The novel “The Algebraist” by Iain M. Banks was published for the first time in 2004.

Fassin Taak is a Slow Seer, a scholar who works in the Ulubis star system, which was cut off from the rest of the Mercatoria, a meta-civilization widespread in the Milky Way, after the wormhole connecting the Ulubis system to other stars was destroyed.

Fassin Taak’s task is to study the culture of the Dwellers, the inhabitants of Nasqueron, a gas giant planet in the Ulubis system. These beings are part of an ancient civilization that inhabits gas giant planets and is said to hide many secrets. Taak is enlisted into an organization that’s partly a military intelligence service and partly a religious order to discover one of those secrets, perhaps the only hope to save the inhabitants of the Ulubis system from the invasion of an interstellar fleet.