Scan barcode
theaurochs's review against another edition
5.0
The Great Banks Re-Read. Book the fifth: Excession.
Sometimes, I go through phases of reading books that I should read, that are important to society or to someone in particular, and I feel some strange duty to read them. Sometimes, I go through phases of just reading books regardless of the content, and let them wash over me. Sometimes, I read books and analyse them too heavily and it breaks the fragile enjoyment I might have got from them.
Sometimes, I forget that reading can be so much fucking fun.
And then I read Excession again.
Honestly, this book I want to give six stars to. I want to go back and retroactively demote every other book I've ever rated on goodreads, just so that this stands alone at the highest rating.
It is pure exhilaration; a plot that sparks off into a conflagration, each of the beautiful pieces carefully arranged into a truly exquisite whole. It is sci-fi wonderland, with so many incredible concepts that there are throwaway lines in here that could easily each fill a novel in their own right. And it is magnificent character studies, with a whole host of interconnected, plotting, scheming, fully-realised characters.
The central plot revolves around the titular Excession- and asks; "What happens when a super-advanced civilization encounters something beyond their understanding?" This Outside Context Problem, something so far beyond their ken that it is impossible to even conceive of beforehand, sets the stage for really exploring the boundaries of the Culture, what it may be capable of and what it really is as an entity. As with all the Culture novels, we slowly build up this shape by desperately groping at the borders that we are given and trying to puzzle out what the centre looks like. Here we get the ideas that it is not completely homogenous (how could it being; valuing freedom as highly as it does?) and contains numerous factions and semi-affiliated offshoots.
The two main human characters have a tragic and sorrowful tale, with one moment of true and genuine horror like all the best Banks, but here it is treated a lot more deftly than in his younger work- The Wasp Factory definitely and even UoW to an extent are trying to shock you for the sake of it. But really they are little more than pets to the great Mind Sleeper Service, who is surely the actual protagonist. And what a perfect name, always one of the highlights of the Culture books.
This is also the best look that we get at the working of the Minds and their interactions, and it is just a delight to see. This is a great extrapolation of the proto-internet that would have been just emerging as this novel was written, and the idea of Infinite Fun Space makes a lot of sense; what else would a god-like intelligence do for fun?
I could write so much more about this book, but to save everyone an essay I'll leave it there. Talk to me about this book, and I will not shut up.
But as a final note- the similarities between this and the novella State of the Art from the previous book are, quite simply, delightful.
Read this book. You owe it to yourself to witness Banks at the absolute height of his powers. I'm so glad I've embarked on this journey of rediscovery.
Sometimes, I go through phases of reading books that I should read, that are important to society or to someone in particular, and I feel some strange duty to read them. Sometimes, I go through phases of just reading books regardless of the content, and let them wash over me. Sometimes, I read books and analyse them too heavily and it breaks the fragile enjoyment I might have got from them.
Sometimes, I forget that reading can be so much fucking fun.
And then I read Excession again.
Honestly, this book I want to give six stars to. I want to go back and retroactively demote every other book I've ever rated on goodreads, just so that this stands alone at the highest rating.
It is pure exhilaration; a plot that sparks off into a conflagration, each of the beautiful pieces carefully arranged into a truly exquisite whole. It is sci-fi wonderland, with so many incredible concepts that there are throwaway lines in here that could easily each fill a novel in their own right. And it is magnificent character studies, with a whole host of interconnected, plotting, scheming, fully-realised characters.
The central plot revolves around the titular Excession- and asks; "What happens when a super-advanced civilization encounters something beyond their understanding?" This Outside Context Problem, something so far beyond their ken that it is impossible to even conceive of beforehand, sets the stage for really exploring the boundaries of the Culture, what it may be capable of and what it really is as an entity. As with all the Culture novels, we slowly build up this shape by desperately groping at the borders that we are given and trying to puzzle out what the centre looks like. Here we get the ideas that it is not completely homogenous (how could it being; valuing freedom as highly as it does?) and contains numerous factions and semi-affiliated offshoots.
The two main human characters have a tragic and sorrowful tale, with one moment of true and genuine horror like all the best Banks, but here it is treated a lot more deftly than in his younger work- The Wasp Factory definitely and even UoW to an extent are trying to shock you for the sake of it. But really they are little more than pets to the great Mind Sleeper Service, who is surely the actual protagonist. And what a perfect name, always one of the highlights of the Culture books.
This is also the best look that we get at the working of the Minds and their interactions, and it is just a delight to see. This is a great extrapolation of the proto-internet that would have been just emerging as this novel was written, and the idea of Infinite Fun Space makes a lot of sense; what else would a god-like intelligence do for fun?
