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Iain M. Banks is a true original, an author whose brilliant speculative fiction has transported us into worlds of unbounded imagination and inimitable revelatory power. Now he takes us on the ultimate trip: to the edge of possibility and to the heart of a cosmic puzzle. . . . Diplomat Byr Genar-Hofoen has been selected by the Culture to undertake a delicate and dangerous mission. The Department of Special Circumstances--the Culture's espionage and dirty tricks section--has sent him off to investigate a 2,500-year-old mystery: the sudden disappearance of a star fifty times older than the universe itself. But in seeking the secret of the lost sun, Byr risks losing himself. There is only one way to break the silence of millennia: steal the soul of the long-dead starship captain who first encountered the star, and convince her to be reborn. And in accepting this mission, Byr will be swept into a vast conspiracy that could lead the universe into an age of peace . . . or to the brink of annihilation.… (more)
User reviews
"something so technologically superior that it appears magic to the viewer."
A word then invented by the author that is still finding it's way into everyday usage (all those other people who are not dedicated science fiction readers). No real clues then as to what the story is about from it's title but it eventually became clear that at the heart of it was an OCP (Outside Context Problem); there goes an initialism and how science fiction writers love their initialisms and acronyms and although not overused by Banks they do nothing to help the uninitiated reader. Fortunately I know my GCU's from my GSV's having read Bank's four previous novels set in his imaginary future universe of the Culture. it still took me some time to make headway into this story, but I have learnt that Banks would make things a little clearer as I went along and that by the end of the novel I would have a fairly good grasp of what had happened.
This is a story that will be appreciated by those readers already familiar with Bank's concept of the Culture and readers coming to the series for the first time might have to take quite a lot of the writing on trust, however the human story that is at the core of this novel should appeal to many readers. In accordance with Bank's universe the Culture is the dominant force/society that exists many years in the future when much of the universe has already been explored. Humans may or may not have given birth to the Culture which are, robots, machines, spaceships controlled by their own artificial intelligence. They would appear to be a force for good in the universe and certainly humans have adapted their lifestyles to fit into this quite different world. Bank's stories have a familiar 'modus operandi' the Culture calls on certain humans with the necessary skills to carry out certain diplomatic/operational/intelligence operations usually involving alien societies who have trouble in accepting the values/society of the Culture. The humans in many instances are pleased to accept these tasks, but occasionally have to be pried away from their otherwise hedonistic lifestyles. The stories then have a kind of cross pollination between humans and intelligent machines, but in Excession it is the machines in the form of spacecraft that drive this plot with the reader wondering where the human characters fit in. It is the novel perhaps that many of Bank's dedicated readers have been waiting for, that is waiting for him to share more of his vision of the Universe of artificially intelligent machines.
The OCP (outside context problem) takes the form of a mysterious object that appears in the universe and which seems to have powers that go far and away beyond anything that the Culture possesses. Meanwhile a rising species of aliens The Affront who have less than human characteristics seem intent on using the distraction of the Excession to overthrow the Culture who in its turn are calling on a couple of humans to carry out a secret mission.
The two humans Djeil and Genar-Hofoen have had an intense relationship some years before and are now living estranged lives after a near murderous end to their affair. Djeil seems to have been living in an artificial world created by the Culture for hers and their benefit and much of the early part of the novel explores this solitary world. Banks is at his strongest as an imaginative writer in creating these different worlds and he does a similar thing with Genar-Hofoen in his role as a diplomat on the alien home planet of the Affront. Then there is the asteroid called Pittance where a human recluse has chosen to live, which also houses mothballed war machines left over from the last war the Culture had to fight. As a reader we know that these different milieu will form part of the story but Banks persuades us to linger there with him while he creates an ambience that contrasts with other events that will overtake his characters. After all this is the novel where the artificially intelligent spacecraft (minds) confront the Excession. It is these minds that show all to noticeable human characteristics that results in both their weaknesses and their strengths and of course make Bank's story more interesting. Banks at times skates perilously close to banality with some of this, but he just about keep on the right side.
