The 5th book in the culture series Excession is by far the most confusing book I have read so far.I think this book could have been split into two parts instead of compressing all the different plot lines in a single part.Although the book has a decent story but Banks starts a new plot in a middle of another another plot and it starts becoming fuzzy and really hard to distinguish who is doing what.I am going to start with the shortcomings of the book first this time and then focus on its stronger points.Some of the shortcomings of this book for me where1.Too many undeveloped characters.2.Too many AI ships. 3.Tiresome dialog between AI mindsSome of the strong points of the book are1.AI minds2.Excession or outside context problem.Let me expand on the above points1.Too many undeveloped characters.The book starts with an female character Dajeil living on a ship known as a Sleeper service and we come to know that she has been pregnant for like 40 years the why of the plot unfolds as the story progresses.The ship informs her that it has to go on an important mission due to which its atmosphere will be changing.Next we are introduced to a character known as Genar-Hofoen who is acting as an culture ambassador for a species known as Affront. He is a special because no previous ambassador has lasted for more than year with Affront. The Affront are shown to be a hegemonistic society who consider themselves to be superior to all living beings and they relish in giving pain and enslaving the other species. Genar-Hofoen gets informed by his ship that he has go on a mission where in he needs to recover a ship captain's memory and convince it to take a living form again.These are two most important characters in the novels, but Banks does not give us information regarding them but manages to throw them in different plots, he reveals some information regarding them after almost 2/3 rd of book is over and at that time it is too late to connect to or care about these characters.2.Too many AI ships. The human beings are secondary characters in this novel, the important characters in this novel are the AI minds who basically rule the culture.We get many juicy bits about them in this book like how the minds pass their time or how they plot against each other.But there are so many AI minds involved in this story due to which it starts getting confusing to remember each of them and the part of the problem is how Banks describes them.ExGsv12456.TRA.2345678.AttitudeAdjsuterExGcv3456.TRA.23789.GreyAreaThese are some of the names of the AI ships the issue is you get lost on listening to names so much that what they are actually communicating just skips to register.3.Tiresome dialog between AI mindsExGsv12456.TRA.2345678.AttitudeAdjsuter To ExGcv3456.TRA.23789.GreyArea"I am going to the end of the galaxy."ExGcv3456.TRA.23789.GreyArea To ExGsv12456.TRA.2345678.AttitudeAdjsuter"I need to inform ExGsv6781.TRA.436789.FaithAmenabletoChange."ExGsv12456.TRA.2345678.AttitudeAdjsuter To ExGcv3456.TRA.23789.GreyArea"I have already informed him."This is just a glimpse of dialog which the AI minds have between themselves, and it gets worst on audio book because the narrator has to repeat the name of the AI minds again and again.This quickly becomes tiresome after some time and you start losing intrest in the plot.Now let me summarize some of the strong points about this book1.AI mindsThis book is all about the sentient minds of the culture, we already know from the previous books that the culture is a post scarcity society where in human beings pursue their interests and all the other things are taken care by the culture.But the minds are at the top of food chain in the culture they decide in which direction the culture society will go or which civilizations to contact and how to deal with them.When you imagine an AI mind you imagine an super computer but these guys have personalities in this book and the last part of their name describes them perfectly.Like Attitude Adjuster is a warship and lusts for war or Faith amenable to change is always dicey so on and so forth.Banks really gives us an up close look at how the minds operate within the culture in this book.2.Excession or outside context problem.The story's central plot is when an black sphere appears in the galaxy along with a star, and when the minds probe both of these they appear to be some of the oldest entities in the universe.The minds start considering this black sphere as excession or a outside context problem.“You were a tribe on a largish, fertile island; you’d tamed the land, invented the wheel or writing or whatever, the neighbors were cooperative or enslaved but at any rate peaceful and you were busy raising temples to yourself with all the excess productive capacity you had, you were in a position of near-absolute power and control which your hallowed ancestors could hardly have dreamed of and the whole situation was just running along nicely like a canoe on wet grass . . . when suddenly this bristling lump of iron appears sailless and trailing steam in the bay and these guys carrying long funny-looking sticks come ashore and announce you’ve just been discovered"The minds try all the possible ways to probe this sphere, but things take a different turn when the affront start claiming that they own this excession.As I have already mentioned this is by far the most confusing book in the culture series and it becomes worse if you are listening it on audio.I hope the next book is better.I give this book 2.5/5 stars.
