Not Enough Algebra!

Well, I was hoping to have posted something in May, but for some reason, just never managed it. Well, maybe it had something to do with moving, but I think it was also just that I didn't end up reading anything I really wanted to review. Ok, I did read Middlemarch, but I couldn't think of any way to review it that didn't come across as a 2nd year English essay, so I didn't.

And I admit, I'm only reviewing The Algebraist to admit that I only picked this up because I liked the title, math girl that I am, and was subsequently saddened by the significant lack of algebra in the book (or even a character who actually was an algebraist). But I guess you can't have everything, so I won't complain too much about false advertising.

So instead of a math-influenced sci-fi novel, I got space opera, and fairly entertaining space opera, all told. Though sometimes I suspect that if Banks turned in excerpts of his books to a highschool English, he'd get put on some sort of "To Watch" list, because he writes torture and general sadism amazingly well. Way, way too well. But as a science fiction novel, it felt to me more like having someone take me by the shoulders and shake me a lot, while yelling, "Fuck! Fucking crazy aliens!" in my face. (Seriously, the characters in his book say "fuck" an awful lot. Do they still say that in the future? Anyway.) Here's a sample of the general over-the-top-ness of it all:

`What', Fassin heard a nearby Dweller say, quite quietly but distinctly through the pandemonium, `the fuck is that?'

(Another dark Mercatorial ship, another silver Dreadnought, ripped to shreds and blossoming in nuclear fire respectively. Another pair of Dreadnoughts shaking in the first beam-fall of the violet ray flicking from on high.)

And on the screen opposite, looking downwards into the wide bowl of the storm's dead heart, a huge darkly red-glowing globe was rising from the sump gases of the storm floor, dragging a great flute of gas after it like some absurdly steady fireball. It was kilometres across and striated, banded like a miniature gas-giant, so that for one crazed instant Fassin thought he was watching the palace of the Hierchon Ormilla floating smoothly upwards into the fray.

And so on. So was it fun to read? Sure. But not without a lot of moments of "okay, enough already", and really just not enough math.