Excession

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?