Excession (Culture series Book 5)

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And 30 years after its first publication, Consider Phlebas remains a novel grimily opposed to the shiny rocketships and derring-do of most space opera. Banks broke the genre apart, and with a little inspiration from M John Harrison and Ursula Le Guin and some outright theft from Larry Niven , he created a series of space opera novels that remains unmatched.

Stories of loss, grief, rebirth and self-discovery are the core of the best Culture novels. He did not write sci-fi and literary novels — he was a master of storytelling that combined both. These are my top five Culture novels, but I wish have included at least five more. Seven would be short-story collection The State of the Art, which contains only brief glimpses of the Culture. The final published Culture novel was a return to top form for Banks. But first some old scores must be settled.

It shows exactly how tough the utopian Culture can be. OK, see you in the next jumbled plot fragment! View all 64 comments. Dec 12, mark monday rated it liked it Shelves: View all 12 comments. Mar 25, Bradley rated it it was amazing Shelves: This happens to be exactly what I wanted when I wanted it. I wanted intelligent galaxy-spanning space opera with a handful of baseline humans getting caught up in an existential conundrum that the far-superior AI Ships and Main Characters had to face. And we even get a BDO to spark an enormous intergalactic war.

Of course, the BDO big dumb object is nothing of the sort. In fact, it might be smarter than all of them combined. I loved the speculation. Life, love, sex, conspir This happens to be exactly what I wanted when I wanted it. Life, love, sex, conspiracy, extremely high stakes, this novel really pretty much had it all, but I think I had the most fun chuckling over all those damn ship names.

This novel kept my attention much better than the previous novels, but honestly, I think I liked those previous ones better on the re-read than the first shot. Maybe I'm just getting used to Banks's writing, at long last, or all my fancies were tickled in just the right measure in just the right times. These are of a higher quality Space Opera than practically anything else out there, but it's of a very particular sort. Out to prove that a beneficent galactic society can still have some real humdingers for stories despite the apparent lack of conflict?

It's nothing like any kind of Space Opera I've ever read, again. It's pretty damn awesome. I want to continue these Culture novels like something fierce, but I have so much on my plate already. I'll schedule them for one a month from now on, and savour them in delight. View all 4 comments. Oct 14, Apatt rated it really liked it Shelves: The Culture series is one of the most beloved among today's sf readers, possibly the most beloved but I don't have any hard figures to back it up so I'll leave that hyperbole out for now.

Certainly some entries in the series are more popular than others, based on the average ratings and online discussions The Player of Games and Use of Weapons are generally held in high regard, Inversions and Matter less so. As for Excession , it is one of the more popular ones, top 4 I think, and I can see why. These things are never more than one click away on Goodreads after all. Apart from being a field day for BDO fans Rendezvous With Rama and whatnot this book also largely focused on The Minds, the series' sentient AI entities which are much more than supercomputers, among other things they are also the real movers and shakers of The Culture society where all the humans are well catered for with everything they could possibly want, leaving little motivation to get involved in politics or anything else of real importance.

What is interesting about The Minds is that they are fully sentient, they have their individual personalities, emotions, and motivations; in other words human-like characteristics coupled with vast intelligence. So when the complex, enigmatic Minds encounter an even more inscrutable BDO which they classify as an Outside Context Problem we are in for some interesting times.

The book is not entirely about the Minds or the "Outside Context Problem" artifact however, the author is after all a human being so he did not forget that his human readers need some human characters to identify with the human drama aspect of the book is not central to the main story line but cleverly woven in.

As usual with Banks the human characters are well developed and believable though none are particularly likable. The single alien specie to appear in this book are the boisterous and naturally cruel and callous Affronters, they are particularly interesting because they are not "evil" aliens per se, they are what they are, morality does not appear to be part of their DNA. The prose is literate and a pleasure to read as always, the lyrical passages, the action packed scenes and the humorous moments as all there. The only snag with this novel for me is the large cast of characters, AIs, humans and aliens.

