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Carregando... The Algebraist (edição: 2006)de Iain M. Banks (Autor)
Informações da ObraThe Algebraist de Iain M. Banks
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Registre-se no LibraryThing tpara descobrir se gostará deste livro. Ainda não há conversas na Discussão sobre este livro. 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! PrêmiosDistinctions
It is 4034 AD. Humanity has made it to the stars. Fassin Taak, a Slow Seer at the Court of the Nasqueron Dwellers, will be fortunate if he makes it to the end of the year. The Nasqueron Dwellers inhabit a gas giant on the outskirts of the galaxy, in a system awaiting its wormhole connection to the rest of civilisation. In the meantime, they are dismissed as decadents living in a state of highly developed barbarism, hoarding data without order, hunting their own young and fighting pointless formal wars. Seconded to a military-religious order he's barely heard of - part of the baroque hierarchy of the Mercatoria, the latest galactic hegemony - Fassin Taak has to travel again amongst the Dwellers. He is in search of a secret hidden for half a billion years. But with each day that passes a war draws closer - a war that threatens to overwhelm everything and everyone he's ever known. As complex, turbulent, flamboyant and spectacular as the gas giant on which it is set, the new science fiction novel from Iain M. Banks is space opera on a truly epic scale. Não foram encontradas descrições de bibliotecas. |
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Google Books — Carregando... GênerosClassificação decimal de Dewey (CDD)823.914Literature English & Old English literatures English fiction Modern Period 1901-1999 1945-1999Classificação da Biblioteca do Congresso dos E.U.A. (LCC)AvaliaçãoMédia:
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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