The Line of Polity

The Line of Polity
First edition
AuthorNeal Asher
Cover artistSteve Rawlings
LanguageEnglish
SeriesIan Cormac
GenreScience fiction novel
PublisherMacmillan UK
Publication date
2003
Publication placeUnited Kingdom
Media typePrint (Paperback)
Pages560
ISBN0-333-90365-X
OCLC59372751
Preceded byGridlinked 
Followed byBrass Man 

The Line of Polity is a 2003 science fiction novel by Neal Asher. It is the second novel in the Gridlinked sequence. In this novel, Earth Central Security (ECS) agent Ian Cormac is placed at the center of a civil war on the planet Masada, where an elite Theocracy lives in cylindric habitats in orbit and violently rules over commoners enslaved to laborious agriculture jobs on the planet's surface. To complicate matters, someone has attacked a low-grav Outlinker habitat with a nanomycelium which bears a striking resemblance to that used by Dragon on Samarkand in the previous novel Gridlinked. Meanwhile, a brilliant Separatist biophysicist has apparently reactivated an extremely ancient relic of technology created by the Jain, an alien species that dropped out of the universe millions of years ago, and commanded forms of technology that the brightest AI minds of the Polity have difficulty comprehending.