The following review ran in the Peterborough Examiner in December, 2004.A revised reprint appeared in the New York review of Science Fiction in September, 2006.The Algebraist by Iain M. BanksOrbit 2004 (Time Warner)534 pagesHC $42.00Iain M. Banks’s new novel The Algebraist is a charming, intelligently written, really long space opera. Those who believe such a thing can’t exist, haven’t read the phenomenal Iain M. There is another Scottish writer named Iain Banks, also author of half a dozen novels. That Iain Banks came to controversial public notice with the astonishing mainstream novel, The Wasp Factory, way back in 1984, written, it seemed, by a disgruntled youth on crack. Very wittily, very cleverly. A few short years later, Iain M. Banks published his first science fiction novel, Consider Phlebas. And continued to do so on a regular basis, occasionally taking a break while his alter ego without the M dashed off another intelligent witty mainstream novel, including Espedair Street and Walking On Glass, two of my favourites. That Iain has a penchant for brevity, for sympatico characters who are such a seamless part of their milieu, reflecting contemporary society including dress and musical tastes so vividly and accurately that the knowledgeable reader doesn’t so much recognise them, as remember people a lot like them, times a lot like that. In this way Iain Banks is kind of a UK version of our own Douglas Coupland, author of the groundbreaking Generation X, Shampoo Planet and others. The fact is, before The Algebraist, I never read the second Iain, author of lengthy space operas. Something must be said of this in itself. The editors at many of the most reputable SF magazines won’t accept space opera submissions out of hand; they feel it’s a passé sub-genre, hackneyed, clichéd, verging on the ridiculous. Which makes it all the more interesting that a fabulously successful literary novelist such as Iain Banks should churn them out, one after another, quite gleefully. He’s too smart to be stupid. So why’s he do it?I would wager for fun, tongue firmly in cheek. At five hundred and some pages The Algebraist takes us, as space opera must, from end of the galaxy to another. The plot revolves chiefly around a young man, Seer Fassin Taak, trained in remote and direct delving; the quite academic study, verging on anthropology, of the Dwellers, denizens of the gas giant Nasqueron in Ulubis system, Mr. Taak’s home. The Dwellers live on pretty much every other gas giant as well. They’re shaped like two giant disks, connected by an axle of orifi, limb-like appendages, organs, and other parts. The life span of a single one of these creatures can be billions of years long. They’re quite snotty and superior, allowing themselves to be studied, but only if they like the researcher. They claim FTL ships, WMD’s, and access to a wormhole network no one else knows about, but have no interest whatsoever in proving or disproving the existence of such to any non-Dweller species. Mr. Taak is hired by the Shrievalty Ocula, a religious branch of the Mercatoria, the reigning galactic hegemony, to find out whether this is true, as most of their own wormhole portals have been destroyed in a previous war, rendering space travel, shall we say, slow.Everything the Dwellers do, from sailing to scholarly studies to top secret military training is done by clubs of enthusiasts, hobbyists, really. They swagger and compete with one another in a childish manner they always hint other species, less long lived, might do well to emulate. They swear a lot. In spite of what we myopic humans would call their barbaric child-rearing practices, they make us laugh out loud, and as such, are a welcome break from the extremely lengthy descriptions of various strata in the excessively, and familiarly hierarchical Mercatoria, somewhat ineffectually planning to trounce the sinister invading Starveling Cult and their allies, the Beyonders.Banks’ science is plausible, his understanding of the physics of black holes competent. Military ships, uniforms and weaponry, flown in, worn, and used to blow things up by every possible group and sub group are described in detail for those who like such things. Fassin Taak’s two school chums appear, disappear and reappear, in lieu of character development. There’s a stereotypically hot spy girl. There’s a lot to laugh about, some serious philosophical bits, endless diversionary adventure, a great deal to read. Complaining about a Banks book is a bit like complaining about the sun, but a few more life-giving rays would have been welcome, which everyone knows Mr. Banks can do, and do well, if they’ve read his mainstream work. More people we care about, more reasons to care about them, and maybe a hundred pages or so less of descriptions of things we are given no real reason to care about. Although the military buffs out there might disagree with me.
