Excession
by Iain M. Banks
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Book Reviews of Excession
Book Review: Thoroughly Impressive and Enjoyable
Summary: 5 Stars
Iain Bank's "Excession" is a masterful piece of science fiction. It's got everything a sci-fi lover could want: gigantic spaceships, hyperintelligent AI, space battles, conspiracy, romance, engaging aliens, a mysterious powerful artifact (the "Excession"); it's the Full Monty. There's a decent story, too, but the best part is the exuberant creativity that Banks brings to his world, "The Culture." This is a dense, detailed, fully realized world, bursting with amazing technology, social arrangements, history, and sentient creatures of all kinds. Almost every page holds a surprise. This is only the second Culture novel that I've read, but man, I am hooked!
My favorite part of the book is the communication between the artificial Minds that run the ships -- and the affairs of the Culture at large. The Ship Minds are like Olympian gods, powerful and intelligent beyond human comprehension, ancient, yet still capable of misjudgment and eccentricity, pettiness and compassion. They were far more compelling characters than the humans in the book.
If flaw there be, it would be the somewhat opaque espionage hi-jinks the humans go through. One of the main characters, Ulver Seich, seemed extraneous to the story. But those are minor quibbles. The book as a whole is fantastic, one of the best I've read in a while. Buckle up and enjoy the ride!
Book Review: Reflections on the Culture
Summary: 4 Stars
While not the best of the Culture series, _Excession_ is interesting on several levels.First, I suspect that Banks wrote this book to highlight problems with the Culture. Sure, it's a beautiful semi-anarchy, enormously capable, everyone leads near perfect, idle lives, etc. However, suddenly something shows up that is both beyond the understanding of even the Culture Minds and is one of a kind.
Result? The Culture starts acting just like any other civilization: grasping, plotting and willing to go to almost any lengths to win the artifact. Couple that to long buried plans to trick an entire race into a war it cannot possibly win just to "teach them a lesson" and you begin to realize that maybe the Culture isn't so lilly-white after all.
Second, up until now most of the ships in the Culture novels have been little more than funny names. Excession begins to show us a bit more of how the Minds that run the Culture really function- they may be tremendously intelligent, but they're still pompous, paranoid, conniving, cliquish, depressed and just a bit crazy.
Bonus points for having possibly the best two ship names yet: the ROUs "Attitude Adjustor" and "Killing Time"
Eric Remy
Book Review: Exceptional as always
Summary: 5 Stars
Good science fiction is rare, requiring as it does a sound knowledge of science as well as the capacity to speculate intelligently. And that's even without the capacity to write well. Ian Banks is that rare creature possessed of all these virtues.
Set within a far future when humankind's main concern is the indulgence of every whimsical fancy, 'Excession' is concerned with the effects of a cosmic event so extravagant in power and so unprecedented in its implications, that even the super-intelligences of the Culture's great star-ships are captivated in awe. Sub plots concerning the engineered precipitation of war and a revolt against the dead hand of Culture orthodoxy weave coherent threads through Banks' grand scheme.
But it is the ships that captured this reader; with names like 'Attitude Adjuster' (which is deemed capable of obliterating entire star systems) and 'Meatf****r' (which had the temerity to intrude into a human mind), these entities dominate Banks' remarkable galactic civilization in this readers' mind.
I strongly recommend Excession to the more demanding SF reader, as a work of consummate skill through which the author's intellect and message so brightly shine. A masterpiece!
Book Review: Banks at his best,not for the timid or short attention spans
Summary: 5 Stars
Iain Banks can be an intimidating writer. His command of the language and a wonderful imagination combined with a penchant for being unconventional leads to very complex plots, unusual prose styles and flat out great books._Excession_ is one of his Culture books, possibly his best. As is typical, there are multiple plots and protagonists but the great AI ships (Minds) play a larger role in this book than any of the others. An unusual object appears in space and touches off a race to claim it between the Culture and others (not specfied so as not to be a spoiler) resulting in some wonderfully complex situations featuring wonderfully deep and fleshed out characters. This book will have you wincing on page and laughing the next, which brings a welcome realness to the hard science fiction genre.
But with this excellence comes a warning: If you tend to skim books or not really pay attention, you may not like Banks in general and _Excession_ specifically. The prose is very dense, with important details tossed off in small sentences that caused to be stop and reread sections more than once. I heartily recommend all of Banks' work and urge the reader to give it the time and care it deserves.
Book Review: Space opera by a master
Summary: 4 Stars
Another book set in the universe of the Culture, Bank's powerful, hedonistic galactic civilisation devoted to pleasure and doing good works. This one focuses on the machine intelligences of the Culture rather than the people, and makes it clear that the machines are people too, complete with virtues, vices, and erratic behaviour. "Excession" is hard work, but worth it. It's a complex book with multiple plot threads and it's stuffed with dazzling ideas. The Excession itself is an enormously powerful alien artefact/entity that appears and then simply sits there doing nothing; but by doing so it provokes a great many other entities into action they may regret. Banks has the writing skill to pull it off, but you really do have to be paying attention right the way through. It's not perfect -- there are a lot of ship characters in this one, not all of them clearly delineated by personality, and it's very hard to keep track of who's who at times. It does repay the effort, though. It's funny, moving and thought-provoking, and holds a mirror up to ourselves in the same way the Excession does to the people and civilisations that encounter it.