Back on December 10, I reported that I’d acquired a new Iain M. Banks novel, The Algebraist. As I noted on my books page, Iain M. Banks is at the top of the list of authors I will buy sight unseen.
So how come I’m only reporting on it now?
This is an odd book. It’s fairly long (544 pages), and I found myself reading the first 300 pages relatively slowly. Huge amounts of detail, a back story stretching over billions of years, a wide variety of alien species for whom conventionally anthropomorphic thinking was unhelpful…. Over a couple of weeks I read on, fascinated, but only able to absorb one or two chapters at a sitting. And then on December 25th we flew out to Seattle, and after we returned I got sick, and the great grey tome sat there, unread.
As I surfaced from the flu, I hesitatingly picked up the book, and started back in. Fairly quickly, I found things changing. The tempo picks up, then becomes almost giddying as armadas of starships battle and needle-ships corkscrew through one wormhole after another, ricocheting around the universe like badly aimed fireworks. An underlying pattern on a galactic scale emerges, and is purposefully erased. Characters and plotlines are abruptly trashed. And as the deus ex machina recedes, the book ends on a wholly unexpected note. If the first 300 pages took me 10 days, the last 250 zipped by in 5 or 6 hours over two days.
I really don’t know how to judge this book. (I note that other reviewers have felt the same way.) Fundamentally it falls between two stools. There’s a taut, 300 page space opera in here just begging to get out: simplify the back story, eliminate half the characters and three quarters of the species, and let it rip. But there’s also a 1,200 page epic here, balancing the thoughtful and detailed preamble with a more complex and challenging quest for the central character and better resolution of some of the secondary themes. In either case I’d also want more autonomy for our human hero, rather than feeling that he’s simply dragged around the galaxy by forces larger than himself. It’s hard to identify and empathize with supercargo.
Overall, I’m really glad that I read the book: there are more ideas here than most sci-fi writers can achieve over a lifetime. But it’s frustrating. And US fans of Banks’ work will have to buy from the UK; there’s still no US publication date set as far as I can see.
I took a shot out of the front door – notice how the snow is drifting in the porch, and around the tree by the road. Then looking out of a side window, I saw this downy woodpacker, covered in snow, pecking desperately into a branch. I hope he found some food…. 
(As usual, click thumbnails for the full-size images.)
