More of wot I have read…

The Algebraist by Iain M Banks

This is more my speed. I like a lot about the worlds the author has created in his sci-fi work and this is no exception. There are always difficulties in seeing the creations of an author the way he does, and sometimes you can find this a little hard to accept. Also there are many obstacles an author must overcome for the sake of a good story (languages, alien compatibility, technology etc). I find that this author makes a good job at talking all of these and still being able to spin a captivating yarn.


‘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 civilisation. 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.’