And the dark side of this advanced science is that fantasy is explained away as science so advanced that it is not explicable.
THE ENGINEER is a novella (though the cover calls the title story a novel) and series of short stories set in the same universe in which humans come into contact with features of this advanced science. "The Engineer" describes how an FTL ship with a two person crew and android and AI back-up rescue an egg-like object in space and discover it to be a five million year old escape pod. Placed in a tank of water, the crustacean-like creature inside, a "Jain", starts to build nano-technology machines, machines so advanced that when they come out of the water they look like human children.
Abaron and Chapra, the humans, have a library of ancient video entertainment. In the second paragraph they wonder if they are going to re-live (or re-die) ALIEN. They do not.
After the battles, we discover that Chapra and Abaron have not seen enough films: if the story begins with ALIEN, it ends with Rex Harrison's DR DOOLITTLE, and they emerge from a water snail shell which proves to be a true cornucopia of vital potential. Pretty good for a giant shrimp's engineering.
There is no simple chronology to Neal Asher's universe: the humans of "The Engineer" cannot be the first wave to have past through. As the stories describe life on some of its planets we discover there have been several waves. In "Proctors" and "The Owner" we discover that at least one earlier pass was made by humans who managed to make themselves God-like through their robot-technology, owning planets now populated by millions from later in-roads of emigrants.
Meanwhile, the universal panspermia means that humans discover all things are living and many living things are unamicable. On a sort-of Elizabethan fishing boat, in "Jable Sharks", humans struggle to fish against creatures that would eat the fishermen alive in their mating rituals; creatures that ultimately are all one creature. While in "The Thrake" a Christian missionary to the new creatures discovers that the purpose of some humanoids is only to act as a host in the transmission of an unattractive parasite. I can't remember what it did to his faith, but I remember what the revelation did to my tea.
The titles themselves give some idea of the word-play and implicit reference in Asher's work, but there is no space to investigate it. What THE ENGINEER does do is raise again the questions asked when Brian Aldiss's Helliconia trilogy appeared: are scientific facts (such as the life cycle of parasites) extensible to this degree? Are we likely to discover such creatures? And should the moral neutrality of the technology be perceived as moral neutrality by the author?
Or is the author fantasizing worlds in which he can abandon moral responsibility, inventing technologies by which we might be tortured? In THE ENGINEER I was unable to tell.