| The Algebraist | 
 enlarge | Author: Iain M. Banks
Publisher: Night Shade Books
Category: Book
List Price: $14.95
Buy Used: $1.25
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Avg. Customer Rating:  59 reviews
Sales Rank: 67338
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 434
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.2
Dimensions (in): 8.7 x 6 x 1.5
ISBN: 1597800449
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.914
EAN: 9781597800440
ASIN: 1597800449
Publication Date: June 29, 2006
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews:
 A must read October 8, 2008
Banks's foremost non-Culture novel and in my opinion his best work so far, it is a must read for any Sci-Fi fan. Not one for spoiling the plot I will only say that it has certainly earned its spot on my "favorites" bookshelf next to Asimov's, Heinlein's, and Hamilton's best works.
 Interesting tale, but too easy to put down for later... September 20, 2008
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
I was introduced to Iain M. Banks through his epic Culture tales. The Algebraist is not part of this "series", but Banks' style is still there throughout.
Fassin Taak is a Slow Seer, a human explorer/ambassador to the Dwellers, a species occurring throughout the galaxy that inhabits gas giant planets. Dwellers can live hundreds of millions of years, and their culture is both ancient and indecipherable. They occasionally allow others to visit, interact, and explore. That is Taak's job.
Taak's home system is being invaded by the Beyonders, and the Mercatoria leadership orders Taak to seek out the truth regarding a secret "wormhole network" used exclusively by the Dwellers. Failure may result in cultural annihilation for Taak's system.
Taak operates an "arrowhead gascraft" that enables him to survive in the gas giant atmosphere for extended periods of time, interacting with the Dwellers in their cities and homes. This gascraft obviously is a miraculous machine, but its description is very incomplete for such a critical component of the story. After all, it is what this arrowhead can and cannot do that makes Taak's adventure even possible.
The story, unfortunately, just seems to be drawn out forever, making it too easy to put aside until later.
I did note the comments of the character Archimandrite Luseferous, an evil despot leading the invasion. He comments on the Truth, a popular religion of the time:
"The idea of faith interested him, even fascinated him, not as an intellectual idea, not as a concept or some abstract theoretical framework, but as a way of controlling people, as a way of understanding and so manipulating them. As a flaw, in the end, as something which was wrong with others that was not wrong with him.
Sometimes he could not believe all the advantages other people seemed prepared to hand him. They had faith and so would do things that were plainly not in their own immediate (or, often, long-term) best interests, because they just believed what they had been told; they experienced altruism and so did things that, again, were not necessarily to their advantage; they had sentimental or emotional attachments to others and so could be coerced, once more, into doing things they would not have done otherwise. And - best of all, he sometimes thought - people were self-deceiving. They thought they were brave when they were really cowards, or imagined they could think for themselves when they were just good as passing exams, or thought they were compassionate when they were just sentimental.
The real strength came from a perfectly simple maxim: Be completely honest with yourself; only ever deceive others" (p. 223).
Don't you hate reading a piece of fiction that exposes organized religion?
 'The Algebraist' is almost unreadable! June 26, 2008
2 out of 4 found this review helpful
Iain M. Bank's The Algebraist was nominated for science fiction's highest award in 2005 and one of my favorite sci-fi authors, Peter F. Hamilton, the creator of the Night's Dawn space opera, has cited the fellow British writer as an influence and inspiration. So I greatly looked forward to reading Banks' latest science fiction work, especially considering the title has something to do with mathematics, my regular day job. Banks is an unusual author in that he is well-known (and commercially successful) in both "genre fiction" as well as general fiction.
Reviews on the web of The Algebraist are not uniformly glowing, although almost all refer to its ambitious nature and sharp wit.
For one thing, the book is 434 hardcover pages, not quite Hamiltonian-length but still quite an imposing size for a bit of a relaxing read. Frankly, I'm surprised I finished it, at all. It's simply not worth the amount of time it takes to read.
My fourth grade teacher once told me a long time ago that if I felt that I was about to give up on a book to skip 50 pages and keep on reading. I tried this strategy with The Algebraist and it did allow me to finish it, but not enjoyably.
GRADE: B.
 Progressive In Both Ways June 21, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
"The Algebraist" was my first venture into the mind of Iain M. Banks, after I saw a character in the movie Hot Fuzz (Widescreen Edition)reading one of his books. I am not a particular fan of sci-fi, so this was the only, shallow reason for checking it out.
The story is highly original and Banks' universe of 4035 AD, (or there abouts), is peopled with a wide variety of intersting aliens and worlds. The whole place is a mind-trip of different technologies and worlds in which Slow Seer Taak Fassin is on a mission to find a secret that could end the immediate threat of war. The only hitch is that he needs to delve into the gas giant Nasqueron and get in touch with the eccentric, long-lived Dwellers. Dweller culture and society, where their own children are hunted by the parents, and they have "Formal Wars" where scores are kept of how many ships are destroyed and crippled. It is among these people that Fassin must search for his own and his people's salvation.
The book itself can be a bit of a mission, (though people already familiar might disagree), as Banks only gives you the information about the world around the characters gradually. This could be merely a product of my own slowness, but it took a fair way through the book to get a handle on various things, such as the political environment of the universe, and also the times. Life spans are somewhat confusing with the times of "slowing", which is what Dwellers can do. Despite these issues, the book does not let you go and remains an interesting and mysterious read.
The sheer scope of the book is huge, and that is also something that might appeal to those who like the "epic" nature in things. Unlike one or two other reviewers, I did not find anything odious about the way the book was written. I thought the book moved along at a great pace, and the techno-babble was easy to handle.
Overall, I would have to say that "The Algebraist" is a great read and one that is very imaginative. It is progressive in the sense of originality and also in the sense that it only feeds you the background information in progressive sections. It works well and maintains a high level of interest in an epic story.
 Just Badly Written June 21, 2008
4 out of 8 found this review helpful
The following sentence, which is fairly typical of the prose in this work, appears on the top of page 25 of the hardcover edition of this book:
"Though it would be a pity if Ilen -- achingly beautiful, wanly pale, shamelessly blonde, effortlessly academically accomplished, bizarrely unself-assured and insecure Ilen -- had to perish in the wreck too, Fassin thought."
If you can read sentences like this and not flinch, you may enjoy this work. I cannot, and after twenty or thirty such assaults, I gave up. Mr. Bank's writing is sophomoric and annoying. Hell, it doesn't all have to be Cormac McCarthy, but even science fiction geeks have to have some standards.
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