Neil Asher's Gridlinked was the first novel from a British SF writer who had been writing short stories for the British small press since 1989. Published in 2001 by Pan MacMillan in the UK, a mass market edition (432pp ISBN 978-0765349057) is available from Tor.
Ian Cormac
The titular hero of Gridlinked is Ian Cormac, a Polity agent who has been linked to an Artificial Intelligence for thirty years -- more than a decade longer than the recommended maximum. Cormac has lost much of his humanity, and --according to his sometime-mentor Horace Blegg-- his edge.
This is made clear at the beginning of the novel, when Cormac kills a separatist agent, Angelina Pelter. It's implied later that the execution wasn't strictly necessary, and in the process Cormac makes an implacable enemy of the Separatist cell's leader, Anegelina's brother Arian.
Armed with a fistful of money, a reconfigured android called Mr. Crane who kills people by banging their heads together so hard that their skulls smash, and a gofer called Stanton, Pelter sets off across the galaxy to wreak his revenge on Cormac.
Runcible Tales
The worlds that humanity has settled are interconnected by Runcibles --matter-transmitters-- and run in a sort of benevolent tyranny by AIs. (One neat trick that Asher does is to have chapter notes offering 'opinions' by fictional characters which sometimes conflict with the main narrative, and in the process offering an extra dimension to Asher's fiction-verse)
Asher had been creating his Runcible-verse for almost a decade before Gridlinked, ever since what was only his third appearance in print. Four more stories were to appear in his 1999 chapbook collection, Runcible Tales. One of those stories, "The Dragon in the Flower" is worked into the main narrative of the novel.
The Dragon is an extra-terrestrial creature of almost unimaginable power, and has an agenda of its own, which involves using Cormac to destroy its maker.
Gridlinked
Asher's first novel is a taut, gripping James Bond-esque adventure. For a first novel, it has remarkably few flaws; admittedly Ian Cormac's transformation from quasi-robot to rounded human being is erratic --sidelined by the various plotlines involving the Dragon and Pelter-- so that there's a feeling of missing continuity, and the romantic sub-plot involving Stanton and his pilot girlfriend, while briefly moving, never really interacts with the main plot -- instead they elope almost off-camera. But for the most part, Gridlinked is an excellent read, and presaged the emergence of a major new British talent.
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