilogy is comprised of The Soldier, The Warship and The Human, and is also set in the Polity universe.

Reviews for Brass Man

[skraft001 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

First book of the series I've read and believe that was to my detriment as too many story lines going and hopped too quick from one to the next.

[grizzly9anderson · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

The cover blurb and the first few pages of Brass Man piqued my interest and gave me high expectations. Instead, over the course of the next almost 300 pages I often found myself about ready to give it up. By that last 200 or so pages the story of a sociopathic killer robot, machinations of ruling AIs, alien dragons, primitive dragon slayers, government agents, rogue AIs, resurrected killers, and a random assortment of minor characters turned in to enough of an action chase scene to at least keep my interest.The story concerns Mr. Crane, a Golem (robot) and the Brass Man of the title, that has been turned into a sociopathic killer with a literally shattered mind. Except that it takes probably half the novel to find that out. Eventually you realize that he is on some sort of inexplicable quest to pull his "self" back together and become his own again. Except that how that is managed doesn't make much sense, and by the time it happens, I didn't much care.It also concerns an inscrutable alien intelligence/partial-collective-being called Dragon that is manipulating things on an up-until-now lost and isolated human world where it is hiding from the rest of humanity and from some alien McGuffin technology called "Jain fibers". And maybe Dragon reaches some kind of truce or salvation, but again by then I didn't care.And those Jain fibers control or are controlled by a super-criminal who exists to be, well, a super criminal. And to abuse the Brass Man even more.Who is hunted by Ian Cormac, an agent for the Artificial Intelligences that run everything. Who have deep secret plans of their own for the betterment of all. Or something. The actual role of the AIs is never clear, and Cormac simply runs around after the bad guys, rather like James Bond, but with slightly less motivation.Oh, and then there is the ship AI named "Jack Ketch" with a fascination for the machinery and mechanisms of execution. Who turns out to be just another super-agent type with no particular motivation or ultimate relevance.Actually any one of these sub-plots would probably have made a decent adventure story by themselves, but all together and at 485 pages, they just turn in to a mess. Asher doesn't help matters by elaborately justifying a re-definition of a scientific title 358 pages in, just so he can start to use it to refer to the bad guy for no apparent reason. Or using abbreviations that are either undefined, or so obscure as to be meaningless.I think Asher was enthralled by Ian Banks and the complexity of the motivations of the ships and people of Special Circumstances. I think he tried to create something of that same depth and grandeur, and unfortunately weighed his own perfectly good space-opera down with so much baggage it collapses under its own weight.

[libgirl69 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

maybe the weakest in the series so far but still a fantastic read

[jercox · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Mr Crane gets resurrected, and someone else wasn't quite dead yet...

[nmele_4 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is a sequel to "Gridlinked", and a good one, but since one of the main characters is a psychotic killer robot and another is a kind of superman secret agent, there are lots of people killed in particularly gory ways. Several times, I wondered why so many gruesome deaths were needed...but I'd still recommend it with that caveat.