They all have interesting names but there are so many of them it is hard to remember who all the minor characters are and their relevance to the major plot of the story. If you have never read any book from this series before, this is probably not the best volume to start with. I would recommend Consider Phlebas or The Player of Games instead, though if you really want to jump right in with this one you may want to read up some background materials in Wikipedia or Banks' own guide " A Few Notes on the Culture ".

I am looking forward to eventually catching up with the rest of the series. Excession is an excellent read, well worth anybody's time, but for the moment my favorite Culture book is still The Player of Games. This one was fun to read, that can be said: There's also a conspiracy going on This novel concentrates on the ships, with names like "Honest Mistake", "Killing Time", "Not Invented Here", "Sleeper Service" and "Grey Area" which is also known as "Meatfucker" for its tendency to sometimes mess with creatures' heads. There's a few Culture people, like Ulver Seich who lives a kind of Marie Antoinette life something like that Sofia Coppola film while also wanting to try adventurous things; the Affronters, playful yet sadistic problem area Culture has wrung its hands long about; the ships of course, and drones I have two books from this series unread I haven't read the books in order , and this does motivate me to read them sooner, I hope.

May 30, Peter Tieryas rated it it was amazing. The connection between literature and video games is one of my favorite topics. I was thrilled to get to write for Tor. I'd had some reservations about the ending and the human arc initially, but I have to admit, almost a year later, Excession has slowly crept its way up to become the Culture book that, along with Player of Games, has stuck with me the most. This was an awesome and fun review I did with Joe Owens and Kyle Muntz about a year ago, and I'm probably going to do a follow up somewhere.

I'm also finally going through Matter, and while it's cool, I miss hearing the Culture Minds which has been one of the best parts of Excession. My thoughts to come soon. Arguably one of the most fast-paced and tense Culture books yet. The Minds are really badass. View all 3 comments. Mar 28, Brad rated it liked it Shelves: 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. 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 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 Apr 03, Stuart rated it liked it Shelves: Too complex for meat-based life forms to understand Excession is the fourth book in Iain M. But how can you easily depict the incredibly complex and cerebral interactions, motivations, stratagems, of these AIs that can process a million separate thoughts in a nano-second? They often seem to take a paternalistic and indulgent attitude to the humans and other beings they deal with.

So the plot of Excession is very simple in outline, but difficult to grasp in the details. This Excession is far too enticing for the Culture, along with the inquisitive Elench and hyper-aggressive Affront think Vogons minus the poetry. So there is a massive mobilization of Ships from various Culture factions and alien species, all rushing to figure out what this BDO Big Dumb Object is and whether they can leverage it for their own purposes. The best part of the story is certainly the Minds themselves, particularly the names of the Ships. Banks has a special genius for inventing clever, ironic names for super-intelligent AIs.

Clearly they have enough cognitive power to allow for a highly-developed sense of irony. In any case, I suspect Excession would reward a careful reading, taking the time to understand the veiled motivations of all the different parties. The best parts are the interactions of the Minds with each other. But basically this is story about the AIs and a scattering of humans involved in inscrutable schemes surrounding the Excession. I have to admit that I listened to the audiobook and had trouble following the plot details, as well as the large cast of AIs, aliens and humans.

Better to read this one in hardcopy. Oct 10, Simeon rated it liked it Shelves: I love these books, but if you don't, I understand. The series' uniqueness is both awesome and offputting; the sort of stuff you wish people would write, but then you find excuses not to read. Reading the Culture novels is rarely the funnest thing you could be doing; but, when you're done, it can mean a whole paradigm shift - steps toward permanently dismantling whatever version of reality is currently trolling your existence.

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There are only a handful of named human characters in this book, and really only three of them are important to the plot—and even then, they really have very little impact on the A-plot. On one level, this book is mainly dialogues between ships separated by vast distances. While they debate how to treat the Excession, a faction within their group uses this distraction as an opportunity to engineer a compassionate war. The intrigues-within-intrigues are mindblowing in this. I love how just when I thought I had a handle on who was on whose side, Banks would drop a well-timed twist to blow all my theories out of the water.

