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 & fighting pointless formal wars. Seconded to a military-religious order hes 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 & everyone hes ever known. As complex turbulent flamboyant & 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.