Fiction Reviews
Dark Diamond
(2025) Neal Asher, Tor, £22, hrdbk, xv+671pp, ISBN 978-1-03793-3
Pyr, US$28.95, trdpbk, xv+671pp, ISBN 978-1-645-06089-5
Neal’s been writing space opera for a while now. His blend of fast action, strange alien species and violence have been published for over 25 years by now, and with 35 (by my reckoning) published to date, it may be a little difficult to know where to start.
With that in mind, then, this actually might not be a bad place. Dark Diamond is the first in a new series and whilst it incorporates lots of characters, situations and aliens from other Asher novels, it is not essential to know all of this background detail.
What Asher does here is incorporate his trademark SF style (already mentioned) with time travel.
In Dark Diamond we meet Captain Blite, a space pirate who owns the dark diamond - a death-defying device that's coveted by powerful factions across space and time.
Blite knows that someone is trying to kill him. His device reverses time to the moment before his death and he goes through it again and again until he finds a way to escape… Each reiteration creates a time flash of alternate futures. This attracts the attention of Polity agents…
Fast paced, bone-crunchingly violent, Asher knows what his readers want and like, and delivers. Whilst the ideas are not too original, the pace is fast, the characters manage to do what is required and expected – except when they don’t – and the reader is kept guessing for much of the narrative. It is quite a big book but Asher manages to maintain the pace with a clever combination of SF tropes, identifiable characters and unusual creatures – not to mention the use of time travel itself.
Amongst all of the usual SF tropes he manages to throw a few curveballs the reader’s way. I was wrong-footed a few times by the point that Blite, like Tom Cruise before him, is able to go back in time and take an alternative timeline until he gets things the way he wants them.
Familiar readers will, like Avengers Assemble, appreciate the reappearance of characters and plotlines from other books. Although it’s not essential to know too much about their past here, there’s some nice little moments, Easter Eggs along the way that may give familiar readers a little smile.
The set scenes of battle, both on planets and in space, are typically Asher-epic. Asher imaginatively creates super-high tech and then extrapolates this further to new levels. Weapons are thrown around planets and in space with seemingly gay abandon, people and aliens are mutated into something new, usually quite unpleasant. The level of thought and detail Asher gives to such things is seriously impressive.
The counterbalance of this is that this level of activity became a little too much for me, like a war movie with no remittance or lee-way – at times, it was actually quite exhausting. It may be that this book is too big to deal with such a situation effectively. As impressive as the elements are, 600+ plus pages of such action diminishes the overall effect for me. I remember this too with the Transformers movies – as impressively good looking as they were, it did get to the point where I was going, “What: ANOTHER robot fight?”
Nevertheless, at its basic level, Dark Diamond has the attributes of a visually stunning, all-action computer game – fast-paced, dazzling to look at, impressive in its breadth, but not too much below the surface once you pause to take a breath. To be fair, I think that Asher fans are not looking for psychological introspection here, more a case of reading about big boys (and girls) showing off their toys. Asher knows this and does it very, very well.
Alternatively, new readers may be wondering what the fuss is about.
On balance, I think that Dark Diamond is a nice reset that takes Asher’s strengths and then adds something new to the mix. As this is the first book in a new series, it will be no surprise that the book ends on a cliff-hanger to be taken up in the next book - pretty much written, I understand, and due out next year. After so many super-big, super-nasty, super-violent events in this one, I would be interested to read how Neal can surpass this one. I await the next book with interest.
Mark Yon
See also Mark Bilsborough's take on Dark Diamond.
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