Please open https://hotaudiobook.com ONLY on your standard browser Safari, Chrome, Microsoft or Firefox to download full audiobooks of your choice for free.

Title: The Line War

Author: Neal Asher

Narrator: Ric Jerrom

Format: Unabridged

Length: 21 hrs and 8 mins

Language: English

Release date: 11-16-17

Publisher: Macmillan Digital Audio

Genres: Sci-Fi & Fantasy, Sci-Fi: Contemporary

Publisher's Summary:

The Line War is the fifth audiobook in Neal Asher's popular Agent Cormac series.

The Polity is under attack from a 'melded' AI entity with control of the lethal Jain technology, yet the attack seems to have no coherence. When one of Erebus' wormships kills millions on the world of Klurhammon, a high-tech agricultural world of no real tactical significance, agent Ian Cormac is sent to investigate, though he is secretly struggling to control a new ability no human being should possess...and beginning to question the motives of his AI masters.

Further attacks and seemingly indiscriminate slaughter ensue but serve only to bring some of the most dangerous individuals in the Polity into the war. Mr Crane, the indefatigable brass killing machine, sets out for vengeance while Orlandine, a vastly augmented haiman who herself controls Jain technology, seeks a weapon of appalling power and finds allies from an ancient war.

Meanwhile Mika, scientist and Dragon expert, is again kidnapped by that unfathomable alien entity and dragged into the heart of things: to wake the makers of Jain technology from their five-million-year slumber.

But Erebus' attacks are not so indiscriminate after all and could very well herald the end of the Polity itself....

Members Reviews:

Action packed, but still a let-down

When you pick up a Neal Asher novel, you expect a lot of action, violence, gore, and mayhem. All of those things are available in abundance in his fifth Ian Cormac novel, LINE WAR. The war in question was joined at the climax of the previous novel, POLITY AGENT, when the forces of the Polity attacked the anti-human artificial intelligence (AI) Erebus. Erebus, it turns out, was responsible for delivering dangerous Jain technology to the mad scientist Skellor and the knowledge-hungry engineer haiman Orlandine, among others. Jain technology, the fruit of a society extinct for millions of years, offers great power to those who touch it, but it also has a hidden purpose--the total annihilation of all beings who utilize it. Erebus, which has itself harnessed Jain technology, hopes to destroy humanity through the propagation of the technology, and, if necessary, through military conquest ... of the sneakiest sort. When it begins its offensive with an attack on an obscure Polity world, Earth Central Security (ECS) Agent Ian Cormac is dispatched to find out what Erebus' game is. The more Cormac investigates, however, the more convinced he is that ECS and its allied AIs are not doing all they can to stop Erebus, and the more suspicious he is that preserving human life is not as high on their agenda as it should be.

As always, Asher skillfully portrays a not-so distant future in which humanity has mastered space travel and other advanced technologies, such as instant interstellar transport through "runcibles"; has spread to many, many solar systems; and lives alongside, interfaces with, in some cases aspires to be like, and is ruled by artificial intelligences. (While he doesn't explore many of the implications of humans being ruled by a benign dictatorship of the AIs, in LINE WAR he at least explores what the limits of that dictatorship ought to be.) He gives his work a convincing "hard" edge by being attentive to, e.g., the dynamics of temperature on a moon covered in methane oceans. He also gives his stories a visceral charge by, well, shooting, hacking and stabbing peoples' guts.