Shadow of the Scorpion

August 18, 2008
An energetic, gory prequel to Asher's “Polity” novels (Gridlinked
, etc.), this far-future novel alternates the youthful memories of Ian Cormac, Asher's complex soldier-hero, with Cormac's brutal adult efforts to master lethal-force training as an undercover agent in Earth Central Security's conflict with the terroristic Jovian Separatists. Amistad, an anthropoid war drone Cormac had glimpsed as a boy, resurfaces periodically throughout the novel, a relic of the half-century-old war between humanity's galactic Polity and the vicious alien Prador. Gradually, Cormac's recollections merge with his ECS missions, until finally Amistad reveals what Cormac most needs and fears to know: his father's fate in an earlier battle. This blasting indictment of war forces readers to ponder whether winning can be worth the struggle if it turns the “good guys” into something worse than their enemies.

September 1, 2008
Here Asher retreats to the formative years of his series hero Ian Cormac to reveal formative events in two time lines to reader and character alike. Growing up in the last years of the Prador war, Ian deals with the loss of his father, the too-terrible-to-remember horrors his army-medic brother has seen, and a war drone that looks like a scorpion and appears in some strange places. Reaching young manhood, he signs up with the Earth Central Security force and heads out to a world devastated by the Prador. While guarding a Prador crash site, he is accidentally caught up in uncovering a separatist movement, an involvement that costs him comrades and whatever innocence he may have had left. Discovering his capacity for violence, he chases down the most dangerous of the separatists and learns the significance of that scorpion war drone he vaguely recalls from childhood. This slim volume that greatly develops Cormacs character is an excellent window into the worldthe Polity universethat Asher has created in the Ian Cormac and Prador novels.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2008, American Library Association.)