Customer Reviews

Algebraist

5 star:		(28)
4 star:		(29)
3 star:		(15)
2 star:		(9)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

Unlike Iain M. Banks's Culture where machine intelligences are the dominant form of life, the world of The Algebraist has humanity structured as a quasi-religious hierarchy. The various human worlds are connected via gates that permit a limited form of FTL travel, the gates must originate from the same place and be transported at sub-light speeds to their destinations. When a gate is destroyed then the surrounding are is cut off from the rest of the galaxy. It is on just such a system that the story takes place. The protagonist is a part socialogist/explorer/diplomat who is one a chosen few who interacts with the denizens of a local gas giant. The inhabitants of the gas giant have a society far different from humanity, in part due to their lifespans stretching to the millions of years. In this time, numerous empires of the Quick, of which humanity is exemplar, have sprung up and disentegrated. Key among the secrets that the ancients are rumored to possess is a network of gates traversing the galaxy. It is in this setting that the story takes place.
Aside from the adventures of the protagonist within the world of the gas giant dwellers, his home system is threatened by a sociapathic dictator and his invading army. If a weak point had to be listed for this novel it would be that the characterization of the dictator is too over-the-top.
In providing a tour of Banks's new creation The Algebraist does get a bit heavy with exposition. However, exploring the new universe is worth the cost of having a slower story. It is nice to see a fresh environment from the author and hopefully there will be more books in this setting to come.

Iain M. Banks is one of the few really gifted writers of sci-fi, and this novel is no exception. The story itself -- a prolonged quest for a secret technology to save an isolated system from a ruthless invader -- seems familiar enough. But, as always with Banks, half the fun is in the telling: the brilliant array of characters whom Fassin Taak (a human "Slow Seer") encounters on his travels. However, as one gradually learns, the actual point of his travels is quite different from what it seems to be at the time, both to us and to Fassin. I won't reveal the secret, of course, but keep your eye on the Dwellers, who understand "the mystery of the universe" far more deeply than the human characters do, and who are, or who at least may be, willing to make a tragic choice in revealing that mystery. See if you can keep up! I have to admit that I was entirely astonished by the ending.

Along the way: the description of the sailboat race on Nasq is simply dazzling. It takes place on the inner wall of the eye of a hurricane! And that's just the premise.

The Algebraist is an extremely absorbing and enticing novel. Banks writes with a milder style than in his well-known 'Culture' books, but he retains his prodigious imagination, dark humor, and his ability to construct a marvelously complicated landscape without allowing it to obscure the story. Many basic elements and themes of his previous science fiction can be seen in the structure of the work, but the creation is entirely new and original.

Banks' earlier body of work is vibrant, gothic, and faultlessly well written. His crowning achievement 'Use of Weapons' is, IMHO, the greatest science fiction novel ever written (with 'Consider Phlebas' and 'Against a Dark Background' running close behind) and 'Crow Road' is a masterpiece of storytelling. His recent work however, has seemed to stagnate; 'The Business' and 'Look to Windward' were somewhat lackluster even to a Banks-phile like myself.

With 'The Algebraist', Mr. Banks has clearly returned to his groove. He creates a completely new milieu, populated with new characters from his incredible font of imagination, and described with his usual wealth of vocabulary and vision. I highly recommend the book to any fan of well-written fiction (science or no).

I eagerly await his next book which, if protocol holds, will be published by 'Iain Banks' and therefore contain contemporary rather than science fiction. Thank you, Mr. Banks, for another extremely enjoyable journey.

IMB returns to widescreen space-opera in this non-Culture standalone, featuring the galaxy-spanning multispecies, oxygen-breathing Mercatoria empire and its interactions with the more-numerous gas-giant Dwellers, who seem to have colonized most of the jovians in the Milky Way. And they're old. Really, really Old. Plus, exploding spaceships!

