Reviewer: Todd Drashner
The Algebraist, by Iain M. Banks
Softback: 434 pages
Publisher: Night Shade Books (www.nightshadebooks.com)
Language: English
ISBN: 1-59780-044-9
In The Algebraist, Iain M. Banks takes us to a time thousands of years in the future. The galaxy is very old and has seen wave after wave of civilization come and go. In the current era the bureaucratic, hierarchy obsessed Mercatoria is the dominant galactic civilization and humanity is but one race among many and a pretty minor one at that. And at the edge of the galaxy, in the Ulubis system, is the gas giant Nasqueron and the setting for our story.
Nasqueron is inhabited by the Dwellers, a race of vaguely squid-like floaters who have apparently been doing their thing for just this side of forever. They are generally thought of as decadent, semi-barbaric aesthetes and anarchists, perhaps once possessed of a great civilization in the deep past, but surviving on obscurity and big talk of past greatness now. This despite the fact that those who attempt to attack Dweller worlds have a disturbing habit of ending up very dead some time thereafter. For the most part they are ignored, being of no interest to the wider galactic civilization and having no interest in it.
One minor exception to this policy of disinterest are the Seers of ‘glantine, a habitable moon of Nasqueron, who devote themselves to studying Dweller civilization, especially the ancient records, some going back hundreds of millions of years, that some few Dwellers like to keep for their own obscure reasons. Fassin Taak is a young Seer, a human, whose family is one of several ancient lineages that have dominated the avocation of contact on ‘glantine for centuries. Fassin is also something of a maverick among the conservative Seers, preferring to actually travel down into the clouds of Nasqueron in a diving pod instead of using remote piloted drones like most of his peers. Although notable for this somewhat unconventional behavior, as well as occasional visits to the fleshpots of the inner Ulubis system, Fassin seems headed toward a fairly predictable life of quiet academia and study.
All this changes when Fassin receives a summons to the Ulubis capital world of Sepekte and the center of the local government. It seems that the semi-bucolic life of Ulubis system is about to change radically. Barbarian invaders are on the way to Ulubis, and although a defensive warfleet is also inbound and bringing a wormhole to replace the one lost centuries before in a rebel attack, its looks like the invaders are going to arrive first (barely) and that the locals are on their own until help can finally get there. And while the cause of the invasion is not entirely clear it appears to have at least some connection to Fassin and the mythical Dweller List which purports to map out a galaxy spanning wormhole network millions of years old.
Drafted into the Mercatoria intelligence services, Fassin is sent with a minder back to Nasqueron to travel among the Dwellers and try to locate the Dweller List or anything having to do with it that might either help defend against the invaders or prove to them conclusively that such a thing does not exist. And now the story really begins…
I can’t go into much more here without providing lots of spoilers, but suffice it to say that by the end of the book Fassin has managed to severely wobble, if not outright upset, quite a number of applecarts including his own complacent view of galactic civilization.
OA Relevance: Moderate to High
Banks paints a picture of an extremely old and complex civilization. Readers who enjoy the multilayered historical descriptions of OA, or writers who want to produce them will like and appreciate his accomplishment. Others will hopefully enjoy the rich detail, complex characters, and multiple storylines that Banks either maintains or alludes to throughout the book.
Note that Banks makes no pretensions to being a hard SF author and he doesn’t aim to change that with this book. Still, the writing is top notch and the technologies described are done well enough that there’s no real urge to ‘look under the hood’ and worry about whether or not such a thing would really work. Interestingly enough Banks uses wormholes for ‘FTL’ travel much like OA does even to the point that his gates require flat space around them to prevent an implosion. The distances involved are much smaller than OA uses however. And Banks’ gates are apparently ‘go anywhere’ type wormholes with a single gate able to take a traveler to any other gate in the network without intervening steps. Still, its an interesting bit of similiarity.
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly:
Banks does a masterful job of weaving together multiple plotlines, time periods, and characters into a coherent whole while providing an incredibly rich and detailed setting for them to all interact in. Indeed, the Ulubis system and the whole story could almost be set in the OA universe with only fairly minor tweaking and would make OA richer for its presence.
However, this same richness of description that is the books greatest strength is perhaps also its greatest weakness.
There are times when the sheer mass of detail and exposition seems to come close to overwhelming the actual story which sometimes seems rather thin in comparison. There is a point when the introduction of yet another multi-paragraph (or even multi-page) dissertation on this or that tidbit of galactic history or yet another plot-twist (that I admittedly did not see coming) starts to get a little old. A couple of times I found myself mentally muttering “Oh, get on with it already!” although these points were thankfully rare.
I actually find myself wondering after reading the book if Banks is starting a new series (something other than the Culture universe) here and has perhaps slipped a little into the trap of trying to introduce everything about his new setting all at once. Certainly that’s something I’ve seen in the works of other authors launching new settings or in television series during the pilot episode. The results can be good but sometimes a little over the top and the same is true here.
Overall Rating: Good But Not Great
The book is definitely a good read and rich in character and details. But wait until it comes out in paperback.
More about Iain M. Banks here. More about the reviewer, Todd Drashner, here.