Reddit reviews Dark Intelligence: Transformation Book One

If you like Banks and Peter Watts, check out Neal Asher's Polity Universe novels. Hell, check him out even if you like Banks.

The AIs are a bit more... humanized, for good or bad. Some are pretty damn godlike. Asher quickly became one of my favorite artists after reading the first book of the Transformations series.

It follows a few characters as they try to hunt down a mysterious and definitely less-than-sane 'black AI' that has a habit of granting Faustian wishes for those desperate enough to ask it.

In this polity universe we see AIs linked with humans, humans turning into monstrous creatures, multiple alien species (some alive, some dead) of both good, neutral and bad varieties. We see human agents that have been gridlinked (connected directly to the AI net) for so long that they've lost their ability to process information organically, a human interplanetary government ruled by AI, war machines, sentient weaponry... the list goes on.

Easily one of my top 5 authors after just a few reads with stories and universes as memorable as Banks.

Neal Asher has a new part to his Dark Intelligence series. But to really get into it, go all the way back to the start of the Polity series with Gridlinked.