As I write this review Iain M. Banks has passed away about three weeks ago. It makes me sad that our genre has lost another great writer. So I picked The Algebraist to be my "tribute read", alas I find that prefer his Culture novels. That said The Algebraist is not at all shabby.The Algebraist (correct me if I'm wrong) is Mr. Banks' only non-Culture sci-fi novel, it does have some of the magnificent madness that you get in his Culture books but after reading it for a while I started wishing the Minds or the drones would crash the party, the "Banksness" of the writing style just goes so well with the Culture elements. OK, no more mentioning of the Culture from this point!In a nutshell the story mainly concerns the search for a secret system of wormholes which makes FTL space flight possible (through space shortcuts). The setting is a universe where humanity have spread across the galaxy and coexisting with various extraterrestrial species as part of a galactic empire called Mercatoria. The most interesting feature of this universe is the existence of an extraterrestrial race called The Dwellers who are basically too cool to bother with joining the Mercatoria empire because they have existed for billions of years and have (presumably) seen it all and done it all. These Dwellers are a wonderful invention, they are partly a satire of certain type of people who have been around too long to bother with the unwashed masses. Due to their practically immortal life span they live in "slow time" basically doing everything at a slow speed relative to how humans (a Quick species) live. They also have many quirks and weird traditions in their culture which make them memorably alien aliens which is always a major attraction of sf books, space operas especially. I remember reading a review that criticized the aliens in this book as "too anthropomorphic" I guess the reviewer is not too familiar with humans and should endeavor to get out more. In any case the Dwellers are the latest addition to my list of favorite fictional aliens (not that I have a list of non-fictional ones)Another concept I really like is the different types of human, aHuman and rHuman (advanced and remainder Human), the aHuman were kidnapped thousands of years ago from a "pre-civilised" human race and sort of uplifted and cultivated to create a separate strain of human to keep the original humans (rHuman) from becoming too uppity when the latter has achieved interstellar travel. There are numerous other clever ideas such as the description of life on a gas giant, the gascraft, a personal size vehicle that enable humans to live on gas giants, the ideas are just brimming all over the place as you can expect from Banks. However, I did not find the Algebraist to be an easy read, the pacing is uneven and the main characters are not as well developed as in other Banks books that I have read (some of the aliens are better developed than the protagonist). There are too many side characters that pop in and out without leaving much of an impression. I quite like the subplot about a woman out to avenge the death of her friend but it flits in and out of the narrative and does not seem well integrated into the main story. Banks also liked to play around with the narrative timeline with sudden switches into flashback without any warning, I guess he just liked to keep his readers on their toes. The patient readers should sort these things out without ant trouble though.As with all Banks novels witticisms and literary flourishes abound, here is a passage that made me laugh and manage to convey the idea of Quick and Slow species particularly well:"(The Dwellers) could get bored with the species that came to talk to them, and by selecting only those numbered amongst the Quick they ensured that they would never have to endure for too long a time the attentions of people they only looked forward to seeing the back of. Just wait a bit and − in a twinkling of an eye by Dweller standards − their troublesome guests would evolve out of nuisancehood." Also this Dweller's comment about humans"Your passion for doing each other harm never ceases to amaze, delight and horrify!"In conclusion I can recommend this book with some reservations because of the uneven pacing. For Banks neophytes I would recommend starting with the awesome The Player of Games instead.At least I can confidently declare that I have never read a bad Iain M. Banks book.R.I.P Mr. Banks.
What do You think about The Algebraist (2006)?
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.Observe: 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.
