Excession

Science Fiction 4 Minutes

Excession is one of the novels I missed years ago when reading Iain Banks’ Culture series. The main reason, I think, is that for a long time it wasn’t published in ebook format, I suspect due to formatting complexity. It just came out in ebook a couple of weeks ago, so I’ve finally been able to rectify the oversight.

The Culture, if you’re not familiar with Banks’ books, is an interstellar society that is probably the closest thing in science fiction to heaven. It’s a techno-anarchist utopia where machines take care of all the work and humans are free to engage in hobbies or other hedonistic pursuits. Many do work, but it’s optional. Everyone lives for centuries, and while humans do die, it’s basically optional, with mind backups and immortality always an option. There are no laws. Everyone is free to do whatever they want. Decisions are made by consensus. For most, prestige comes from being very good at something, like art or games.

The only real hierarchy in this society comes from being a member of Contact, the organization which manages the Culture’s relations with other species and polities, or by being in the even more elite Special Circumstances, essentially their espionage division. Competition to get into Contact is fierce, but Special Circumstances is by invitation only. (And it’s made clear in the books that many who are recruited into SC end up regretting it.)

At the center of the Culture are the Minds, vast engineered intelligences, far beyond anything we’d call AI. These Minds run the gigantic spaceships and space habitats that make up most of the Culture. In the early books, they seem like inscrutable entities, intelligences so far beyond ours that they’re hard to relate to.

But in this book, Banks makes them front and center. A large part of the story are conversations between various Culture Minds, with long sequences of message exchanges. We discover that they’re just as fallible, petty, and emotional as the biological beings, just on a much bigger scale. An important group in this story is the Interesting Times Gang, a collection of minds who assemble whenever a major problem arises.

The major problem in this case is a sphere that appears in space and seems able to do impossible things. It’s recognized that whatever is behind the sphere, it’s an intelligence far in advance of anything the Culture is familiar with. This isn’t the first time inscrutable god-like entities show in these books, but it may be the first time one is at the center of the story. It’s a role reversal of sorts, since in most of the stories the Culture is the most advanced society. Here they’re only the most advanced of an overall group that is far inferior to whatever is behind the sphere.

The sphere is designated by the Minds as an “excession,” something that is excessive in some way, such as excessively powerful and dangerous. The overall situation is viewed as an “outside context problem,” the kind of thing that a civilization only experiences once, and which often leads to their end.

But the book isn’t only about the Minds. It wouldn’t be a Culture novel without troublesome warlike aliens, in this case a species known as the Affront, a cantankerous boisterous species that have long been recognized by the Culture as a problem, but not one necessarily requiring that they go to war over. The overall policy has been to contain and try to develop the Affront. However, the Affront are chaffing under these restrictions.

There are also some human characters who find themselves being recruited by Special Circumstances, although the tasks they are given don’t seem to make a lot of sense at first, and the relations between all the threads in motion remain obscure for much of the story.

This is a fun book with a lot of interesting concepts. My only complaint is the one I usually have with Banks. The writing is excellent, showing a powerful command of the language. But he really likes to give us a lot of it, which makes the pacing of his books stately, at best. This usually makes the first act of his books a lot of work for me to get through. Usually around the 20-30% mark I start to feel the pull of the story, but in this one I didn’t really feel it until around the 50% point, when one of the Minds complains that they wish something would happen, a sentiment I as the reader shared. But we get our wish as things do take off immediately afterward.

So I definitely recommend Excession, although not for your first Culture book. Consider Phlebas is the first one published, but as noted when I discussed it last year, it’s a pretty grim tale. Having reread it since then, I think the best one to start with is The Player of Games; it provides a good introduction to the Culture itself, and the story, while not exactly optimistic, is still enjoyable. After that, I think the books could be read in any order, although sometimes there are Easter Eggs in the later ones that only have their punch if you’ve read the earlier ones.

Have you read Excession? If so, what did you think about it? Or the Culture books in general?

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13 thoughts on “Excession”

  1. @selfawarepatterns.com
    It may be that I came to it via The State of the Art, a novella published with some assorted short stories, but I think that story of the examination of an Uncontacted world in which I had lived is a good entry point.

    For younger people, perhaps it would feel no more real than an Orbital.
    #SciFi #IainBanks #TheCulture #StartingPoint

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  2. @selfawarepatterns.com The Culture series of books is my favourite series of novels, simple as that. Somehow utopic, and thought provoking.

