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A review by kynan
Excession by Iain M. Banks
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