I could write so much more about this book, but to save everyone an essay I'll leave it there. Talk to me about this book, and I will not shut up.
But as a final note- the similarities between this and the novella State of the Art from the previous book are, quite simply, delightful.
Read this book. You owe it to yourself to witness Banks at the absolute height of his powers. I'm so glad I've embarked on this journey of rediscovery.
bionicbeaver's review against another edition
adventurous
mysterious
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
4.0
scheu's review against another edition
4.0
Kind of a left turn for the Culture stories here; this one focuses more on the Minds/AI running the show instead of those people I like to call the "space dilettantes". The story was engrossing, although aspects of it left me in the dust at certain points. Certainly a worthy addition to the series, though.
kynan's review against another edition
5.0
TL:DR: A fantastic and humorous story, somewhat lost in a multiplicity of inter-twining sub-plots and so many characters!
TL: I've been reading hoarded [a:Terry Pratchett|1654|Terry Pratchett|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1235562205p2/1654.jpg] books recently and, for work-based-book-club reasons, I also had cause to dig into my other pile of books-by-gone-too-soon-authors and start on Excession. I bring up Pratchett because I found Banks' humour to be of a similarly caustic, sarcastic and bitingly-real-world-relevant tone - Pratchett's down-to-earth characters find an interesting parallel in the spaceship-housed "Minds" of Banks' far-future Culture.
I don't think you need to know anything about the Culture in order to appreciate this book - which is good, because I don't know anything about the Culture. I have read [b:The Algebraist|12009|The Algebraist|Iain M. Banks|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1388530602l/12009._SX50_.jpg|2465248] and [b:Against a Dark Background|422452|Against a Dark Background|Iain M. Banks|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1174599757l/422452._SY75_.jpg|809748] but, against my better judgment (re beginning a "series" half-way through), I read Excession and suspect that the general knowledge of the Culture - that it's some kind of far future social construct - is enough, along with what's embedded in the book itself.
The story concerns the unsettling discovery of an "Excession" (something excessive: excessively aggressive, excessively powerful, excessively expansionist; whatever) by members of the Culture - something that the Minds, the Culture's minders (I think that's their job), deem to be an "Outside Context Problem", e.g. "the sort of thing most civilisations encountered just once, and which they tended to encounter rather in the same way that a sentence encountered a full stop". The subsequent tale is of what happened next both within and without the Culture. There are Culture-based perspectives and at least two non-Culture groups (including the most gloriously named race, "the Affront").
The narrative is told from at least 10 different perspectives and, whilst there are definitely only 3-5 "main" ones, the others are present and need to be followed. The perspectives we get are spread throughout the sentients that make up the Dramatis Personae, we get a variety of Minds (ensconced in variously sized bodies ranging from humanish sized all the way through to a craft 90 x 60 x 20 kilometers), some humans and some aliens - all of which Banks manages to imbue with their own mindset and viewpoint, not to mention character. My particular favourite was the drone Sisela Ytheleus, both for its name, its perspective on the world and the insight from it that we gain into what's going on. Banks manages to pack several infodumps throughout the book (partly why you don't need prior knowledge coming in) and Ytheleus is one of the conduits for these well-disguised explanatory-texts on how this universe fits together.
I think this is one of the joys of reading this book: it's a page-turner, but it's dense! It never felt to me like a struggle, like I needed to take a break. In fact, despite that fact that I did feel like I needed some processing time (and some time to write down a character list and what I thought they were all up to), I just couldn't force myself to stop for long-enough to do so!
I don't think that the actual plot should be touched on outside of reading the book, for a couple of reasons. For starters: I'm not sure that I definitely got it all on my first read through
TL: I've been reading hoarded [a:Terry Pratchett|1654|Terry Pratchett|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1235562205p2/1654.jpg] books recently and, for work-based-book-club reasons, I also had cause to dig into my other pile of books-by-gone-too-soon-authors and start on Excession. I bring up Pratchett because I found Banks' humour to be of a similarly caustic, sarcastic and bitingly-real-world-relevant tone - Pratchett's down-to-earth characters find an interesting parallel in the spaceship-housed "Minds" of Banks' far-future Culture.
I don't think you need to know anything about the Culture in order to appreciate this book - which is good, because I don't know anything about the Culture. I have read [b:The Algebraist|12009|The Algebraist|Iain M. Banks|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1388530602l/12009._SX50_.jpg|2465248] and [b:Against a Dark Background|422452|Against a Dark Background|Iain M. Banks|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1174599757l/422452._SY75_.jpg|809748] but, against my better judgment (re beginning a "series" half-way through), I read Excession and suspect that the general knowledge of the Culture - that it's some kind of far future social construct - is enough, along with what's embedded in the book itself.