Banks writes his machines with a personality only a British author can manage. They are funny and quirky, but some are ponderous and self-important, while others are rude, perverse, or downright twisted.

by Iain Banks

In a post-scarcity society where one wants for nothing and crime has become a kind of performance art, the chief problem is boredom. As the story goes on, we start to see how Minds interact and the way they judge each other. In this respect, while neither of these human characters have a huge effect on dealing with the Excession, their peripheral actions greatly influenced one of the ships directly involved in the plot. From the complicated conspiracies to the tragedies and deep regrets, the plot unfolds like a vast tragedy although you could argue that, in the end, it is a comedy despite the gigadeath—I think Banks is mocking the wider space opera genre here, pointing out how when the narrative operates at such a remove, pathos becomes an intractable problem.

This conspiracy to incite war is a fascinating subplot, because it makes me wonder is such a story is possible with human proponents. The Culture is a paradoxical society, both remarkably flexible yet also very rigid in other ways.

30 years of Culture: what are the top five Iain M Banks novels?

Despite technical civil war in the form of some Culture warships firing on other Culture ships, there are not many intimations of long-term repercussions for those actions; in contrast, I think a human-run empire would tear itself apart in the aftermath of such events.

My reviews of the Culture novels: Jan 01, Alan rated it liked it Recommends it for: Spacecraft with Minds of their own, and those who like reading about same. What sort of gift can you get for the Culture that has everything? That is, how on Earth or, rather, off do you make Utopia interesting, when all society's ills have been resolved, and all misery is at worst optional?

That is the central conundrum with which Iain M. Banks has been grappling in all of his Culture novels, and Excession is perhaps his most explicit examination of that question to date, even though it came out 'way back in An "excession," in Banks' parlance, is something that What sort of gift can you get for the Culture that has everything? An "excession," in Banks' parlance, is something that comes from outside the star-spanning Culture's comfortable context—something excessive, beyond the pale. Something which may be beyond even the Culture's considerable ability to manage.

As the novel opens, it's been hundreds of years since the Culture has been confronted with anything even marginally threatening, and when a ship run by the Zetetic Elench a somewhat heterodox offshoot of the Culture comes across a star that appears to be older than the universe itself, the news causes a typically chaotic reaction. Various elements of the Culture and other Galactic small-c cultures prepare for contact, for cooptation, and The outcome is by no means certain, and the working-out of it is one of the significant strengths of this complicated novel.

The thing I liked most about Excession in retrospect, though, wasn't the grand sweep of its space battles, nor was it the sheer scale of the universe Banks has constructed, though I liked those too. Nor was it the witty banter between Minds and meat—there was in fact not as much of such banter as I'd have liked.

The novel did at times seem a little too dry to me—a little too much told, and not enough shown. It wasn't even the Laumeresque aliens known as the Affronters, though they were often played for laughs, and quite effectively too. No, the parts of this book I most appreciated in the end were the parts where Banks points out that even in the midst of a cornucopia of physical plenty, where death itself is an arbitrary and personal choice rather than an inevitability, human beings would in fact and quite beyond all reason find ways to be miserable.

This shows up in small ways, contrasting vividly with the stellar-scale explosions and tremendous accelerations involved: Dajeil Gelian's lonely, expectant vigil, and Gestra Ishmethit's self-imposed exile on the asteroid Pittance, for two such individuals. Very few authors can mingle the universal and the personal as well as Banks; I think it's important to acknowledge that, quite apart from the whiz-bang pyrotechnics, there's actually some depth here too, some introspection which could easily be missed amid all the flash.

Banks has constructed a universe where, despite all of the gigantic technical achievements he depicts, the panoply of Galactic history, human beings still matter. Banks is always at or near the top of my to-read list, and this book is, in the end, no exception. Aug 13, Andrea McDowell rated it did not like it Shelves: I gave up at about page After being introduced to a woman character who had chosen to be pregnant for 40 years, and then an emissary for a nearby alien civilization where the all-male representatives publicly brag about how many females they've impregnated through rape, I was seriously put off.

