Shadow of the Scorpion

Rating NR Genre sci-fi Author Neal Asher Publisher Night Shade Books

Neal Asher's Shadow of the Scorpion takes a long time to ramp up to anything like a plot, and when it does, that plot isn't very interesting.  The chapters alternate between two main plot threads.  In the first, which sometimes takes up a whole chapter and sometimes a paragraph, a young boy named Ian Cormac travels with his archaeologist mother and whose father and brother are at war against the Prador, cliché bug monsters.  In the other,  Cormac is an adult fighting in that war who is assigned to track down Carl Thrace, a traitor working with a separatist faction with no discernible goal except to be sinister and make speeches.  After a destructive encounter with Thrace in which his unit and many other soldiers are wiped out, Cormac is assigned to a new unit, and while en route to his first mission with them discovers that his mother had memories of his father's death removed from his mind.  The childhood flashbacks, which should now come into focus and reveal themselves as a mystery to solve, still seem disjointed, and now they begin again with slightly more information.  A scorpion-shaped war drone named Amistad that has haunted Cormac's memories for years was on the battlefield with his father, and felt obligated to inform his family of his death.  Cormac's mother opposed this, so she removed the relevant memories, supposedly to spare her son pain even though he never met his father.

The two time lines are difficult to sort out.  This is at least partially due to an early scene in which young Ian declares to his mother that he will be known as Cormac from now on.  She agrees, and for the rest of the novel there is no clear cue which Cormac we are reading about until the second or third paragraph of the chapter.  The jumps back to the war time line are equally disorienting, though it gets clearer as the pattern of flashback/main plot builds momentum.  The writing style is also troublesome, which should be clear since a storyline about a school child and a man at war are not immediately distinct.  The sentence structure feels disjointed, even making allowances for the differences between British and American English.  Asher's characters give speeches.  The dialog is stilted throughout, but never more than during Cormac's first fight with Thrace.  While the action is exciting and well described, Carl's “you can't hide forever” speech conveys a moustache-twirling, top-hat-wearing, damsel-to-the-railroad-tracks-tying caricature, not a believable villain.

The novel has some redeeming qualities.  The surly computer Artificial Intelligences and the androids that serve alongside human companions have some depth as they struggle to find acceptance, but this is all well-trodden ground.  Just like the big, scary bug monsters, these are clichés that have been wrung dry over the years.  When there is action, it moves along at a brisk pace.  Asher's writing shines when things are moving and there is a sense of danger and urgency.  There just isn't enough of it.  Shadow of the Scorpion is part of a series, and it's hard to escape the feeling that it exists only to fill in back story.  This can be done well (Caine Black Knife, for instance), but in this case the plot seems to take a back seat to ticking off items that fans of Asher's other works have heard of and want to know how they happened.  If this novel works for those fans, that's wonderful.  As its own work, it doesn't hold up.