7 March 2026
Some rambling on the publishing landscape that’s more a blog post I guess
My patience for reading things that start a bit of a slog but pay off ‘in the end’ is high. I admire any artist or writer who in this day of dopamine hyper-addiction and micro entertainments is willing to ask the reader to have faith and take the long slog, as it will pay off in the end. (Or, probably more to the point, the publishing house willing to publish it.) This wasn’t as much of an Ask in 2004, when The Algebraist was published, but in 2024, when Orbit started republishing Banks’ works with a new minimalist Windows screen saver aesthetic cover design, it was.
This is a constant of Banks’ works—hyper-detailed, unexplained jargon, blow-by-blow decontextualized action that only on looking back completely makes sense. Use of Weapons is possibly most exemplary of this of his works, with the most famous payoff. Tor is putting out new versions of The Book of the New Sun, which asks faith that moves mountains–in the face of four books of what might as well be post-apocalypse Jabberwocky for all the sense it makes in the first read-through—that it all ties together, eventually, so perhaps there is an appetite for this sort of slow investment again. I wonder how much of that ‘demand’ is fueled by self-disgust in people whose attention spans are utterly shot, who want to force themselves to appreciate something ‘slow’—the anxiety of intellectuals who are, unfortunately, caught in the same damn trap as the rest of society, but have the burden of being aware and ashamed of it. I cheer on anybody who is trying to undo the dopamine addiction, the scattershot three-screens-at-once attention span. I’ve fallen into it myself and had to claw myself back out of it.
Well, Banks and Wolfe are both decorated authors, multiple-winners of prestigious awards, the favorite-author-of-your-favorite-author as I once heard it put, and that reputation itself does a lot of lifting of the marketing. A “classic”—an accomplishment to have read, a victory for the struggling dopamine addict intellectual. Perhaps that designation is carrying a lot of the decision to re-print. Kind of a moot point, perhaps, to ask if these books ‘could have been published today’ because the weight of the designation of “classic” and the endorsement of popular contemporary authors primes the reader with far more fortitude and patience than they would bring to opening a new book from an unknown author. I admit I am no different—I trust Banks, so I give him more grace when I’m not jiving with the work immediately, and the payoff comes in the last twenty or so pages.
The old advice to ‘grab the reader immediately’ only seems more urgent, now—the adage that you have a page to grab the reader/editor seems almost quaint and naively generous. You have a catchphrase, a list of tropes. What works are we losing because publishers are too aware of this taste of the market? And what brilliant writers with asocial souls are not getting published? Leaning into questions of identity-as-shaping-narrative, what narratives do we necessarily lose when that sort of person is locked out of publishing? Does the soul of the BookToker have within it The Brothers Karamazov or Always Coming Home? That aspect of the human experience simply is not being printed. It is not ‘better’ or more ‘valid’ than the modern social media socialite soul, but I lament that there is no place for it.
This begs questions about the emperor’s new clothes, and our ability to accurately evaluate a work ‘of its own merits’ (implied: decontextualized, which is impossible). I’ve thought a great deal about meta-narratives readers impose upon authors’ works, something that seems only to have gotten more prevalent with hyperfocus on identity in interpreting one’s words. Indeed, to do this—to ‘think about who is saying this, and why’—is now a stated imperative in leftish circles, and while it does have a materialist bent (we are shaped by our circumstances) it is the sort of belief that leads to the Isabel Fall tragedy: the “attack helicopter” story in Clarkesworld that was condemned as ‘dangerous’ outright and the only possible mitigation being Fall’s identity: that only a trans voice could be trusted to parody anti-trans speech and use it to explore gender in good faith. She was pushed to out herself as a trans woman. She did not want to out herself, originally; she just wanted to publish a story and have it stand of its own merits, for the tongue-in-cheek to be evident to any reader with a brain. Anonymity as condemnation—part of a larger trend online of finding pseudonyms suspect because they might obscure that a person is out of their lane, so to speak.
Okay, let’s actually review the damn book.
