Product Description

It is 4034 AD. Humanity has made it to the stars. Fassin Taak, a Slow Seer at the Court of the Nasqueron Dwellers, will be fortunate if he makes it to the end of the year. The Nasqueron Dwellers inhabit a gas giant on the outskirts of the galaxy, in a system awaiting its wormhole connection to the rest of civilisation. In the meantime, they are dismissed as decadents living in a state of highly developed barbarism, hoarding data without order, hunting their own young and fighting pointless formal wars. Seconded to a military-religious order he's barely heard of - part of the baroque hierarchy of the Mercatoria, the latest galactic hegemony - Fassin Taak has to travel again amongst the Dwellers. He is in search of a secret hidden for half a billion years. But with each day that passes a war draws closer - a war that threatens to overwhelm everything and everyone he's ever known. As complex, turbulent, flamboyant and spectacular as the gas giant on which it is set, the new science fiction novel from Iain M. Banks is space opera on a truly epic scale.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #9661 in Books
• Published on: 2005-07-04
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 544 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
In The Algebraist, Iain Banks returns to spectacular space opera but not to his familiar Culture universe. His new setting is a complex, war-torn galaxy with an entirely different history going back almost to the Big Bang...

For short-lived 'Quick' races like humans, space is dominated by the complicated, grandiose Mercatoria whose rule is both military and religious. To the Dwellers who may live billions of years, the galaxy consists of their gas-giant planets--the rest is debris.

Our human hero Fassin Taak is a 'Slow Seer' privileged to work with the Dwellers of the gas-giant Nasqueron in his home system Ulubis. His life work is rummaging for data in their vast, disorganised memories and libraries. Unfortunately, without knowing it, he's come close to an ancient secret of unimaginable importance.

Though Ulubis is currently cut off from the galactic wormhole travel network, two interstellar battle fleets are racing for this secret. The hissable arch-villain Luseferous--whose tastes run to torture, atrocity and genocide--seems bound to arrive in overwhelming strength before the Mercatorian rescue squadron.

So Fassin is reluctantly conscripted into security forces, and enters the hell of Nasqueron's atmosphere to seek the magic key (code? signal frequency? equation?) that might save everything. Even at their most helpful and charming, though, Dwellers are maddeningly elusive. For ancients, they seem bumbling and whimsical, far more interested in hunting, kudos, and extreme sports like GasClipper Races or Formal War than in saving humanity's skin. Their ramshackle transport and awesome yet run-down floating cities suggest that Dweller legends of hypertechnology are sheer bluff. But are they keeping something dark?

Fassin's journeys and discoveries are exhilarating, witty, sometimes mind-boggling. Exotic weaponry abounds. The Dwellers are engagingly eccentric, like AI Minds in the Culture books--but the Mercatoria has banned artificial intelligence as Abomination, and this too is a plot strand. Additionally there are human revenge, intrigue and betrayal subplots; surprises and upsets; and the mother of all shaggy-dog revelations. Once again Banks is having enormous fun with space opera, and his exuberant enjoyment is infectious. Highly readable stuff.--David Langford

Review
'It positively boils with ideas and crackles with creative energy...The Algebraist opens a window on the unknown and lets fresh air blow into the genre' The Scotsman, 'The master's characteristic touches are present in great abundance' The Independent, '[Banks] has the skill to paint in words the most breathtaking portraits ... a return to the happy hunting grounds of Banks's early SF' The Guardian, 'Brilliant; a hugely enjoyable romp' The Alien Online

WILLIAM GIBSON
'Banks is a phenomenon'

Customer Reviews

Banks in poetic form.
Whilst not a direct addition to the splendid Culture saga, The Algebraist is still a highly compelling slice of grandiose space-opera, containing most if not all of the usual Iain M Banks trademarks.

