elfs | Iain M. Banks, The Algebraist

In the end, I enjoyed The Algebraist. It was long, and in some places a bit of a slog. I kept track: it took me eighteen solid hours to read my way through it. I don't read mysteries, so the two big surprises of the book were surprises to me, and in the end I was quite impressed with the way Banks had laid out the clues, giving me a "Wow, that should have been obvious in restrospect" feeling akin to reading Agatha Christie.

Banks's sense of cosmic wonder is infectious even if he plays hard and fast with his "hard and fast SF" setting. He has moments set in a world of pure water, an adventure with a huge gas giant civilization, and maginificent moments of architecture that are just breathtaking. That part of Banks's imagination is intact and reliable.

There are things Fassin (our hero)'s environment suit can do that you just can't acheive without AI and nanotech, yet AI and nanotech are "forbidden horrors" of the Mercatoria (the government agency in charge of the human part of the galaxy) and there are several agencies tasked with hunting them down and destroying them. (Banks has some ironic words about why there are "several" agencies.) Although Banks has tried to create a universe where FTL is all wormhole based and theoretically within the limits of known physics, but one voyage involves what it clearly not a closed timelike loop. Ah, well.

The "villain" of the piece is a classec E. E. "Doc" Smith villain who has replaced his mustache-twirling for other kinds of evil biophysical enhancements. He's So Evil that he's got to be a satire and ultimately he is just a macguffin to drive the rest of the characters to act.

If there was one thing that disappointed me about the book, it was Banks's return, several times, to the notion that human beings have a Will To Death. He introduces character after character only to describe in detail how they approach death, look forward to it, even embrace it. He does it so often, even to having a species engineered to be morbid, that I suspect he's having fun with his critics. If so, he didn't do it well enough to not depress his regular readers. He spends far too much energy highlighting the tragedies of war and in the end the satisfactions of his story are offset by his dark conclusions in which, really, nobody gets what they want. Banks does his "funny old world" and "life goes on" things, theming as he does that only short lives are worthwhile as long as they carry the illusion of purpose: long lives, those in thousands or billions of years, end up being pointless.

It's hard to tell if he was serious.