The Algebraist

As complex, turbulent and spectacular as the gas giant on which it is set, this novel from Iain M. Banks is space opera on a truly epic scale.

“An enormously enjoyable book, full of wonderful aliens, a sense of wonder and subtle political commentary on current events.” –Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)

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 civilization. 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.

“Banks is a phenomenon…writing pure science fiction of a peculiarly gnarly energy and elegance.” –William Gibson

“Banks writes with a sophistication that will surprise anyone unfamiliar with modern science fiction.” –The New York Times

For More from Iain M. Banks, check out:

The Culture series:
Consider Phlebas
The Player of Games
Use of Weapons
The State of the Art
Excession
Inversions
Look to Windward
Matter
Surface Detail
The Hydrogen Sonata

• “Banks is a phenomenon...writing pure science fiction of a peculiarly gnarly energy and elegance.”

  William Gibson

• “Banks writes with a sophistication that will surprise anyone unfamiliar with modern science fiction.”

  The New York Times

• “An enormously enjoyable book, full of wonderful aliens, a sense of wonder and subtle political commentary on current events.”

  Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) on The Algebraist

• “Banks never lets up in a dizzying array of characters, mind-bending ideas, and dazzling action.”

  Booklist

• “Few of us have been exposed to a talent so manifest and of such extraordinary breadth.”

  New York Review of Science Fiction

• “[Banks] can summon up sense-of-wonder Big Concepts you've never seen before and display them with narration as deft as a conjuror's fingers."

  scifi.com

• "Nobody does it better."

  Times (UK)

• "Banks writes space opera on the grand scale: he measures time in eons, space in lightyears, tragedies in gigadeaths."

  Time