Massive, crablike creatures with a chilling disdain for human life, the Prador seem so B-movie monstrous that initial reports from a suddenly gore-stained Avalon are disbelieved. Skepticism, however, gives way to panic and finally to resolve as the tough-to-destroy aliens drive deeper into Polity space. The difficulty of understanding the enemy's utterly alien mindset hinders both sides. Why are the Prador so interested in the runcibles, when they don't have AIs to control them?

Two disparate heroes join to fight the Prador. Jebel Krong was there on Avalon and barely escaped with his team, which includes the artificial golem Urbanus. Leaving behind his lover's battered remains twists Jebel into a Prador-hating supersoldier. His obsession soon makes him an unwilling icon of resistance and hope.

All Moira Salem did was get a cerebral augmentation—an everyday mental upgrade to help her in her work at the Trajeen runcible gateway. But unknown to her, the aug she got was far from normal. Before long Moira finds herself capable of computation and modeling beyond imagining. Mentored by the Trajeen AI itself, Moira finds herself taking its place when it's killed by an anti-AI faction called the Separatists.

With the main enemy dreadnaught bearing down on them, Jebel and Moira must work together to end the alien menace and save a planetful of people. Their position is all the more desperate because their fate is in the hands of Conlan, a Separatist traitor in collusion with the Prador.

Blood-soaked bug-eyed monsters

Asher has a reputation for blood-soaked action, which Prador Moon will undoubtedly reinforce. But there's a lot more going on here. Asher has deliberately created a bug-eyed monster as the enemy to throw into relief the complex relationship between the human citizens of the Polity and the artificial intelligences that control their everyday lives.

Moreover, the Prador, with their rigid hierarchies and remorseless pursuit of their objectives, offer insight into the heroes' behavior. Jebel finds within himself the same capacity for brutality and blind hatred for which he despises his enemies. And the Prador captain's pheromonal and electronic control of his offspring-subordinates echoes in a minor key the dangerous, identity-swamping synergy experienced by humans linked directly to the AIs.

This being a Neal Asher novel, however, these issues do not tend to incite esoteric, multi-page conversations exploring the finer points of morality. As in the previous five Polity books and his extra-continuum novel Cowl, Asher is content to raise the issues for the reader to think about while his enraged combatants proceed to rip each other's intestines out. (Prador Moon may not be the best novel to read while enjoying spaghetti in red sauce.) This is both a compliment to the reader's presumed intelligence and an excellent way to clear the decks for action while still having the action mean something.

Best of all, the Prador, though monstrous, are not ciphers like, say, the Bugs of Starship Troopers. Asher has risked fragmenting his story by telling Prador Moon partly from the aliens' point of view, fleshing out a plausible societal structure that the reader understands far better than the Polity humans and AIs do. This makes it possible to compare the two civilizations side by side, and even to flirt with sympathy for the younger Prador caught under their father-captain's iron thumb.