The Mercatoria power-structure is rococo Raj-in-Space -- there's a fabulous court scene straight out of Victoria and Albert's coronation in India, featuring the Heirchon Ormilla, the Peregals Tlipelyn and Emoerte, First Secretary Heuypzlagger, and many, many more comic-opera-dressed reps of the Ascendancy, Omnocracy, Navarchy etc etc. Egalitarian Democracy in Space it's not, but looks positively enlightened compared to the Archimandrite Luseferous, warrior-priest of the Starveling Cult of Leseum9, who is Bad. Really, really Bad. And Luseferous is coming to get Ulubis, the detached Mercatorial system which recently lost its wormhole to Enemy Action....

The Algebraist macguffin started out seriously straining my WSOD, but the Dwellers, giant gas-dwelling ammonite-analogs who channel John Cleese (when they're not emulating soccer hooligans), and their party-hearty 'kudo' (= wuffie, reputation) culture, won me right over. OK, they're not particularly Alien-alien, but what the hey? A human Deep-delver is sent to Nasqueron to find an ancient Dweller document, written in alien algebra and revealing a Deep, Dark Dweller Secret. Luseferous got wind of it, too, and Mercatoria Central knows that he knows, and is sending a big-ass fleet to fend him off...

Will the Fleet arrive in time? Will the Secret be found? It's all good fun, seriously over-the-top Banks Light, one silly space-chase after another, with hardly a sag up to the near-inevitable Banks Downer Ending (tm), which is even more gratuitous than usual here. And Algebraist needed some blue-pencil work to cut some of the fat... Grump, grump. Lotsa fun, but could have been better with just a bit more work.

Algebraist has gotten a mixed reception, here and elsewhere. I agree with other's comments that Banks isn't breaking new ground here, but so what? He's clearly having fun, and still writing rings around most of his competition. Algebraist is a close comparable to WJW's recent "Praxis" space-operas: good fun, even if not the author's best work.

Are we having FUN yet?

Happy reading--
Peter D. Tillman

I have been a fan of Iain Banks` fiction for a few years now. Ever since reading The Wasp Factory, I have been among those that counted him among the ranks of interesting, inventive, and perhaps even important living novelists.

Prior to The Algebraist, I had not read any of Banks' science fiction. It was then with a great deal of anticipation that I picked this one up at the library. I had enjoyed The Wasp Factory and The Crow Road so much that certainly his "M." branded science fiction must be equally exemplary. Imagine my surprise as my enthusiasm waned and waxed and waned again throughout the reading.

Right away I was struck by how the language seemed... Stilted? Over the top? I knew going into this that the novel was a space opera but ... why so operatic? The style seemed to overwhelm the substance for about the first 100 pages. I had an idea of what was developing but it flipped seemingly at random between times, places, and voices; I had an inkling that the stage was being set but it took me a while to care.

By 25-30% of the way through the story though, it gains some serious traction: the style gets out of the way and lets the story shine through, you feel OK letting yourself get invested in the events, some of the characters start to really pop and come alive. YOU GET TO MEET SOME DWELLERS. And this momentum gets going and stays pretty strong. But you have some nagging worries in the back of your mind: is "The Style" going to come back for revenge? Wasn't there an important-seeming character or two that fell off the radar a while ago? Am I going to remember who he/she is? Will I care? And sure enough, some tedium creeps back in and you find that you feel like you missed the best part because you zoned out.

But then the war starts. And the style gets out of the way again and the pace starts to clip along really fast. And that feels great. And the read gets fun again. But you'll find yourself waiting for a twist that doesn't come. (Or it does but you realize that it came and went already and the only thing you thought was: "That? Duh, that's given away on like page 9...")

Ultimately it's a fun read. A bit tedious at times but still a fun, deep space opera with some interesting hooks and a few compelling sub-texts.

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".

Iain M Banks novels are a bit like M Night Shyamalan movies in that each one has a twist. Unlike Shyamalan, however, Banks' twists keep getting better and are embedded in works of artistic and creative genius. This book eschews the Culture universe where AIs run the show in favor of an alternative place where AIs have been hunted down (nearly) to extinction. Banks explores many common themes such as the complex ways that humans affect one another on personal and societal levels, as well as uncommon ones, like what kinds of species and societies could evolve on gas giant planets. This book is long and complex and its issues filled my thoughts for days after I finished it.

PS If you like books like these where the fantasy goes hand-in-hand with great prose and characters, also try Gene Wolfe's "Book of the Long Sun" novels.