The story concerns the unsettling discovery of an "Excession" (something excessive: excessively aggressive, excessively powerful, excessively expansionist; whatever) by members of the Culture - something that the Minds, the Culture's minders (I think that's their job), deem to be an "Outside Context Problem", e.g. "the sort of thing most civilisations encountered just once, and which they tended to encounter rather in the same way that a sentence encountered a full stop". The subsequent tale is of what happened next both within and without the Culture. There are Culture-based perspectives and at least two non-Culture groups (including the most gloriously named race, "the Affront").
The narrative is told from at least 10 different perspectives and, whilst there are definitely only 3-5 "main" ones, the others are present and need to be followed. The perspectives we get are spread throughout the sentients that make up the Dramatis Personae, we get a variety of Minds (ensconced in variously sized bodies ranging from humanish sized all the way through to a craft 90 x 60 x 20 kilometers), some humans and some aliens - all of which Banks manages to imbue with their own mindset and viewpoint, not to mention character. My particular favourite was the drone Sisela Ytheleus, both for its name, its perspective on the world and the insight from it that we gain into what's going on. Banks manages to pack several infodumps throughout the book (partly why you don't need prior knowledge coming in) and Ytheleus is one of the conduits for these well-disguised explanatory-texts on how this universe fits together.
I think this is one of the joys of reading this book: it's a page-turner, but it's dense! It never felt to me like a struggle, like I needed to take a break. In fact, despite that fact that I did feel like I needed some processing time (and some time to write down a character list and what I thought they were all up to), I just couldn't force myself to stop for long-enough to do so!
I don't think that the actual plot should be touched on outside of reading the book, for a couple of reasons. For starters: I'm not sure that I definitely got it all on my first read through
branch_c's review against another edition
4.0
This was a first time re-read, since it's the only one of Banks' books I'd given five stars rather than four and I wanted to see what it was about it that made this one different. As it turns out, not much, that I could determine; for some reason I must have been "excessively" impressed by this one. Certainly enjoyable, with many similarities to the other culture books, and I reaffirm that Banks' work is extremely fun to read, with great writing and fascinating twists that make for a wonderful experience - but then thinking about them later, the plot and intricate details become strangely forgettable!
In this case, the high point for me was probably the inclusion of the Affront, a barbarian alien race that exhibits the worst possible, but demonstrably realistic, qualities of our own kind. How the superior Culture deals with this race is one of the strands woven through this story, and its ultimately less than satisfying for me, but certainly thought-provoking. Another main thread involved the obsession of the protagonist Ship/Mind Sleeper Service with the frankly mundane actions of a couple of the human protagonists, and this was not entirely believable to me. The various Ships involved here, with their subtle communication and overlappingly conflicting motives, were honestly a bit tricky to keep track of here, but nevertheless demonstrated Banks' usual innovative style to great effect.
Anyway, reducing my rating from five to four; absolutely a solid entry in the Culture series, equally worth reading as the others, but not above and beyond them.
In this case, the high point for me was probably the inclusion of the Affront, a barbarian alien race that exhibits the worst possible, but demonstrably realistic, qualities of our own kind. How the superior Culture deals with this race is one of the strands woven through this story, and its ultimately less than satisfying for me, but certainly thought-provoking. Another main thread involved the obsession of the protagonist Ship/Mind Sleeper Service with the frankly mundane actions of a couple of the human protagonists, and this was not entirely believable to me. The various Ships involved here, with their subtle communication and overlappingly conflicting motives, were honestly a bit tricky to keep track of here, but nevertheless demonstrated Banks' usual innovative style to great effect.
Anyway, reducing my rating from five to four; absolutely a solid entry in the Culture series, equally worth reading as the others, but not above and beyond them.
species10026's review against another edition
adventurous
challenging
dark
mysterious
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
5.0
jhgorman's review against another edition
4.0
Probably my third-favorite Culture book. Great story, great characters, but, like a Christopher Nolan movie, Banks plays it fast and loose with his timeline. I had a hard time keeping up with what was happening when, and who was allied with who. Not enough to deter me, but this is a book you've really gotta pay attention to.
rocketiza's review against another edition
5.0
I hadn't expected a Culture book to be laugh out loud funny like this one was.
fisk42's review against another edition
3.0
At this point I am officially unimpressed by Iain Banks. Apparently he is just not for me. I have enjoyed several of his books, but the amount of work for the payoff is just too high for my tastes.