The Algebraist
The Archimandrite Luseferous, warrior priest of the Starveling Cult of Leseum9 IV and effective ruler of one hundred and seventeen stellar systems, forty-plus inhabited planets, numerous significant artificial immobile habitats and many hundreds of thousands of civilian capital ships, who was Executive High Admiral of the Shroud Wing Squadron of the Four-Hundred-and-Sixty-Eighth Ambient Fleet (Det.) and who had once been Triumvirate Rotational human/non-human Representative for Cluster Epiphany Five at the Supreme Galactic Assembly, in the days before the latest ongoing Chaos and the last, fading rumbles of the Disconnect Cascade, had some years ago caused the head of his once-greatest enemy, the rebel chief Stinausin, to be struck from his shoulders, attached without delay to a long-term life-support mechanism and then hung upside down from the ceiling of his hugely impressive study in the outer wall of Sheer Citadel - with its view over Junch City and Faraby Bay towards the hazy vertical slot that was Force Gap - so that the Archimandrite could, when the mood took him, which was fairly frequently, use his old adversary's head as a punchball.
This book gets cool points just for using the word "archimandrite".
I have decided that I rather like Iain M Banks when he's not working in his trademark Culture universe. The Culture books I've read so far have never rung true for me: a society where AIs run everything and never crash, while humans are sort of pets, yet perfectly happy, seems sort of a cop-out. The Algebraist on the other hand is a lot of fun. It's unashamedly widescreen Space Opera - a galaxy billions of years old, with a wide spectrum of races who live at vastly different scales and speeds, about five separate factions vying for power, a billion-year-old secret McGuffin which could Change Everything, a society of very alien aliens, and lots of things exploding in ways surprisingly consistent with the current consensus laws of physics. (Relativistic asteroids are one of Banks' favourite offensive weapons, it seems).
Oh, and it's told from the point of view of a human archeologist - a bit of a rebel and a youngster at a mere couple hundred years old - who spends half the book inside a personalised spacecraft inside a gas giant, interacting with the natives who are kind of like a cross between squids, wheels and crabs, who live for billions of years, and who have a civilisation based around collecting books and fighting sort of historical re-enactment mini-wargames (with live weapons).
Plot? Well, you need wormholes to get around the galaxy. A large chunk of the galaxy's 'holes are still offline after the last war (a mere few million years back) - it takes between dozens to hundreds of years to travel at sublight speeds - and the current consensus civilisation, the amusingly Byzantine Mercatoria, has its hands busy fighting both the uncivilised Beyonders, and various dropout cults such as the Epiphany Five Disconnect (home of our Chad Vader-ish villain, Luseferous. He likes blowing up planets, but he's a little out of his league when it comes to the galaxy's real hard lads. Invading 117 stellar systems is about the level of 'loud annoying domestic dispute' in this milieu.)
Meanwhile, a little system in the middle of nowhere that happens to be home to an archeological station researching the enigmatic gas-giant Dwellers (the squid-wheel-crab people) stumbles on The Ultimate McGuffin - a long-lost epic poem titled 'The Algebraist' which supposedly reveals the location of the Dwellers' secret private wormhole network - which is the sort of information entire civilisations would start a galactic war over. Or at least invade a system for. Which all sides then proceed to do, and wacky antics ensue.