Every woman I've ever met has been dying to be un-pregnant by the 8th month. A woman who chooses to be pregnant for 40 years? No swollen ankles, no sore back, no heartburn, no weird skin issues? Did Iai I gave up at about page Did Iain Banks know any women? Did he ever remotely consider for five seconds asking them about this scenario? And no, I can't sympathize with someone who thinks it's just swell to go around raping people, and I don't care if it's an alien or not.

Thankyouverymuch, I already live in a world with too much rape in it, and plenty of people willing to defend how 'natural' it is. I don't need to spend my imaginary time there too. I was looking forward to reading this author after hearing so many good reviews. Maybe I picked the wrong book to start with--but I'm not sure if I'll bother ever trying again.

View all 10 comments. Terry Pratchett once said that horses take longer to get up to full speed because they had more legs to sort out. Under those conditions, Excession has about a dozen damn legs, because this book takes half its length to feel like it's gaining any momentum. The cast of thousands approach doesn't really help. By the time the narrative returned to some characters I had trouble remember who they were or what exactly they wanted.

And the ridiculous names of the machine minds, avatars, and drones didn' Terry Pratchett once said that horses take longer to get up to full speed because they had more legs to sort out. And the ridiculous names of the machine minds, avatars, and drones didn't help matters any. But ultimately the biggest issue with Excession is that it destroys a lot of the mystery around the Culture of the previous books and doesn't really add anything that great.

We get to read conversations between the minds, massive super-AIs, and they end up sounding more quaint than cerebral. One would think that a bunch of super computers could exchange novels-worth of information instantaneously, but their conversations have the ho-hum quality of a bunch of C3POs talking about tea serving traditions. Humans don't get off much better. It's several millenia in the future, but the dialogue and mannerisms seems straight out of the 80's.

Men and women in this book are all somewhat ridiculous stereotypes, and you never get the sense of thousands of years of advancement in the way they interact. It takes the air out of the fanciful world of the Culture, and makes them seem more like a future proxy for the British Empire, a bunch of ultra-powerful aristocrats enforcing their values on everyone they view as stepping out of line. I respect the ambition that the Culture books show, but sadly, when the curtain is pulled back and their world rendered explicit, it can't help but disappoint.

Jan 24, Nikki rated it really liked it Shelves: 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: Anyway, I don't know how to talk about Excession, rea First book of this spring's readathon! Anyway, I don't know how to talk about Excession, really. You spend an enormous amount of time in contact with the Minds, in this book, instead of with the human or humanoid members of the Culture, which is really interesting, especially coming after reading Use of Weapons and Consider Phlebas, where it's the other end of things.

Do they know I'm writing a review of an Iain M. Banks novel, a novel which might be his most complex and that's REAL complex and adventurous, definitely his most imaginative, and a novel in which a good proportion of the characters are AI Minds, not humans? Read this book and tell me.

It has been one of the books that has given me new faith in science fiction. Banks' passing leaves a hole in the genre that will not soon be filled. Banks, more than any other writer, has a knack for making artificial intelligence machines into living, "breathing" characters. In fact, they don't breathe. And they are the real starts of this novel. What makes these characters enjoyable, though, is that their culture as, in effect, de facto protectors of The Culture civilization feels so human, with dignity, noble goals, ethics, protocols, social norms, and an admirable overall desire to make things better.

The fact that The Culture is built on individual freedom, including freedom to do what you will and freedom from the nasty and brutish challenges of illness, physical disadvantages let alone disabilities , and poverty, makes it easier to root for these "Minds". And the fact that The Culture is not perfect at achieving these goals, especially when it comes to meddling with less advanced civilizations, makes it all the more believable.

Otherwise it'd just be too utopian. There's a mystery at the heart of this novel: A mysterious ship if it is in fact a ship that suddenly appears in a corner of the galaxy. Nobody knows what it's about, where it's from, what it wants. But it may have appeared previously long ago.

The only thing that's clear is that it's vastly more powerful than the Minds who are the giants of The Culture.

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