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. As complex, turbulent, flamboyant and spectacular as the gas
giant on which it is set, the new science fiction novel from Iain
M. Banks is space opera on a truly epic scale.
關於作者:
Iain Banks came to widespread and controversial public notice
with the publication of his first novel, THE WASP FACTORY, in 1984.
He has since gained enormous popular and critical acclaim for both
his mainstream and his science fiction novels.