We have a delightfully evil boo-hiss villain in Luseferous, who has a particularly inventive mind when it comes to devising methods of extreme torture. We have a sumptuously observed exotic alien species in the Dwellers; near-as-damn-it immortal, this arrogant, hedonistic race can switch from an irritating blasé aloofness to endearing earthy (or Nasqueron-y perhaps?) humour at the drop of a hub-kilt. We have a cunningly evolving plot with machiavellian twists, double and triple-crosses, sacrifice, redemption, heroism, further insights into the machine soul (a theme explored oft-times before by Banks), shocks, thrills, many laughs, a little sodomy, battles on an unimaginable scale and enough technical minutia to keep the geekiest of sci-fi addicts more than happy.

The sheer humanity and ordinariness of the hero - Fassin Taak, means he strikes a chord with all of us and we can empathise with his experiences throughout the story, whether he be reliving the tragedy in the derelict spacecraft, gulping the chill of gill-fluid in preparation for his "delve", or merely strolling through his garden with the vast bulk of the gas-giant filling the sky above him.

The measured pace of The Algebraist perhaps delivers /slightly/ less visceral thrills and visionary wonder than the pure genius of Consider Phlebas, Use of Weapons or Look to Windward, but it certainly won't disappoint the faithful and just might turn new readers onto Britain's best living sci-fi author.

The elegiac epilogue was genuinely profound and moving, and rang faint echoes of Voltaire's Candide - "Il faut cultiver notre jardin".

The blurb promise didn't disappoint
I find a lot of science fiction leaves me feeling a little cold; perhaps it is the writing style, perhaps it is the need for matter-of-fact descriptions in order to set the scene and describe the technological environment. So it is rare for me to take a chance on an author I haven't already tried and enjoyed.

I am so glad I did take that chance with this book; indeed it has prompted me to read further sci-fi from Iain M Banks, and the other titles so far have been well worth the effort.

This is not an easy book to read; it is disjointed, with flashbacks and plots introduced gradually through brief teasers. It is lengthy prose with sentences that I found myself re-reading to ensure I'd absorbed the information. But it is a highly rewarding read, with an epic scale, fantastic imagination and a touching humanity (if humanity can be used to describe some of the portrayals of the frequently alien protagonists!).

There is an easy wit, the characters are thoroughly brought to life, and there are many plot twists. It took me quite a long time to read, but I felt thoroughly rewarded for doing so. To me, this type of book is what grand-scale science-fiction is what it all should be about - literate prose, argument and humour; complex but clearly developed and explained plot; wild but credible imagination; and a true sense of vision anchored by well-rounded characters.

I have seen more negative reviews and I can appreciate that this book is not necessarily for all tastes, but it certainly pushed all the right buttons for me.

Forget Barcelona
I'd been recommended a lot of Banks by friends before I picked this one up. Anyone else who has done so will not need me to tell them that it is a novel which requires commitment. I have a feeling that a reader who maybe goes through ten pages at a time, gives it a break for a week, then goes back to it etcetc might not get so much out of it (although I'm sure there are some that would).

The reason is the scale of the tapestry on which the story is woven; the universe is huge and rich and intricate, the backstory is detailed and clever and intriguing. It is a book to immerse yourself in, to shut yourself in a room with and forget that the real world exists; to devour (I read most of it on a weekend break to Barcelona, and my girlfriend didn't thank me or Banks for it either...). It's not just a sense of the now, it's a sense of all that was and all that shall be, the monumental scale of the universe and everything in it against the miniscule insignificance of one human life. The dwellers sum that up beautifully.

Once you have entered this world.. (and having read many of the Culture novels this could just as easily be set in a post Culture as a pre Culture world, I think. I have always viewed it as what was left, as a great power declined and its tecnology left to wilt, the universe trapped in a kind of dark age).. well, then you are rewarded with a rich vein of dark humour (this book left me laughing out loud more times than I was comfortable with), scintillating set-pieces vividly realised and fabulous characters, human and alien, almost all of which are entirely convincing. The Dwellers are probably my favourite aliens, so wonderfully indifferent to the struggles of humankind. I was sad to finish it, but I did so with relish. It still sits in my bathroom, and occasionally under certain [ahem] circumstances I like to re-live some of my favourite bits. It's great.