This is an excellent novel for Culture enthusiasts and probably one for science fiction readers who are prepared to enjoy a human story that can be more perceptive than the super-intelligent minds of the Culture machines. I think Banks has achieved a very good balance in his story telling. If the ending appears a little too engineered for some tastes then that does not take away from the high spots that precede it. This is my favourite book in the Culture series, running just ahead of [The Player of Games] and so 4.5 stars.
The main trouble is that the novel is incredibly slow to get going. As one of the Culture Minds states almost halfway through the book - "I wish something would happen." This trouble is brought about because the Excession itself is largely a MacGuffin (at least until the final page). As a result not a lot of activity takes place around something that also doesn't do very much for 90% of the story. All quite boring and even the threat of war is quite boring when the result is an admitted foregone conclusion.
The human side of the story is also... well, pointless, I thought. The overall "conspiracy" leads you to think this storyline is actually important when it's really not, except for the hurt pride of the Sleeper Service itself. Really why the human characters have a role in this story is a bit of a mystery - Ulver is a particular waste of space and only useful for injecting some sex into proceedings. I suppose Banks felt he couldn't possibly write a novel just about the Minds?
I made it through the novel and although some sections could do with better editing, it was generally well written. Excession does shed light on how certain factions exist within the Culture and how it might not all be goody-goody. Yet that's about the only worthwhile thing to come out of this novel and it's an awfully long winded way to make that point.
I intensely disliked the main human characters Byr
On top of that, I thought this book told us a lot of new things about the Culture that made it a much less plausible universe; Banks creates opportunities to explore sexuality, longevity, and human AI interaction, and completely ignores the implications. Almost as an aside Banks throws in variable gender as a plot device (which somehow turns into an opportunity for a brief moment of gratuitous lesbian sex); yet he seems totally oblivious to the consequences of such a central component of identity (with the obvious comparison to Ursula Le Guin's treatment of the same subject in The Left Hand of Darkness). Similarly, this is a universe where people can live forever; yet this profoundly life altering reality seems to have no impact on how they live their daily lives. Many, many other authors have treated this subject in a thoughtful, thought-provoking way--for Banks, it is thrown in as device around which to steer a plot turn. And perhaps most bizarrely in this book (for me anyway, given the random order in which I am making my way through the Culture series) we learn a whole lot more about ship Minds, things that make it utterly incomprehensible to me that the humans of the Culture would blindly entrust their society to the Minds' wisdom and justice.
I don't agree with the reviewer who suggested the book should have been cut by 200 pages (which would be about 40% of its length!). It was slow paced, but I think this flowed from the plot. There were multiple layers of narrative going on here, and it inevitably took time to climb through each layer to get to the central issues and driving events of the story.
A case could also be made, I think, that Banks might also be playing with extremes here. "Excession" introduces us to the Affront, a race whose entire culture seems to be built on cruelty and who might be the least pleasant bunch of aliens I've met since encountering the Vogons in the "Hitchhiker's Guide" books. The Affront -- boorish, mean, physically repulsive and apparently incorregible -- are so awful that I often found the parts of the book that they are in genuinely difficult to read. At the same time, he devotes more time in "Excession" describing the fun -- sexy and otherwise -- that the Culture's innumerable citizens get to have. It isn't that the Culture doesn't face the sort of moral dilemmas that people who consider themselves "civilized" often run into when they come face to face with something truly alien. The line between a belief in galactic progress and bloody expansionism is, as ever, dangerously thin. Even so, the stark differences between the two modes of being epitomized by the Culture and the Affront made me wonder if it wasn't abundance itself -- of materiel, of spirit, even of time -- that makes the Culture novels so much fun to read. Banks has conceived of a world where spaceships build other spaceships and design custom-made habitants for specific humans. Much of human life seems to have become a festival of light and color that often goes on for a cool couple of centuries. A lot of it sounds delightful, even if all is not yet perfect. Sometimes I think Banks is asking what shape the problems we now consider to be most central to our existence were to be -- if not eliminated -- worn away by centuries of geometrically increasing technological progress. In practice, that means that the Culture is often a fun place to spend your time. Heck, I'll probably read the next one.