The actual review
As I (at length) said, it took me a while to get into it. I realize this is because he is laying the groundwork for a setting of comparable complexity with The Culture—which has had a hefty series of doorstop novels to develop—within a single book. Thinking on it that way he accomplished a heroic thing and was able to pull it off by leaving a great deal unsaid—trusting the reader to infer the lower 90% of the iceberg, though if you’re familiar with science fiction it’s not undoable by any means. I could see people who aren’t seeped in science fiction having a more difficult time getting bearings.
Humans are part of a pan-galactic civilization and there is a diaspora on a planet sharing a system with a gas giant, Nasqueron, populated by a race called the Dwellers. Fassin Taak is heir to a familial sect of human Seers who live on a moon orbiting Nasqueron and make regular trips down to the planet to visit with the Dwellers, a sort of ambassadorial-cum-information-seeking role, as the Dwellers are an unfathomably ancient race whose members are, themselves, unfathomably ancient (billion year life spans is a norm), and who the galaxy suspects is hiding far more technology than they share behind a flippant dandy-like disregard for the politics and doings of Fast beings, those who live on a more human timescale and with a human sense of urgency. Indeed, Fassin must artificially slow his awareness of time to be able to communicate with them, and his willingness to literally dive into the planet in a life support mech suit instead of merely sending a proxy droid and communicating remotely (as most Seers do) has won him some degree of esteem and trust with the Dwellers.
Faster-than-light travel was never achieved in this universe. Stellar systems are instead linked by a series of wormholes that allow instantaneous travel over great distances, but to utilize this system one must be able to find the opening to the wormhole, which is linked to another specific opening—there is no free-flying through warp space or whatever: one is limited to the road as carved. When a portal is destroyed, the components to fix it must be dragged slower-than-light hundreds of years from a central governing body. Fassin’s system has been thus isolated for a few hundred years after their system portal was destroyed, and they have been awaiting the arrival of a new portal while living on a more immediate scale with their neighbors. An imminent threat of invasion makes the need for a portal urgent—they can no longer wait the few years left for the slow-moving ship to drag it over—and there is a rumor of an ancient system of secret portals the scrambled coordinates for which are in the possession of the Dwellers, which furthermore must be refined with a Transform to get the actual coordinates. Well, that Dweller List is at least a place to start, and Fassin Taak is the Seer with whom the Dwellers are most friendly, and, it is assumed, open-handed—in short, the non-Dweller most likely to get the information.
The first part of the book is a description of tortures the like and cadence of which make me think this is going to be an edgier-than-thou description of the most fucked up things your fifteen-year-old self can imagine and put to paper, albeit written with the skill of a Nebula laureate. As this was introducing the ‘main villain’, I assumed this would be a lot of the book, so I almost put it down. I love Banks but if this was the detour he took in this non-Culture book I wasn’t feeling it. We are introduced to this very edgiest-edgelord-OC-who is also a vampire and has red eyes and is chaotic evil and then he just… drops out of the narrative, for the most part. Or is an incidental background menacing ‘evil’, the manifestation of High Stakes and the wonton cruelty of the universe – whatever the case, his presence is sporadic. Thankfully. I found him tedious and not all that interesting.
I much preferred reading about the Dwellers, a race of Frisbee-shaped gas giant natives with the flamboyance and irreverence of Oscar Wilde, and the same regard for ‘fashion’ in word and deed that may be genuine or irony layered so thick as to gain substance, and it doesn’t much matter—it achieves the goal of making them seem ineffectual dandies-about-the-galaxy with exceptional wealth and influence, and, perhaps the biggest privilege, disregard for ‘politics’ and the messy entanglements of other species as they truly do seem insulated from it. Almost like gods you expect to be above the affairs of mortals and to not take a personal stake in wars, injustices, etc, because they will not be moved by the playground squabbles of inferior beings anyway so affecting a tolerance gives one a sense of wisdom and control. Bruce Wayne as the utterly insufferable billionaire playboy to shed any suspicion that such a frivolous person could be Batman.
Orbit did reprint Banks’ works, but the version of The Algebraist I read was the Night Shade Books printing from 2006 I found at Bookman’s—i.e. back when they were an independent publisher, not an imprint. That is a blast from the past. I’m glad they landed on their feet; I hadn’t heard much about them in years but I loved the weird stuff they put out in the aughts.