—Rob
It's all a bit too much, isn't it? I mean, every page—sometimes every paragraph on every page—of The Algebraist throws in the names of new planets, principalities and vast empires; lost races and common aliens of endlessly inventive forms, habitats and abilities; unheard-of technologies, world-sized starships and robots smaller than grains of sand, automated castles, weapons of both mass and intimate destruction... clans, clades and clubs; cross-generational romance... bizarre medicines and foods and drugs and sensations... it's exhausting! And, perversely, this very flood of specificity seems to have made this particular book less memorable, at least for me; I recognized bits here and there, but the plot as a whole (and, for a long time, even the Big Reveal) rather evaded me on second reading.This very overwhelming, mind-blanking quality (as if I were a Banks character myself—they're always getting their memories tampered with, at least in this book) prevents me from being as enthusiastic about this book as I might otherwise be. For it is a great and sweeping tale, a science fiction mystery with a mathematical bent (as one might guess from the title), a space opera whose conflicts range from the grandest to the most intimate scale.Fassin Taak is at the center of it all. A Slow Seer whose expertise is in communicating with the Dwellers—a whimsical gas-giant native species whose individual members measure their lifespans in billions of years. The Dwellers whom Fassin Taak studies live within the turbulent atmosphere of Nasqueron, the largest such gas giant in the Ulubis system. Fassin's home is on 'glantine, one of Nasqueron's more habitable moons, where he is a member of Sept Bantrabal, one of the more successful groups of Seers. (See how complicated this is getting already? And we're really not even scratching the surface!)The Dwellers seem like capricious, frivolous dilettantes—there's some debate about whether they're civilized at all, despite their longevity and obvious intelligence—to the humans and other "Quick" species who slow their metabolisms and Delve into the atmosphere of Nasqueron to interview and study them (when they're allowed to). The Dwellers' long history and inquisitive nature leads them to collect an immense amount of information that is of historical and sometimes even scientific interest. But... the Dwellers are also rotten catalogers—all of their various collected libraries are a hodgepodge of unindexed, disorganized records. The Seers try to tease a few threads of order from the chaos.That's really all Fassin Taak wants to do. But he's due to be yanked out of his complacent, contemplative work for Sept Bantrabal... because Fassin is also a citizen of the Mercatoria, the star-spanning Human civilization (well, mostly Human) which has successfully eradicated rogue AIs (artificial intelligences who came close to subjugating humanity) and connected hundreds of Earthlike planets in a faster-than-light network of Arteria, the paired wormholes through which interstellar travel is essentially instantaneous. Wormhole networks are easily disrupted, though—one of the reasons why Ulubis is such a Galactic backwater is that its own wormhole connection to the rest of the Galaxy was destroyed a few centuries earlier, necessitating a replacement be sent from the nearest connected star system by the Mercatorian Engineers who are the only ones allowed to create and maintain these particular bits of critical infrastructure.Meanwhile... the self-styled Archimandrite Luseferous, an Evil Genius in the classical mode (inventive methods of torture; giant leeches in the dungeon; an obsession with ranked battle cruisers and other such ostentatious military toys) has cast his eye on the isolated Ulubis system as the next—the one hundred and eighteenth, to be exact—to join his Starveling Cult. His fleet is on its slow way towards Ulubis too...And why all of this interest in what really is, on a Galactic scale, the equivalent of a sleepy little college town? Well, that's the thing that ties all of these elements together. Supposedly, somewhere in all of that vast collection of data the Dwellers hold dear might be a clue to the Dweller List... which might be a trick, or a myth, or it might just be a comprehensive list of a few million wormholes that the Mercatoria and other Quick civilizations could use. If they could just find them.The Dweller List is the deceptively simple McGuffin that drives Banks' ornate engine of plot. And in the end, I enjoyed the drive Banks took me on using that engine—twice. So... not such a bad ride after all.
—Alan
'The Algerbraist' is a slow read for the first hundred pages for the set up; then a good read as you get into the story; then even better as it speeds to the end; and then a great read as you are driven back to work out: Eh wait a minute how does HG get there? Then a laugh - and still a puzzle. I get the distinct feeling that Iain Banks is constructing a story time line that is as devious and playful as the Dwellers themselves; and a mirror of the possibilities of wormholes. But I'm still puzzling over that. In a way that would lead me to give the story a 4. It is certainly MORE than 80% better than other science fiction!But just because I'm giving it a number in terms of all books it falls to a 3 - but that means most books would end up in the minus category. Great depiction of the playful anarchy of the Dwellers. Magnificent construction of the gas giant and the Dwellers' 'wars' and regattas and their floating cities and falling libraries.Oh and here is an image of a Dweller I found at Deviant Art (Bank's images are so great I really wnated to see them visually - not just in my imaginationhttp://wunderbear.deviantart.com/art/...The utter horror of Luciferous was too much for me. I read any part with him in it quickly skipping over most - except the scene where he is trying to negotiate with the Dwellers.And why a 3? There are parts where I wish Banks had edited his work. I thought if I heard another 'arguably' I'd stop reading. There were the Luciferous sections that I could not read. There was the long set up.But I'm quibbling really - in another universe I'd give it 5.Kathy
—Kathy Turner
