Excession (Culture #5) in The Alternative Worlds

Dec 12, 2010 mark monday rated it liked it

Shelves: scifi-modern, z-iain-banks, rain-man-reviews, x-culture

ATTENTION CULTURE SHOPPERS

this weekend's special is an Outside Context Problem! this amazing special is so unique, most shoppers will only encounter it once - in a millenium! please look for the infinity symbol tagged on our specially-marked OCP items.

on aisle 1, back by popular demand, we are excited to present faction upon faction of Culture Minds, as embodied physically by their glorious Mind Ships!!! shoppers, we have read your suggestions and we respond! you will find very few examples of t ATTENTION CULTURE SHOPPERS

this weekend's special is an Outside Context Problem! this amazing special is so unique, most shoppers will only encounter it once - in a millenium! please look for the infinity symbol tagged on our specially-marked OCP items.

on aisle 1, back by popular demand, we are excited to present faction upon faction of Culture Minds, as embodied physically by their glorious Mind Ships!!! shoppers, we have read your suggestions and we respond! you will find very few examples of those sad, silly creatures known commonly as "Cultured humans" throughout our festive OCP sale weekend. and that's not all... we proudly announce the debut of two marvelous new Mind Ships! at the front of aisle 1, the lovely and amazing Sleeper Service - necro-artist and secret agent! and lurking in the rear, unlisted on any official Culture registry... the remarkable Grey Area - avenger of genocides, torturer of torturers! ignore his nickname "Meatfucker" at your very own and very personalized peril!

on aisles 2 through 11, our hallmark OCP product The Excession continues to be available in ever-widening sizes and ever-changing formats. whether it be a black swan event, an unreadable black body sphere, a transport system for higher powers, or an ageless conundrum appearing since before the dawn of time, the Excession is tailor-made and custom-fit for thrilling contemplation of the infinite and - perhaps - cosmic oblivion!

on aisle 12-A we are excited to feature an exciting, one-time only Super Special... Warships! buy one, get 80,000 free! literally!!

we would also like to direct your attention to aisle 12-B... to our brand new line of society, The Affront! this bold new community brings a fresh and energetic perspective to many fronts: the gender war, the race war, the male-on-male war, and of course the timeless war between galaxies! you'll laugh at the barbaric shenanigans of this sociopathic "civilization" 'til your sides literally split open, entrails spilling and flying willy-nilly! BUY NOW - we guarantee you will soon find our special Affront products to be disappearing fast.

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and now for the review: i liked it. the writing was especially witty in this one; the concepts were typically grandiose. sadly, a rather deflating ending. and a feeling of, i dunno... thinness, somehow? just not a whole lot to think about after putting this one down - a rare thing for one of my favorite authors. but i did love how this Culture novel was all about the fascinating Mind Ships and their various factions - so many of them, i had to write a list to keep track. i love the Culture Minds. besides, who needs humans anyway? wouldn't you rather read about Mind Ships? ...more

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Mar 28, 2008 Brad rated it liked it

Shelves: scottish-lit, anarchism, sci-fi

Early on it felt like there were too many characters, too many plot threads, too many settings, and that Excession was too damn convoluted to be good.

Iain M. Banks’ Excession was living up to the definition of its title:

"Excession; something excessive. Excessively aggressive, excessively powerful, excessively expansionist; whatever. Such things turned up or were created now and again. Encountering an example of was one of the risks you ran when you went a-wandering."

It was a true slog to get i Early on it felt like there were too many characters, too many plot threads, too many settings, and that Excession was too damn convoluted to be good.

Iain M. Banks’ Excession was living up to the definition of its title:

"Excession; something excessive. Excessively aggressive, excessively powerful, excessively expansionist; whatever. Such things turned up or were created now and again. Encountering an example of was one of the risks you ran when you went a-wandering."

It was a true slog to get into, but then somewhere around the time Byr Genar-Hofoen was on his way to the GSV Sleeper Service and that ship was busy waking up folk from its battle tableux, I found myself comfortable in Banks' most sprawling Culture novel (if taken in order) to date.