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  3. @selfawarepatterns.com Great review, great book.

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  5. I read it recently and enjoyed it. As you said (and we’ve talked about before) Banks is wordy. I copied two sentences from the same paragraph; the first was 173 words (903 chars); the second was 100 words (539 chars). It’s a lot to wade through, but his stories generally make it worthwhile.

    Also, his long lists: “Mostly it was done like that; through Minds, AI core memories and innumerable public storage systems, information reservoirs and databases containing schedules, itineraries, lists, plans, catalogues, registers, rosters and agenda.”

    He does lists like that a lot. (And it’s true what they say about the Oxford comma. Once you embrace it, seeing it missing feels weird. Banks seems almost determined to never use it, and it catches my eye every time. 😆)

    Agree about The Player of Games as a good starting Culture novel. That was a good story and very complete. I think it was the second Banks I read, and I enjoyed it a lot.

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    1. He is definitely wordy. It’s one of the things about his writing I dislike. The other is the literary experimentation, most of which I don’t care for. Although I know a lot of people like him exactly for those things. Different tastes. But he’s far from the only writer I read despite his writing style.

      I’ve always used the Oxford comma with no realization I was using it, or that people had strong feelings about it. 😬 It’s always seemed wrong not to include the last comma. Although when reading someone else, I never notice one way or the other.

      BTW, I decided to take another shot at Feersum Endjinn, but this time in audio. The narrator is using a strong Cockney accent for the phonetic viewpoint. It’s annoying because I have to slow the playback down to understand it. (I usually listen at 1.5x.) But that’s a lot easier than trying to parse the written mess. That said, I’m still not sure whether I’ll finish. He’s not making it easy to know what’s going on. It seems to be one of his most experimental books.

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      1. Banks is late to the experimental writing thing. A lot of SF writers explored that territory back in the 1970s and 1980s. As I recall, I resulted in a lot of unreadable, or at least unenjoyable, SF. What I thought then was perhaps we’ve settled on certain age-old narrative forms for a reason. 🤷🏼‍♂️

        Maybe it’s because you never had to be persuaded into the Oxford comma that you’ve never realized it’s one of those very divisive things for some people. Strong feelings, etc. A now long-gone fellow WP blogger made a case for the Oxford comma, and I was persuaded into it and began using it. Now it’s natural. A while back I saw a meme about how, once you become a convert, you start really noticing it. It was funny to me because by then I’d realized its truth.

        Good luck with Feersum Endjinn. Better you than me!

        My BTW: After watching astrophysicist and YouTuber “Dr. Becky” do both a review of Project Hail Mary (which sounds like it might be excellent) and an interview with Andy Weir, I thought I’d give Artemis a try. Gulped down 84% of it yesterday and will finish today. Turns out I like each Weir book more than the last. Was meh on The Martian (mostly, I think, because I’m meh on Mars). Liking Artemis quite a bit, though I’m a little annoyed by some childish and quippy dialog. And I thoroughly enjoyed Project Hail Mary without complaints. So, from my perspective, the guy is getting better. And I do love his hard SF approach. He starts with the science and weaves a story around it. He’s proud that you have to go down to the quantum level to get to the “gimme” in Project Hail Mary. 😄

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        1. I don’t mind a little bit of experimentation. The novel itself was once an experiment, and the third person limited so heavily used today maybe came out of the 1970s experiments. Certainly it’s been more prevalent since. But loading up too much of experimentation in the same book seems risky.

          Feersum Endjinn is growing on me as I make it further in. But it does suffer from excessive experimentation. Two of the four viewpoints are aggravating to take in, even in audio. (And as usual with audio, I struggle to keep my mind from wandering. Usually speeding it up helps, but I can’t do that with the Cockney sequences.)

          I need to swing back to Artemis at some point. Weir, in an interview, admitted that character interaction is something he still struggles with, so that might be why the dialogue seems childish. And I’ve seen some reviewers knock his writing. I don’t mind because it’s clear and quick. I’ll forgive a lot of sins for that.

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          1. Same here. I give a lot of forgiveness for readability. And for good science!

            Artemis was interesting in having a character I didn’t find entirely likeable. Jazz reminded me a bit of S.L. Huang’s Cas Russell series. Very damaged, very disaffected, very prickly, but highly competent character. Jazz is clearly a genius, but lazy and self-indulgent and not easy to get alone with. Ryland Grace, likewise, has some interesting character flaws, though you discover that after you’ve gotten to like the character.

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