Comment on the following paragraph and assertions in 600 words:

"Of course, criminals are people who have not received the correct moral education. They are people who have not enjoyed the opportunities of the rest of us. We should pity them, and as a society we should look after them. Punishment is not the answer. It only worsens an already bad situation. If we execute people, this apparently makes us as bad as them . . .

Bollocks . . . In the early years of the millennium this was always considered to be the case. The insanities of 'political correctness' blinded many to plain realities: if you execute a criminal, he won't do it again. Punishment of the criminal is good for the victims, if they are still alive. Why should we, as a society, look after and re-educate them when we hardly have the resources to do this for law-abiding citizens? Nowadays, we have grasped these realities, so murderers and many recidivists are mind-wiped. We have not ceased to execute people because we are more 'civilized', but because that would be a waste of a perfectly useful body. And there are many personalities waiting in cyberspace (AI and uploaded human) for another crack at living in the real world."

From How It Is by Gordon.

Now there's a work whose very title would appeal to a wise old friend, who's wry observations on the world almost invariably end with a "That's how it is."
Gordon's little gems are among those chosen for the chapter headings constituting one of the pleasures of 'Gridlinked' (Amazon UK) by Neal Asher (Macmillan/Pan, 2001).

Ian Cormac, the "James Bond" of Earth Central Security, has little time for convention and and kindly law-enforcement in Asher's first full-length novel, which begins with a bang in 2432.

Any book which starts out with a space travel engineer saying the equivalent of "Beam me up, Mr Scott" and unintentionally blowing up a planet on his arrival has potential. Any parallel with the ' Star Trek ' series ends right there. There's no bridge on Hubris, one of the starships to feature in an intergalactic Polity where the bulk of humanity's political and economic business is run by artificial intelligence.

Asher delivers on the promising start, in a tight tale of psychopathic separatist killers and mercenaries, special service agents, almost unbeatable androids from the Golem range, and an ambiguous and cryptic alien Dragon. From the first explosion to a violent climax, this English author works fast, usually sparse in vocabulary to the point of crudeness, but unsparing with the brush strokes in a cinemascope thriller.

Occasionally, to see the same word too often used in one sentence gave an infuriating itch to a reader far better at subbing other people's work than his own. But to call much of the writing crude is not to put down Asher, whose plot is as satisfyingly complex as the several worlds he describes in 'Gridlinked'. You can't put Asher down; twice I found this book on the floor in the morning, with a pair of fortunately unbroken glasses. Only the imperative of sleep kept me from reading all night.