Loved itAnd I think The Algebraist combines some really high-concept space opera with some Banksian ideas about power, freedom, and intelligence. And yes, even better than the Culture novels, if you can imagine that.
Review 1 of 2
The Algebraist (2004)
Others: Overwhelmingly positive 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.
- ISBN:
- 9780316565585
- Length:
- 534 pages
Genres: science fiction
Lists: …
Similar books
1 of 6
Slow Bullets
Alastair Reynolds
2015 · 192 pages · 1 review
Others: PositiveAn interstellar adventure of war, identity, betrayal, and the preservation of civilisation itself.
Why?
What made the match, strongest first
Also science fiction71%Similar descriptions17%SciFiScavenger loved bothPersonalize your recommendations12%Seveneves
Neal Stephenson
2015 · 866 pages · 2 reviews
Others: Overwhelmingly positive"What would happen if the world were ending? A catastrophic event renders the earth a ticking time bomb. In a feverish race against the inevitable, nations around the globe band together to devise an ambitious plan to ensure the survival of humanity far beyond our atmosphere, in outer space. But the complexities and unpredictability of human nature coupled with unforeseen challenges and dangers threaten the intrepid pioneers, until only a handful of survivors remain . . . Five thousand years later, their progeny--seven distinct races now three billion strong--embark on yet another audacious journey into the unknown . . . to an alien world utterly transformed by cataclysm and time: Earth" --
Why?
What made the match, strongest first
Also science fiction74%2 creators loved both20%Similar descriptionsPersonalize your recommendations6%Embassytown
China Miéville
2011 · 350 pages · 4 reviews
Others: Overwhelmingly positiveEmbassytown: a city of contradictions on the outskirts of the universe. Avice is an immerser, a traveller on the immer, the sea of space and time below the everyday, now returned to her birth planet. Here on Arieka, Humans are not the only intelligent life, and Avice has a rare bond with the natives, the enigmatic Hosts - who cannot lie. Only a tiny cadre of unique human Ambassadors can speak Language, and connect the two communities. But an unimaginable new arrival has come to Embassytown. And when this Ambassador speaks, everything changes. Catastrophe looms. Avice knows the only hope is for her to speak directly to the alien Hosts. And that is impossible.
Why?
What made the match, strongest first
Also science fiction75%2 creators loved both20%Similar descriptionsPersonalize your recommendations5%A Fire upon the Deep
Vernor Vinge
1992 · 613 pages · 19 reviews
Others: Mostly positiveThousands of years in the future, humanity is no longer alone in a universe where a mind's potential is determined by its location in space, from superintelligent entities in the Transcend, to the limited minds of the Unthinking Depths, where only simple creatures, and technology, can function. Nobody knows what strange force partitioned space into these "regions of thought," but when the warring Straumli realm use an ancient Transcendent artifact as a weapon, they unwittingly unleash an awesome power that destroys thousands of worlds and enslaves all natural and artificial intelligence. Fleeing this galactic threat, Ravna crash lands on a strange world with a ship-hold full of cryogenically frozen children, the only survivors from a destroyed space-lab. They are taken captive by the Tines, an alien race with a harsh medieval culture, and used as pawns in a ruthless power struggle.
Why?
What made the match, strongest first
Also science fiction75%2 creators loved both20%Similar descriptionsPersonalize your recommendations5%Floating worlds
Cecelia Holland
1975 · 465 pages · 1 review
Others: Positive2000 years in the future, runaway pollution has made the Earth uninhabitable except in giant biodomes. The society is an anarchy, with disputes mediated through the Machiavellian Committee for the Revolution. Mars, Venus and the Moon support flourishing colonies of various political stripes. On the fringes of the solar system, in the Gas Planets, a strange, new, violent kind of human has evolved.In this unstable system the anarchist Paula Mendoza, an agent of the Committee, works to make peace, and ultimately protect her people, in a catastrophic clash of worlds that destroys the order she knows.
Why?
What made the match, strongest first
Also science fiction75%Secret Sauce of Storycraft loved both13%Similar descriptionsPersonalize your recommendations12%Empire of silence
Christopher Ruocchio
2018 · 618 pages · 20 reviews
Others: Mostly positiveIt was not his war. On the wrong planet, at the right time, for the best reasons, Hadrian Marlowe started down a path that could only end in fire. The galaxy remembers him as a hero: the man who burned every last alien Cielcin from the sky. They remember him as a monster: the devil who destroyed a sun, casually annihilating four billion human lives--even the Emperor himself--against Imperial orders. But Hadrian was not a hero. He was not a monster. He was not even a soldier. Fleeing his father and a future as a torturer, Hadrian finds himself stranded on a strange, backwater world. Forced to fight as a gladiator and into the intrigues of a foreign planetary court, he will find himself fight a war he did not start, for an Empire he does not love, against an enemy he will never understand.
Why?
What made the match, strongest first
Also science fiction75%SciFiScavenger loved both13%Similar descriptionsPersonalize your recommendations12%
Loved it
Loved itI just remember the world and the tongue-in-cheek ending. And there's just like a lot of this story that I love. and it's one that I would continually recommend to other people if you're interested in just a one big sweeping space opera epic.