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A carregar... The Algebraistpor Iain M. Banks
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Ainda não há conversas na Discussão sobre este livro. Really really great book, wrapped up nicely, everything coming together. Dweller society is fascinating and a really great concept that's executed well. It's pretty funny at some points, especially the Dweller stuff - not laugh out loud but enough to lighten the mood and not be SUPER SERIOUS SCI-FI all the time. There are loads of details that give enough information to satisfy my curiosity while still wanting more and thinking there's a whole other world that I'm just scratching the surface of. I don't know I'm bad at praising fiction but it's a very satisfying, good, well done, nice, excellent sci fi novel that I highly recommend and you'll like if you like the Culture series. Worth mentioning a couple of things that might be shitty for people to read: The main bad guy character of the Starveling Cult does a few pretty gory things - it's not super extended but early on there's some pretty gruesome description and there's some later gratuitous violence stuff although not described in too much detail. There are a couple of mentions of rape, although there's no detail. Just want to give a heads up, although this stuff is a very small fraction of the book. Very very minor spoilers relating to the slow time stuff, just me trying to work out how it works: 1) Humans have a much longer lifespan than normal, measuring in the hundreds of years - this is through rejuvenation treatments and stuff. In addition, travelling long distances by spacecraft makes you age slower than your years because relativity. It's also possible for humans to exercise self-control of some sort (dunno if it's like a surgical thing) to slow their metabolism and thoughts down by large amounts, making them live much longer. 2) Dwellers are a "Slow" species because of their attitude to life and their biology that allows them to live billions of years. They live a lot of time at normal speed but especially as they get older they spend more time at very slowed down metabolic/thought speeds (1/64 normal is brought up at one point). Dwellers also often do this while travelling or just for fun - their timescales are several orders of magnitude longer than ours. I'm still kind of confused about a moment where some dwellers say to Taak like "do we need to talk slower for you" as if on a normal delve talking normally to people he'd be slowed down? I guess usually delvers are slowed down a lot because they're talking to Sages and the like who spend most of their time in Slow. Spoiler re the ending Spoiler for near the end Hydorgen Sonata I like stories set in space, though I prefer to visit them by the big screen rather than via books. However, I figured it was about time I read more proper sci-fi books, and Banks seemed to be a good place to start. This was a just a book I randomly picked up never having heard of it before. I did like it, I think, I just had a hard time keeping up. Usually I understood WHAT was going on, but rarely I had any idea why. I don't know if I'm just stupid or lacking in reading comprehension (do I read too many books?), or if it was just too much with all the unfamiliar terms. Then again I read a lot of fantasy, so maybe I can't blame that last part. My fave thing was the writing. I just really enjoy Bank's writing style, some phrases and sentences were just delightful to read. It might not be Nobel prize worthy prose, but it was right up my alley and for some reason I hadn't expected that. Might have to read something else by him just for that. Also, random mentions of a girl being bi. First it was just mentioned that a lot of guys were falling for this one girl, and a bunch of girls too, which I thought was nice, but then it got even better when it was confirmed that the girl in question had been with both guys and at least one gal. More of that, plz! The Algebraist is a full-bore space opera with a galactic setting, plenty of exotic alien intelligences, interstellar warfare, political intrigue, espionage, melodrama, and a surprisingly generous helping of slapstick. It is divided into six chapters of about eighty pages each, but these are not component novellas. It's very much a single novel with a unified arc from start to finish. The far future described here takes place long after the "Arteria Collapse" that broke up the wormhole-networked galactic community. The focus is on the particularly remote Urlubis system. This peripheral locale is still subject to the Mercatoria, which imposes its multiracial but highly authoritarian hierarchies across much of the galaxy, along with a crusade against autonomous AI. Humans are both old and relatively new to galactic polity, since a-humans ("advanced" or abducted) had spread quite widely after being collected earlier by other starfaring races. R-humans ("remainder") from Earth did eventually join these "prepped" populations. The story's protagonist is a human "seer," part of a research institution dedicated to learning from a somewhat standoffish race of gas-giant planet "Dwellers" who are among the oldest and most widespread of interstellar sentients. This freestanding novel was my first read in the works of Iain Banks, whose science fiction is most identified with his series The Culture. I liked it a great deal, and I will certainly wade into The Culture on the strength of this book.
It is almost impossible to do justice to the breadth and scope, sheer entertainment value of The Algebraist, so . . .. Read and enjoy! PrémiosDistinctions
The time is 4034 A.D. and humanity has made it to the stars, but Fassin Taak will be fortunate if he makes it to the end of the year as he searches for a secret that has remained hidden for half a billion years. Não foram encontradas descrições de bibliotecas. |
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![]() GénerosSistema Decimal de Melvil (DDC)823.914Literature English English fiction Modern Period 1901-1999 1945-1999Classificação da Biblioteca do Congresso dos EUA (LCC)AvaliaçãoMédia:![]()
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What I really enjoyed was the world-building concerning the Dwellers and other alien species. Humans seemed dull and militaristic by comparison. My favourite aliens were the Ythyn, who turned up after 400 pages to take a very minor role in the plot:
Despite disliking his torture scenes, I can definitely appreciate Banks’ macabre imagination. There are some fantastic ideas in ‘The Algebraist’ concerning the implications of interstellar travel, the difficulties of interspecies communication, and the nature of reality. Fassin and several friends from his youth provide the point of view characters, yet they seem relatively petty, small, and uninteresting in comparison to Dweller timescales. Still, Fassin is a thoughtful protagonist and his friendships with aliens add some emotion to the plot, which is largely focused on impersonal technological and sociopolitical forces. There are some spectacular scenes and very satisfying plot twists,