Stars of the show are doubtless the alien race known as the Affront - who adopted the name because they liked the critical tag applied to them after some atrocity or other of theirs which they thought merely harsh but fair (I suspect that in the unrolling film of the book in Banks' mind's eye, the main Affront character was voiced by Brian Blessed!) - and the ship Minds who are as much characters as any of the biologic players. Indeed, some of the biological characters are far less interesting and some of them are not particularly nice, being far too self-centred; but you get the feeling that the opportunities the Culture offers does allow most biologicals the golden opportunity to be just that.
The Excession itself seems very much like a MacGuffin to allow the practice of politics both within the Culture factions and between the Culture and the Affront; but right at the end, Banks gives us a hint of what the MacGuffin was there for, and it opens up the universe of the Culture far more than previously.
There is more development and less goshwow action in this book than in previous Culture novels, but it's a worthwhile read nonetheless.
The focus here is the "excession" - a mysterious something, an apparently impervious sphere. Is it from another universe? Several cultures are interested in gaining possession, or access, and/or preventing others from doing likewise. The Affront are one of these groups, a rather nasty species although oddly almost likable despite their cruelty. They'd very much like to score one on the morally self-righteous Culture - fun with cultural relativism! If you know Banks, you know they probably won't win. But who will, and what is this thing anyway?
Genar-Hofoen had visited this particular nest space before on a few occasions. He looked up to see if the three ancient human heads which the hall sported were visible this evening; the Diplomatic Force prided itself on having the tact to order that the recognisable trophy bits of any given alien be covered over when a still animate example of that species paid a visit, but sometimes they forgot. He located the heads - scarcely more than three little dots hidden high on one sub-dividing drape-wall - and noted that they had not been covered up.
The chances were this was simply an oversight, though it was equally possible that it was entirely deliberate and either meant to be an exquisitely weighted insult carefully contrived to keep him unsettled and in his place, or intended as a subtle but profound compliment to indicate that he was being accepted as one of the boys, and not like one of those snivellingly timid aliens who got all upset and shirty just because they saw a close relative's hide gracing an occasional table.
That there was absolutely no rapid way of telling which of these possibilities was the case was exactly the sort of trait the human found most endearing in the Affront. It was, equally, just the kind of attribute the Culture in general and his predecessors in particular had found to be such a source of despair.
When a mysterious black sphere 50 km in diameter, appears on the edge of Culture controlled space, the Culture describes it as an Excession, which means something excessive, whether excessively powerful, excessively aggressive, or excessively mysterious. An Out of Context Problem, is one that happens when a (small 'c') culture encounters something that it is completely outside its experience, and the Excession is is most definitely an Out of Context Problem.
A group of ancient Minds who call themselves the Interesting Times Gang take control of organising the Culture's response to it. It isn't long before some of the Minds start to believe that there is a conspiracy among others in the group, and suspect that they are manipulating events for a purpose unrelated to the appearance of the Excession. And what does all this have to do with the Affront, a species whose name started as an insulting nickname given by an appalled neighbouring species, until the Affront embraced the name as being so much more 'them' than being boringly named after their planet of origin?
The Minds and the Affront are the most interesting thing about this book; I could have done without the humans, especially the vain, pretentious and extremely spoilt Ulver Seich, and the tediously self-absorbed Dajeil Gelian with her everlasting pregnancy (even the Sleeper Service thought that sulking for forty years was overdoing it). So I can safely say that "Excession" isn't my favourite book of the series so far.
the story itself shows a lot of promise, just as the various characters do. but sadly Banks is not able to keep in my
there are a lot of ships involved, all with funny names. but because the ships do not need to be in the same scene to communicate i just couldnt remember who is who. in the whole book Bank attempts to adapt a lot of different styles, but just doesnt quite manage to make them convincing. or different enough. a lot like a first novel, of a new author just discovering his tools... but it isnt...
In this particular book the human members
The idea in this novel is that an excession event is one where a society comes across something so advanced, so far outside it's experience that it is destroyed by it. An example given is that tribespeople experience an
The culture believes it has spotted a galleon homing into view and is understandably concerned.
It's great, read it.
Stylish, intelligent, sophisticated space opera with human weaknesses thrown into the mix.
Perhaps the biggest, quickest and least bloody intergalactic battle I have come across.
Another good innings from a consistently good author.
At times I felt like I needed to take notes to keep track of the ship names, who was on which side, and where things were. The