Federal government through the Department of State Services (DSS) has arraigned seven men before the Federal High Court in Lagos for allegedly diverting and
We live in monstrous times. Nevertheless, I sometimes find myself wanting not to escape but to symbolically confront the plagues of cruelty, craziness, and consequences (unintended or otherwise) that the last century (or the last week) has visited upon us. Neal Asher’s confrontations tend to distance and displace the monstrous, to locate it in a future far enough away to have solved most of the problems that bedevil us now. His Polity setting, like Iain M. Banks’s Culture, imagines a material utopia where scarcity is banished and the burden of rational self-governance has been offloaded onto presumably-wiser artificial intelligences. The universe beyond the Polity remains a savage environment, though, as inter-species interstellar war and the irruption of artifacts and survivors of much more ancient conflicts make clear. And even within the bubble of Polity civilization, mankind remains potentially vile. Outside that bubble, all bets are off.