Visiting the Goodreads website soon after rereading this excellent novel, I saw a number of reviews by people who had plainly failed to understand it at all. Many seemed to be unable to overcome their disappointment that it isn’t a Culture novel. A few even tried to make it into one, casting the Dwellers as Minds and the Mercatoria as a proto-Culture.
So I posted my own review there, hoping to clear things up a little. It is not a review as such, really just a glance at the politics of The Algebraist. The novel is a polemic against authoritarianism and – perhaps more salient in context – a satire on the hugely popular galactic-empire trope in space opera.
The Mercatoria, the galactic empire in question, is no Culture. It is a super-corporation ruling an interstellar empire knit together by FTL wormhole portals, over which it operates a monopoly. Its power lies in its control of these portals. The nearest Earthly comparison would probably be to the Dutch East India Company, whose power lay in its dominance of long-distance trade in the Indian Ocean during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Mercatoria is pan-specific: humans are only one of several sentient species it comprises. It is toweringly hierarchical, baroquely officious and seems at first sight to be pervasive throughout the inhabited Galaxy.
The story is told largely from the perspective of a Mercatoria citizen of the professional class named Fassin Taak: a human scholar who spends most of his time (centuries of it, in fact) communing with the Dwellers, an intelligent but incredibly long-lived, slow-moving and generally intractable species found on most gas-giant planets in the Galaxy – including one, Nasqueron by name, that orbits his own home star, Ulubis. Dwellers have no starships, rarely make interstellar journeys and are not part of the Mercatoria. They are, in fact, largely indifferent to, and contemptuous of, the shorter-lived, fast-paced oxygen-breathing species that comprise it.
Partly due to Taak’s embedded viewpoint, it takes time for the reader to notice that the Mercatoria are not, in fact, good guys. The author plays this elegantly, giving us plenty of clues but still contriving to mislead us. We learn very early on in the story that everyone within the Mercatorial sphere of influence – human and nonhuman alike – is owned by one or another of its many constituent bodies. They are not slaves in the typical sense, being largely allowed to get on with their lives as they please; but they are indentured to the Mercatoria nevertheless. Its high officials give orders and all others obey. These hierarchs exert the power of life or death over all citizens, and from their decisions there is no appeal.
From time to time, a group of interstellar rebels attacks individual star systems in the Mercatorial network, disabling the portals which make travel between them feasible. These rebels, known as Beyonders, have a fairer and more liberal social model than the Mercatoria but live in space habitats under constant threat of imperial attack. They play an important part in the plot, but we see little of them or their society. Only one important character in the story is a Beyonder, and even that person is operating incognito among the Mercatoria.
The pompous interstellar moneybags who run the Mercatoria are are not quite the baddest of the bad guys, however. That honour goes to the Starveling Cult of the L5 Disconnect and its leader the Archimandrite Lusiferous, a cartoon villain of preposterous absurdity. Seizing the opportunity represented by the isolation of star systems whose portals have been destroyed by the Beyonders or were rendered dysfunctional in a now-ancient event known as the Arteria Collapse, Lusiferous is building an empire of his own on the edge of the Mercatoria. He has heard that the Dwellers on the planet Nasqueron in the system of Ulubis are the keepers, perhaps unwitting, of an extremely valuable secret, and he and his fleet are now en route to that system, to conquer it and seize the secret and make himself Master of the Universe, or at least the Galaxy...
For all his absurdity, however, Lusiferous is a natural outgrowth of Mercatorial society, the kind of malignant polyp such societies inevitably produce; his father, we are told, was a Mercatorial high administrator in his own right until the star he ruled over was cut off from the rest of the empire by a local portal crash. Lusiferous himself began his rise as a functionary within the organization. He is less a character than a symbol of the absolute corruption engendered by absolute power, but he is worse than the Mercatoria only in that he, unlike they, is not willing to rule as part of an oligarchy but insists on reigning alone.
I found The Algebraist more impressive at a second reading than I did on my first. I remember finding the adventures of Taak the gas-giant diving Slow Seer tedious the first time round, until I realised that they were where the plot was mostly unfolding. By then I was through at least half of the book and it was too late to go back; I had to pay the price for my inattention towards the end of the story. Not as high, though, as some of the other reviewers on Goodreads apparently did.
