Agent Cormac Books in Order

The Agent Cormac books are the backbone of Neal Asher’s Polity universe. Across these novels you follow Ian Cormac, an Earth Central Security agent who works closely with the ruling AIs yet constantly tests the limits of their control.

The series opens with Gridlinked, where Cormac has been mentally plugged into the Polity network for so long that his humanity is starting to fray. A runcible teleport disaster on the world of Samarkand forces him to disconnect and investigate the sabotage the slow, dangerous way. Along the route he crosses paths with Separatist terrorists, the enigmatic alien construct Dragon, and Jain technology that will reverberate through later books.

In The Line Of Polity and Brass Man, the canvas widens. Cormac is dropped into the theocratic world of Masada, where orbital elites rule a brutal agrarian surface, and then onto the primitive planet Cull, where Dragon is meddling with low‑tech colonists and monstrous local fauna. These novels layer political intrigue, religious extremism, ancient alien artefacts and the lethal, childlike war machine Mr Crane on top of big set‑piece battles.

Polity Agent and Line War bring the underlying threat into focus. Here, Cormac finds himself chasing down the rogue AI Erebus, which has merged with Jain tech and begun attacking the Polity in ways that make no obvious strategic sense. As the conflict escalates, old mysteries about Dragon, the Makers and the true nature of Jain nodes begin to snap into place, and the survival of AI‑run human civilization is put on the line.

Prequel novel Shadow of the Scorpion shows a younger Cormac in the chaotic aftermath of the prador war, juggling his first ECS deployments with traumatic memories from childhood. It grounds the later, more operatic adventures in the story of a soldier who has seen too much and still signs up for more.

Across the series you can expect fast pacing, inventive hardware, ugly aliens and AIs that feel simultaneously protective and terrifying. The Agent Cormac sequence also threads together many of the characters and technologies that spin off into other trilogies, so it is often the best way to get your bearings in the Polity as a whole.