The Departure

The Owner, Book 1

By: Neal Asher

Narrated by: Steve West, John Mawson

The Argus Space Station looks down on a nightmarish Earth. And from this safe distance, the Committee enforces its despotic rule. There are too many people and too few resources, and they need 12 billion to die before Earth can be stabilised. So corruption is rife, people starve, and the poor are policed by mechanised overseers and identity-reader guns. Citizens already fear the brutal Inspectorate with its pain inducers. But to reach its goals, the Committee will unleash satellite laser weaponry, taking carnage to a new level.

This is the world Alan Saul wakes to, travelling in a crate destined for the Calais incinerator. How he got there he doesn't know, but he remembers pain and his tormentor's face. He also has company: Janus, a rogue intelligence inhabiting forbidden hardware in his skull. As Janus shows Saul an Earth stripped of hope, he resolves to annihilate the Committee and their regime... once he's discovered who he was, and killed his interrogator.

©2013 Neal Asher (P)2013 Audible, Inc.

Realistic, frightening dystopic vision

Neal Asher's The Departure which is the 1st installment in the Owner trilogy, is a frightening realistic dystopic future vision of what may be the eventual outcome of the culmination of a digitally interconnected world that is both powerfully intrusive into individual lives, while at the same time, substantially vulnerable to abuse and corruption. Asher paints a terrifying scenario of a future with a fragile society where the bulk of humanity, referred to a "zero assets" (ZAs) offers nothing of value to an oligarchic government that is seeking a final solution for a sustainable future with their retention of total societal control. Into this mix comes a former genius, since discarded by the power elites, who is both mentally damaged, but also digitally enhanced to challenge the current regime. At the same time,a power struggle for survival is occurring in the fledgling Mars colony that was put on hold, while the Earth issues are sorted out.

The sci-fi elements are pure Asher with the primitive beginnings of artificial intelligence (AI) beginning to emerge and assert itself. There is much in the way of human machine interface that telegraphs Asher's long term perspective on the AI ascendancy. While the space elements are futuristic (a Mars colony, a massive orbital space station, military style laser satellites, etc.), there is nothing overly remarkable or imaginative about their design or utilization. At its heart, this is a tale of prophecy of the potential perils and pitfalls of civilization's expectations for a risk-less and careful future by turning over personal responsibilities to machines and a select group of fallible humans.

The narration is superb with an excellent range of voices, solid pacing, and a tone that perfectly aligns with the delicate, yet tense nature of the action.

Incredible!

This book has absolutely blown my mind. I was deeply enthralled the whole way through.

A Definite recommendation from me

Neal Asher Delivers Again

After listening to Neal Asher's Spatterjay series I frequently check to see if any of his other works have been released.

Finally to my great satisfaction this showed up in my search results.

This is a revenge story where the Earth itself shakes at one man's fury. I can't really say much else about the plot without spoilers.

You'll notice the book has two narrators. Don't fret though, one of them only reads the intro's to each chapter in a documentary style diction. The other brings the story to life.

I think the worst part of this book is knowing you're going to have to wait for the rest of the series.

Okay, but hard to care about

I have really loved Asher’s “short” stories (novellas, I guess), so I was looking forward to finally reading one of his novels. I came away somewhat disappointed.
I don’t know if he writes better far future, Earth-less, SF; or if he just does better in the novella format, but there was just a lot missing here.
There is an over-blown, over the top, totalitarian world government, that is just asking to be rebelled against. I suppose it is one possible future of what happens when the government passes the tipping point from viewing the people it governs as more than just an ignorant subclass, to overtly viewing them as sacrificial cogs in the machine that empower government.
While this is an extreme view of the future of a world government, I can’t say it is entirely illogical, given the attitude of the American, European, and Chinese governments are lately taking to their people since WWII, so I can’t dismiss Asher’s postulate as ridiculous.
But then we have the characters… The protagonist is excused from having a personality, because his memories were erased, except for those that weren’t. He has plenty of internal dialog, but over all is alien enough that I can’t relate. I can’t even support his goals, since his goals seem to mostly be survive and get revenge, and a few incidental side quests like removing the government, which come up along the way and he reluctantly takes on.
And his girlfriend/touchstone for humanity, is a constitutionally week 65 year old woman, with the emotional development of a 20 year old liberal college student, but apparently is smart and canny enough to make herself an indispensable scientist to the government, and devious enough to turn the main character and others into revolutionaries by her direct and indirect actions. Not really a character that makes a whole lot of sense to me.
I can’t even pull for the villains, since except for the accumulation of personal power, we never get any real idea what drives any of them.
Lastly, the way the first half of this is written—jumping back and forth through time—is off-putting, with no clarity when transitions happen. Unlike some reviewers, I didn’t have a problem when the point of view would change abruptly—I’ve seen authors do this before, and while I don’t love it as a story telling style, it’s far from rare, and you can usually pick up pretty fast that someone else is now doing the thinking. But the jumping through time without warning thing did throw me.

