They are first and formost high tech, far future adventure stories. There is a certain ineffable quality to Neal Asher's books. But I don't care neough about any of the characters to follow this series any further to find out. Now however it appears the dragon wasn't that involved with them and the Jain is instead, which didn't make much sense either.

Unsurprisingly this had been subverted by the Dragon alien. In the pervious book there'd been a new one more bio-tech than hardware, owned by Dragcorp. Most people use 'augs' as supplimentary computing devices, like an embedded phone. Everythign follows fairly predictably from there, then the Dragon and the Jain turn up and there's a big fight for far too many pages, and Ian hasn't died yet. The polity doesn't like to intervene unless asked, and people won't ask what they don't know exists.

There was a some fairly tenuous linking to get Cormac out to where most of the action takes place, a random non-oxygen world controlled by a religious sect, with slaves living on adapted technology to survive while they struggle to produce enough goods for the church. Instead of some vast being this is a distributed threadlike thing thought to be extinct, but a bio-technologist has been exploring some options on a world not quite within the borders of the Earth's AI controlled Polity. Having released the maker and dealt sort of honourably with the dragon, Cormac is the ETC's goto person whenever their might be aliens around - we get a another new one in this book the Jain. Cormac has remained unlinked which kind of worked as an excuse for the first book, but isn't so relevant here. We keep jumping from character to character with little clear marking which doesn't help. Meh, kind of ok, but there's little character engagement and that makes it hard to become engrossed.

The Line of Polity by Neal Asher