It was difficult to keep everything straight and difficult to care what was going on in every thread of the tale, and the work doesn't really pay off in a big pay-off kinda way, but there are some positives to take away from the experience of reading Excession.

For one, this is Banks' finest expression of the ship-mind (I have read nothing past Excession, so there may be better to come). He makes us privy to discussions of ships that make up the "Interesting Times Gang," an unofficial branch of the Culture's Special Circumstances who are steeped in a conspiracy to deliver a crushing blow to the upstart "Affronter" society by using the appearance of an Excession, an Outside Context Problem (OCP) which takes the shape of a spherical nothingness tapped into energy outlets in the skein of hypervoluminous space. But he takes us further than communication between the great ship-minds and into the minds of Eccentric ships and Pseudo-Eccentric ships and Traitor ships and Warships. It is a bit of a mind bending journey, and it is some of the hardest Sci-Fi that Banks has written.

But Banks also offers some compelling human interaction, orbiting around Genar-Hofoen, to keep us grounded in the familiarity of humanity.

I was exhausted by the end, and I am tempted to be unforgiving about the length of time it took me to really engage with Excession, and the ending was ultimately unsatisfactory, but I still found myself not wanting to put the book down. I loved too many of the characters -- ships and humans and drones and Affronter alike -- to let them go. I wanted Excession to go on for another thousand pages, but it didn't.

It's never ideal when a book leaves me wanting, but that's a hell of a lot better than leaving me wanting the book to end. So if you're a Banks fan I can say, quite confidently, that this is a must read -- not his best, but worth the time. If you're not a Banks fan, however, stay away. This will not endear you to the man...genius though he may be. ...more

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Dec 03, 2012 Kara Babcock rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: mystery, artificial-intelligence, own, 2016-read, utopia-dystopia, posthuman, science-fiction, space-opera

Finally, the Culture novel I’ve been waiting to read since I started the series. Everyone told me not to start with Excession, so I didn’t—and honestly that was pretty good advice. I can see why people wouldn’t enjoy this novel, and even though I think I would have liked it with no previous Culture experience, reading other books has given me a deeper appreciation for what is happening here.

Excession reminds me of children’s books where the main characters are all animals, and humans have very l ...more

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Jan 24, 2013 Nicky rated it really liked it

Shelves: speculative-fiction

First book of this spring's readathon! It took me ages to read, but it's well worth it. I think I'll take a little break now from the Culture: not only do I want to ration it out a bit, but there's a sameness to the cleverness at the heart of these novels, so that reading three in quick succession makes me more able to figure out the plot -- and I actually like feeling that Banks is smarter than me, so I'll give it a rest before my next one...

Anyway, I don't know how to talk about Excession, rea ...more

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Oct 15, 2013 Lori rated it really liked it

The problem with getting older and facing mortality is that you realize you won't be able to read all the books you want to. I love the Culture books so much that I'd love to reread them in the order written. One of the reasons being a desire to track the Minds through the series, do any reappear?

The most appealing aspect of Excession is that it's pretty the Minds, with the humans and a new alien species on the sidelines, altho they are part of the plot. I love the Minds! The names they choose a ...more

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May 11, 2008 Hirondelle (not getting notifications) rated it it was amazing

Shelves: sf, favorites, precisely-my-cup-of-tea

Maybe my favorite Culture book - not that it is the *best* (probably not) but because it is *big* (not saying LONG) and fast, and just appealed tremendously to me.

Having read Banks all out of chronological order, I just realized now looking at a list of his books by publication order that this was the last-published Banks books I have wholeheartedly loved. I pretty much love all sf he wrote before this and a few of his other novels. I liked some of what he wrote after this ( including, strangely ...more

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Sep 09, 2013 Perri Oldfield rated it really liked it

I wish I could give this 4.5 stars. It didn't quite fetch five stars only because I save such an award for those books that I really can't put down and feel particularly inspired by. This book almost achieved that, but what let it down for me, personally, is that I found some of it a little too technical and thus I skim-read parts. I can feel other Banks fans recoiling in horror at this statement - of course I know that Banks does fit in to the hard-science sub-genre, however it is more his port ...more

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