I’d like to start this blog post of with stating that The Algebraist by Iain M. Banks is without a doubt the single worst book I’ve read since leaving grade school and escaped having to read pointless fiction mass fed to uninterested minors.

So what is this 534 page travesty about? It’s a space opera set in the year 4034 A.D. but that hardly matters since the book doesn’t distinguish very well between relative time and “compressed” time which is a conceptual time that passes slower but doesn’t seem to make consistent mapping back to real time so the main character, the human Fassin Taak, is either around 30 years old or 2000 depending on how you read this drivel. Fassin Taak is a Slow Seer which is sort of an cultural archaeologist studying an old race called the Dwellers. The Dwellers are an advanced ancient civilization that live in gas giant planets and live for millions of years and the species has existed for billions of years.

The book also introduces a complex and interesting galactic empire of varied races but it falls into the shadow of the books main content: HORRENDOUS SOULLESS PLOT. The story involves a situation where the system that Fassin Taak lives in gets cut off from the rest of the galactic empire and is attacked by some random pirate like priests. There is nothing else that happens in the book, the characters are all two dimensional and aren’t developed at all and the end…. I don’t want to talk about the end. This is basically a case of taking a thin “back of a napkin” plot that would be a fair premise for the first 50 to 100 pages of a novel and stretching it to death until nothing is left except my anger of having forced myself to finish the book.

This book has made me question my stance on not burning books, please do yourself a favour and don’t go anywhere near it, let alone read it.

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