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Asher, Neal. Jack Four. Tor, 2021.
Neal Asher’s Jack Four is billed as a stand-alone novel set in Asher’s Polity universe, but a reader would profit by knowing something about Polity agents, the alien prador, and the Spatterjay virus. The Polity universe is a sprawling galactic civilization that puts Asher in the company of Ian M. Banks, Alastair Reynolds, and Peter F. Hamilton, but this novel, like its predecessor Spatterjay, is more in the tradition of Harry Harrison’s Deathworld and movies like Predator and Alien than it is like a Reynolds space opera. Jack Four is a human clone sold as a slave to the prador king, a who engages in gory genetic engineering, and who himself has been infected by the Spatterjay virus, an organism that puts the selfish in Richard Dawkins� idea of the selfish gene. Jack is supposed to be a mindless meat puppet, but he seems to have some gradually emerging memory engrams from the original Jack, who was a probably a Polity agent. He escapes from the prador station to the nearby planet that has become a dumping ground for the most vicious genetically engineered animals from around the galaxy, many of them have been toughened up with the Spatterjay virus. From that point on, the story is a survival quest adventure as Jack gradually regains his original’s skills and memories he will need to survive in the wilderness. Because this is a Polity story, there are wheels within wheels and other characters who, like Jack, are not what they seem. The action is nonstop and vividly bloody. 4 stars.