Decent world building

A decent dystopian cyberpunkish experience with good worldbuilding but thin characters.

Asher's 2011 "The Departure" is the first of a trilogy that features a near-future society where nobody really owns anything and those "Zero-Asset" (ZA) members of the population exist on the gov't dole and at the pleasure of increasingly disconnected elites and their "Committees."

Constant gov't surveillance and authoritarianism abound, coupled with scarce resources and food riots. What's a forward thinking oppressive gov't to do? Why, kill a few billion ZAs to stabilize things for the betters' continued survival.

From this comes Alan Saul, with little memory of his life beyond that past 2 years who VERY quickly decides/gets roped in? to trying to bring the whole system down. So we've got resistant groups, orbital stations, and lots and lots of action.

The 1984-esque worldbuilding is far more satisfying than the characters and once bullets start flying, the book loses a lot of its appeal. But as a reasonably prescient look at who credentialed "elites" can run a society into the ground, "The Departure" ain't bad.

Amazing science fiction saga

Loved it, excellent storytelling, can't wait to listen to book two. Hope its as good as this. Well worth the listen.

hard choices for a harder world.

The descriptions were a little shorter than I normally enjoy but the story was gripping if hard. Facing extinction at the hands of global environmental collapse or at the hands of a government that has decided that near extinction isn't a bad idea as long as they keep power.

Bioborg in the middle of a bureaucracy apocalypse!

The story is so rich I found myself restarting chapters to keep up, which is something I have not done with any other books I have listened to.
as you know it gets monotonous, but not here, and oh boy is the story relatable to current geopolitical situation.

If you want a book about a bioborg in the middle of a bureaucracy caused apocalypse this is the book for you!

!!!!possible spoilers ahead!!!!



first chapter is wild, and there is a big time skip of about a year, the next following chapters are just amazing, and just Ludacris enough to be exciting, but not enough to be absurd in my opinion!

but okay if I do think back there is a literal feed them to the "laser" sharks, moments, of course the villain had to leave is the main character alive in a torture booth, because they wanted their bio enhancements,
but then I come back defending it with, you know they do set up that specific character to be just arrogant and power-hungry enough to be like that, so it's good it works, and it's exciting cuz you know holy m0ly he actually came close to dying, and only writing this do I go to myself relax it's just a book,

This is how much I liked this book!

a bit bloated but started very strong

Asher starts off very well, indeed he went up in my estimation because of those first 100 pages. Asher's typical smash it up comes on strong in the latter half but this book could have been a bit shorter. i have read nearly everything he's written and he gets better with practice, in general his books have increased in skill over the years. however I will always prefer the Banks, Reynolds and Hamiltons more. that does not mean I dislike Asher, but there is something about his earlier sci-fi that turned me off. still I've read everything and he does a good job of bringing the story into interesting places. this book represents a new style for him. another reader commented that this was more like Richard Morgan. i agree, for those first 150 pages, afterwards the monsterama tries to kick in but without any alien creatures or dangerous million years old nano tech to do it with bee is left with robots... very cool and deadly sounding robots mind you.

all in all this book delivered a good yarn and I'll read the other two.

S Kaye

A different perspective of the future. I love the progression of our hero.
Narrative is right on the mark.