The algebraist - Iain M. Banks (First edition)

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 civilization. In the meantime, they are dismissed as decadent 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.

As complex, turbulent, flamboyant and spectacular as the gas giant on which it is set, this science fiction novel from Iain M. Banks is space opera on a truly epic scale.