The Algebraist (SIGNED)

London: Orbit, 2004. 1st. hardback. Near fine, signed, 1st edition, unclipped d/j (v.g., slight bumping at base), brown boards, white spine titling bright, text block firm, pages unmarked and crisp. Signed on title: To Jim, Iain M Banks. 8vo (230 x 150 / 9"" x 6""). A superb standalone novel from the awesome imagination of Iain M. Banks, a master of modern science fiction. 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.