I skipped The State of the Art to read this fifth book in the Culture series, since the former is a collection of short stories. After having been burned by the likes of The Martians, I decided not to sully my opinion of the series so early on.The titular Excession is another name for what the Culture calls an Outside Context Problem (OCP), which is an encounter with an alien civilization so much more advanced than your own that you have no way of conceptualizing their technology within your culture's (Culture's) framework. For indigenous tribals of the Americas and elsewhere, the arrival of Europeans with their gigantic ships, metal armor, and artillery represented such a Problem; for the Culture, the Excession, which is able to tap into the universal Energy Grid in both directions and which may be able to travel inter-dimensionally, is an OCP. No, you're not expected to understand what an Energy Grid is, even after Banks goes to great lengths to explain it in analogous terms, but it basically is the substrate of reality against which faster-than-light engines push.Unique to this entry of the Culture series, Excession is mostly about the hyper-intelligent Minds which operate/are the ships on which so much of the Culture's daily life occurs. What's great about Banks's portrayals of these Artificial Intelligences (a term at which they naturally bristle) is that they are people, with all the personality quirks, vanities, and emotional concerns one would expect from people. We learn about so-called Eccentric ships, Minds who have cast off the shared values of the Culture in order to pursue their own idiosyncratic interests. One such, a ship named Grey Area, spends most of its time using its effector fields to read the minds of humanoids and punishing or rewarding them based its judgment (a practice which is almost unspeakably taboo within the Culture). We learn more about why the Minds place such a premium on the happiness of the human inhabitants inside them -- it's basically social pressure from other Minds, with statistics such as human resident turnover rate informing a Mind's social status. And we learn what they do in their copious spare time, which is exploring the meta-mathematical realms of Infinite Fun. Yes, there is the strong implication that the smarter you are, the more enjoyable you find mathematics.As an aside, the names the ship Minds choose for themselves is a constant source of joy. For example: The Anticipation of a New Lover's Arrival; Serious Callers Only; and the warship Frank Exchange of Views.These ships and others discover the Excession hanging in space, tempting them with its almost unspeakable technological powers, and furious scheming as to how to best exploit it ensues. This is the basic plot arc, although there are probably too many sub-plots hanging off it.And that's the problem. This started off as a five-star book, especially as I was reading the most entertaining of these subplots, dealing with a Culture diplomat's interaction with an alien race known as the Affront who are hilariously offensive enough to live up to their name. As things progressed, I found myself sometimes struggling to follow the other subplots or to comprehend how they might fit into the larger picture. By the end of the book, the chapters become so short and swap contexts so frequently that I became impatient for the story to reach a resolution.As other reviewers have noted, there is far and away enough good bits to make the so-so parts worth getting through, even to largely bury them. But I'm noticing a frustrating trend with Banks, which is that, even as I greatly enjoy his novels, I get irritated that they aren't as good as they should be, as they so obviously have the capacity to be. I guess that's a good problem to have with an author.
What do You think about Excession (1998)?
WOW. I'm still reeling from how good this book was. This is the fourth Culture series novel I've read (skipping The State of the Art) by the venerable Ian M. Banks, and it unarguably surpassed the others in terms of content, writing style, and sheer imagination on a grand scale.Certain portions of this book, and even certain paragraphs, made me literally gasp. Banks describes technologies and ideologies in his imagined future with a lucidity that amazes. In particular, the first three pages of a chapter describing Metamathics, a computationally simulated conception of reality (if you'll excuse the comparatively terrible description), took my breath away. Easily some of the most beautiful prose I've ever read in science fiction, if not in any of my readings.Large portions of the book are dialogues and forums between sentient, awesomely intelligent, and ancient artificial intelligences-- what are referred to as Minds (capital M) in the Culture series. The events of this novel take place on such a grand scale that the human affairs described seem almost humorously quaint and unimportant. Nonetheless, Banks is a master at character handling, and he weaves the tapestry of this novel with both the macrocosmically huge and the microcosmically human. I especially liked his description of The Affront, a race of beings evolved in a radically inhuman environment. They are beaked, six-tentacled, air-sacked, hugely powerful, zealously warmongering, and viciously mean beings. Great fun to read about.This is a book to reread time and time again, and I can not recommend it highly enough. It is worth noting that you *could* start The Culture series with this novel (as they are set in the same universe but with different characters/stories), but I would recommend reading Consider Phlebas as your first foray into the Culture.
—Julien
I've been reading books from Banks for just over a year now, and Excession was my fourth dip into the Culture, his ultimate Utopia. Previously, I've been impressed by both Consider Phlebas and The Player of Games, whilst also being left underwhelmed by Matter.I found Excession to veer towards Matter rather than the standards of either of the others. Like Matter, it has an ensemble cast of characters, grandiose ideas not present in the earlier books and cunning, subtle plot-lines and shifts. Certainly its scope is impressive, but its complexity occasionally hamstrings the story.Perhaps the main complaint is that the large cast of characters and the plot-lines - most particularly the sub-plots - aren't handled with quite the care and subtlety expected of Banks. I'm starting to come to the opinion that he's best at writing smaller casts of characters from one perspective - a la Player of Games - rather than going all-out for the big bang from the start.That's not to say the book isn't impressive. It is. It's scope and ideas impressed me as much as any space opera I've read for a while. Its problems simply lie in Banks' will to make this a multi-faceted spectacular, which falls just a little short of his earlier efforts in my experience.
—Peter
Another few months and another book in my complete re-read of Iain M. Banks's Culture series. This time it's his novel Excession. The story of what Banks refers to as an 'Outside Context Problem' – something unexpected; something a civilisation can't, by definition, plan for; something that will likely end up destroying them if they react incorrectly to it. What Donald Rumsfeld would call an "unknown unknown".It's a return to previous heights I think, as Banks gives us is a sort of Culture novel meets Arthur C. Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama. But, instead of a simple exploration of the Big Dumb Object, Banks turns it into a a story of political intrigue and warmongering where multiple factions and civilisations are competing for control of the object, or simply using its existence for political opportunity. The AIs that run the Culture can't agree on how to react to the excession, and that brings to a head the ongoing disagreements about how to handle lower civilisations. Civilisations like the Affront who see the excession as an opportunity to show the Cultre that they aren't to be pushed around anymore, or treated like pets to be 'trained' in the 'correct' behaviours.Of course Banks can't resist naming things in a way that should tell us more about the thing than we originally believe. Somehow it never feels like a cheap trick or easy cop-out, but the Affront really are an affront to the Culture's sense of morals, and the GSV Sleeper Service is not only storing people who just want to sleep but (view spoiler)[is a sleeper agent under deep, long-term, cover as an Eccentric ship (hide spoiler)]
—James
