A set of nine novelettes from Neal Asher. All but one of them (see below) were generally enjoyable reads that explored Neal's Polity universe. I suspect that if I had taken breaks between the novelettes I might have enjoyed them more overall.

I usually enjoy reading about Neal's books and the Polity universe in particular but for these stories I started noticing elements that pulled me out of the story somewhat: - Recurring use of super human / super competent main ~male~ character who is the only person important to the plot. - Characters other than the main character often were very shallow if they were developed at all.

The premise for Longevity Averaging is ~individuals~ reaching longevity escape velocity (LEV) where continuous improvements in healthcare and longevity treatment result in them becoming effectively immortal. I've encountered the concept before and find it personally distasteful because there is often a mentality that ~of course~ the super rich people who can afford treatments should live forever because everyone knows that being rich means you are good. (The only folks that say otherwise are all those lazy/bad/undisciplined/... poor people who all ~could~ have been rich too but didn't take advantage of all the wonderful opportunities that life threw their way.) I could have written some of this off to "just telling a story" but Neal's intro to Longevity Averaging is very explicit that he thinks it is all positive that the deserving rich might be about to "reach LEV" and leave all the poor riffraff behind. My standing point for this is that even the most ethical of super rich people did NOT get that way on their own because at the minimum a functioning society maintained by ~everyone~ made it possible.