The Algebraist - Hardcover

Banks, Iain M.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1597800260 ISBN 13: 9781597800266

Publisher: Night Shade, 2005

Synopsis

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.

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About this title

About the Author:

Iain Banks came to widespread and controversial public notice with the publication of his first novel, THE WASP FACTORY, in 1984. He has since gained enormous popular and critical acclaim for both his mainstream and his science fiction novels.

From Publishers Weekly:

Starred Review. Banks (Look to Windward) pulls out all the stops in this gloriously over-the-top, state-of-the-art space opera, a Hugo nominee in its British edition. In a galaxy teeming with intelligent life-forms and dominated by the intensely hierarchical society known as the Mercatoria, the Ulubis system has been cut off from the rest of civilization for over a century as its citizens impatiently await the arrival of a starship carrying an artificial wormhole to replace one destroyed in a previous war. Fassin Taak is a Slow Seer, an anthropologist who studies the Dwellers, the ancient, enigmatic species that inhabits gas giants throughout the galaxy, including Nasqueron in the Ulubis system. Fassin's research contains clues to the existence of a secret wormhole network, one operated by the Dwellers and free from the repressive control of the Mercatoria. Unfortunately, the monstrous ruler of a nearby star system has also learned of this discovery, as has the Mercatoria itself. Now two enormous battle fleets converge on Ulubis, and Fassin must undertake a quest deep into Nasqueron to uncover the Dwellers' secret. This is an enormously enjoyable book, full of wonderful aliens, a sense of wonder and subtle political commentary on current events.
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About this edition

• Publisher: Night Shade
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 1597800260
• ISBN 13: 9781597800266
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 500