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Regular fans of Iain M Banks will note immediately that this is not a Culture novel. However, this does not stop Banks from crafting his usual expanse of narrative, crammed with new ideas and new thoughts.
The book centres around Fassin Taak, a “seer”. Fassin lives on ‘glantine, a moon in the Ulubis system, which is also home to a gas giant planet (think Jupiter only larger) called Nasqueron. The gas giant is home to a species called Dwellers, who specialise in collecting information and storing it, usually haphazardly. Seers specialise in visiting the Dwellers to locate some of this information. Elsewhere, the galaxy is ruled by The Mercatoria, and interlinked with wormholes accessed through Portals. If you have a portal in your system, you can be at any other connected system in the blink of an eye. If not, you’re one of the “Discon”, isolated by the time taken to get to you at sub-light speeds.
Unfortunately, much of the wormhole network was destroyed in a war, but there is hope since documents pertaining to a Dweller network of wormholes are purported to exist. The Dwellers deny it, of course. But the Archimandrite Luseferous has heard of the documents, the so-called Dweller List, and he wants it. The Mercatoria hear about this, and not only want the list, but want to stop Luseferous from getting it. It’s supposedly on Nasqueron, so the stage is set for an epic battle in Taak’s back yard.
Hoping to steal a march on Luseferous, the Mercatoria co-opt Taak into one of their military orders, and send him on a delve to Nasqueron to try to find the Dweller List.
None of this takes very long in the book, much of which is devoted to the delve itself, and Fassin’s quest to find the List, if it even exists. The narrative jumps about a bit as we reminisce with Fassin or review the progress of the fast-converging fleets. But mainly it’s about Fassin and his quest. Of course, the murkiness of the Gas Giant’s atmosphere are as nothing compared to the complexity and vagueness of the quest itself. Intertwined within this is the ongoing (in Banks’s universe at least) discussion regarding Artificial Intelligences, which have been all but eradicated by the Mercatoria.
Fassin bounces from pillar to post in his search for the Dweller List. This may seem frustrating for the reader, but each step is well executed, and expectations are well-managed through the narrative tone. And it’s all woven with the mesh of the general Dweller outlook. It’s extremely well done. Luseferous is at least as unpleasant and nasty as you would expect from a Banks villain, and the women make a startlingly pleasant diversion, especially as they do not always have the best intentions at heart. Banks is historically very good with his female characters, it has to be said. Fassin himself seems to be slightly immature but very intelligent. He wears well throughout the book as he learns from his experiences. The Dwellers are suitably inscrutable, and the other characters too are well described and play their parts. Each of them invokes an emotional response in the reader, which is an achievement.
The conclusion to The Algebraist is more than it seems when first read. It took a while for your reviewer to piece together the full implications of the outcome. The book is not instantly forgettable, and that’s a good thing. After resolving it all, it becomes apparent that there was a fairly massive twist in the tail. It was a good read, and a strong book from Banks, who, we at
7/10
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