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Description
As complex, turbulent and spectacular as the gas giant on which it is set, this novel from Iain M. Banks is space opera on a truly epic scale.
“An enormously enjoyable book, full of wonderful aliens, a sense of wonder and subtle political commentary on current events.” –Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)
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.
“Banks is a phenomenon…writing pure science fiction of a peculiarly gnarly energy and elegance.” –William Gibson
“Banks writes with a sophistication that will surprise anyone unfamiliar with modern science fiction.” –The New York Times
For More from Iain M. Banks, check out:
The Culture series:
Consider Phlebas
The Player of Games
Use of Weapons
The State of the Art
Excession
Inversions
Look to Windward
Matter
Surface Detail
The Hydrogen Sonata
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Praise
“Banks is a phenomenon...writing pure science fiction of a peculiarly gnarly energy and elegance.”
—William Gibson“Banks writes with a sophistication that will surprise anyone unfamiliar with modern science fiction.”
—The New York Times“An enormously enjoyable book, full of wonderful aliens, a sense of wonder and subtle political commentary on current events.”
—Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) on The Algebraist“Banks never lets up in a dizzying array of characters, mind-bending ideas, and dazzling action.”
—Booklist“Few of us have been exposed to a talent so manifest and of such extraordinary breadth.”
—New York Review of Science Fiction“[Banks] can summon up sense-of-wonder Big Concepts you've never seen before and display them with narration as deft as a conjuror's fingers."
—scifi.com"Nobody does it better."
—Times (UK)"Banks writes space opera on the grand scale: he measures time in eons, space in lightyears, tragedies in gigadeaths."
—Time