I've been reading Banks for at least a decade now, and jumped on this book when I first saw it in the bookstore. Most the other reviewers have targeted the imaginative setting Banks portrays (including one who exclaims why we should all want to become Dwellers, although their society includes slavery and hunting the young).

I usually give a book I like four stars if I really like it, five it is awesome. I stepped down to three stars because there are some problems that made it hard to finish. First, the plot ground down in a few points, causing me to scan several pages to get to a part that was interesting. Second, some of the sub-plots lacked development, so when the "warrior woman" reaches the end of her plot, I'm left wondering why it resolved so. I suppose I expect a novel to reach inevitable conclusions or at least provide clear support for why the twist worked. Combined, I'm left thinking that Banks had a well-planned ending but rambled on a bit too much in the middle to reach page count.

These complaints might suggest a two-star work. However, Banks' came through in other areas. I expected the main plot ending and thought he did a great job setting up some minor elements of the plot in a convincing way. He also sold me on the Dweller society and did a slow reveal on their society which reveals irony toward the end.

Perhaps I'm being too mechanical in my analysis? Probably so, but I enjoy the "how" of the writing as much as the "what." Banks sold me on the what, but not so much on the how. And, that's why I'm giving three stars.

In "The Hero with a Thousand Faces" Joseph Campbell describes the elements of the Quest Myth that cut across cultures and societies. "The Algebraist" is an anti-quest science-fiction novel.

The time in this tale is the human eightieth century, but sentient beings have been roving the universe for billions of years. Fassin Taak, an anthropologist/sociologist, has studied the Dwellers, a race living on gas giants throughout the universe. He is sent back to the Dweller planet Nasqueron to find information that may give his galactic government the upper hand in its defense against attack. As he travels from place to place he observes Dweller society, much like Gulliver in Swift's "Gulliver's Travels". And much as we can with "Gulliver's Travels", we can examine the societal organization of the various cultures mentioned in the book to gain insights into our own society.

The Dwellers are an apparently disorganized society made up of many individuals whose self-indulgence and egotistical behavior provide a great deal of humor. At the same time, there are several other characters, like the barbaric invasion leader, and a revenge-filled military officer, who are involved in their own story lines that intersect with Fassin's.

Although the book jacket describes this as a space opera, and there are large-scale space ship battles, the focus of the book seems to be on the organization of the several societies in the book. But the quest story in engrossing enough to satisfy those readers who are not interested in looking more deeply for buried meaning.

What makes it an anti-quest book is that Banks stands the traditional elements of the quest myth on their heads. For example, rather than leading Taak to discovery, his guides seem to have no idea of what is actually going on, and in fact, border on incompetent. There are other reversals that can't be described without giving away the plot.

The book has several aspects that some readers may find bothersome. For example, while Dweller behavior is generally humorous, the story often shifts to scenes of horror that don't seem necessary to the telling of the tale. Also, the subplot lines add nothing to the main story and sometimes seem designed to give the reader a shocking but unnecessary surprise.

Still, if you enjoy thinking about what a science fiction story means and how it reflects on both literature and society, you will probably enjoy this novel.

I haven't read any of this mans other novels, and I bought the book because it was recommended to me by a friend whose taste normally closely matches my own.

The society in which the protagonist lives is one that's quasi-religious in nature, a universe closer to Dune than Star Trek. He is led on a quest to find the links between solar systems that would mean that mankind can communicate and travel freely. Large nebulous aliens, hunted artificial intelligence computers and the threat of full scale war should make this book a compelling read.

For some reason I make heavy work of this book. It dragged somehow. I only kept going to see how it ended. The best sub-plot was the one about the group of friends that visited the out-of-bounds spacecraft, and what they did about it afterwards.

I kind of wanted a happy ending. Everyone had such a rough time I wanted to cut them some slack. In the end, not enough slack was cut and I was vaguely dissatisfied.

I can say with perfect truth that I put this book on a shelf and haven't thought about it since. I wouldn't personally recommend it - but if you're into that description of a dystopian future, then a mild version of that can be found in The Algebraist.