The Algebraist

The Algebraist appeared in 2004, a science fiction novel by Iain M. Banks and one of the few he wrote outside his Culture series. It is set in the year 4034, in a galaxy dominated by the Mercatoria, a feudal hierarchy of human and alien powers that has turned the elimination of artificial intelligence into a matter of religious duty.

Fassin Taak belongs to a small dynasty of Slow Seers, researchers who adapt their own bodies to the tempo of the Dwellers, a species that has held the gas giants for billions of years and shows no interest in the faster civilisations around it. His career changes when the connection that ties his system to the rest of the Mercatoria is destroyed, and he is seconded to an order with both military and religious authority, then sent back among the Dwellers to chase a legend. The Dwellers themselves are the book's great invention: cheerful, violent, endlessly curious and entirely uninterested in the opinions of younger species.

The pleasures on offer are the ones Banks specialised in: a baroque political machine with its own prayers and uniforms, an alien culture described entirely on its own terms, and a scholarly hero who would much rather be working than fighting. The Dwellers' libraries are vast, unordered and older than human history, and the question of what is hidden inside them is what drives the whole novel. The scale is part of the joke as well: distances measured in light years, lifespans measured in millions of years, and a bureaucracy to match.