Excession

What a disappointment. This entry in the Culture series was billed as the main book to look forward to, a pay off for the diligent reader/ true fan. I can't see the appeal. There is a lot of stuff contained in 500 pages; too much stuff, this book is bloated and unfocused.

A short summary: The Culture encounters and “Outside Context Problem”, the discovery of an “Excession” an artifact of a civilization so advanced as to be beyond their understanding. (Conquistadors to Aztecs/Incans). In the midst of this alarming discovery a war is precipitated as part of a long running conspiracy, with the discovery of the Excession serving as a catalyst.

Before this becomes a list of everything wrong with the book I will say that I enjoyed getting a story that dealt in the perspective of the Minds. Given that they feature so prominently in the premise of the series it is kind of surprising that they haven't featured as main characters until this novel. There are certain snippets and interactions between the varying ships that were extremely entertaining. As ever, I enjoyed the sheer variety of interesting and novel ideas the Culture throws at you, of which, this novel has no shortage; really this is a conceptual feast of a novel.

Unfortunately that same glut of interesting ideas is, in my opinion, the downfall of this book. There are so many subplots, characters, and concepts to keep track of. Some of the chapters are non-linear to boot, so you have a really hard time pinning down exactly what is going on until maybe half way through the book. Along the way Banks gets a little lost in the sauce and spends an in-ordinate amount of time expounding on non-relevant but interesting tidbits about the world we're visiting. This would be fine but we have the main plot concerning the excession, we have a conspiracy that cuts in every other chapter, there's a war on in the background, there's a love story, and much much much more. It's all plot, so when Banks takes two or three pages to explain something ancillary it really just makes the book drag.

I want to briefly mention the Genar-Dajeil-Ulver subplot. Genar is tasked by SC (on secret orders from the Sleeper Service) to retrieve a mind backup of some ship captain, Ulver is tasked to distract him by the conspirators, and Dajeil has been pregnant for 40 years with Genar's child. At the very end we're told that Genar only features in the plot because his presence was the payment the Sleeper Service had requested. This entire subplot is contrived, all it served to do was distract from the truly interesting bits.

The prose in this novel is also much weaker than I've come to expect. The cryptographic notation attached to the ship communications was pretty neat the first time I saw it, but it features in EVERY ship/mind focused chapter and it seems like a crutch to lend a little credibility to the staggeringly dense paragraphs that follow. Most of the plot is delivered in these long and drawn out exposition dumps, and rarely if ever does the conversation between characters resolve any questions we might have had.

Finally, I will note as I have for the previous books, that Banks cannot write a female character to save his life. In this book it becomes truly baffling as we get a better understanding of the in-universe mores and norms surrounding sex, gender, and the family. For an older series this book has an extremely progressive tilt; I found the concept of “mutualing” where both partners become simultaneously pregnant to be fascinating and surely enough to make a nun blush. Ostensibly in the Culture where people can and do freely transition between sexes, the difference between men and women would surely amount to just aesthetic differences. Why then, are all the female characters featured so far in these books, and this book in particular, cardboard cut outs, or proxies for male characters (or the ships), or just tropey brat-type characters?

So, I've just completed a reread of this and it remains my favourite Culture novel. Banks could write Space Opera like no-one else. Full of action, humour and great writing, Excession features more ideas that most SF novels throw up in a trilogy.

In a remote corner of the galaxy, near a dying star a perfect black sphere appears as if from nowhere. It is like nothing this universe has ever seen and its sets the cat amongst the pigeons as far as the Culture's sentient Minds are concerned, because it could hold the key to the Multi-verse.

And so a series of events leads to a conspiracy, a war and a convergence on the artifact by any number of involved species. But not only this....because Banks also manages to slip in a subplot, linked to the main story, about a couple who fell into and out of love, and once again he proves to be a deeply affecting writer when it comes to relationships. See also “The Bridge”.

There are secret agents, secret committees of Minds, a talking crow, an alien species called The Affront who are gas giant dwellers and declare war on the Culture, but above all there are numerous characters, both AI and human (and alien) who you actually like. So yeah, one of his best.

Worth reading for the names of the spacecraft, never mind the fact that it is one of the best SF books ever.