Excession
Iain M. Banks
451 pages
published in 1996

Back when Excession was first published I remember a lot of people were disappointed in it, because it didn't live up to the quality of the previous novels in the Culture series. It's certainly true that Player of Games. Consider Phlebas and Use of Weapons set a high standard and that Excession is a much more straightforward book and lacks some of the inventiveness of the earlier novels, some of the novelty. However, surely part of this is due simply because the ideas plays around with are no longer new. Where the earlier novels were cuilt successes, by the time Excession came along Banks had a large, expectant audience well familiar with his work. It would have to be an exceptional novel to live up to these expectations. And even though it doesn't, judged on its own Excession is still an excellent science fiction novel any other writer would be glad to have written.

But there's another reason apart from high expectations that may explain why some people were disappointed in Excession: this is the first Culture novel in which we get to explore the inner workings of Minds, the almost godlike AIs that control and govern the Culture's spaceships and such: they come across as deceptively ordinairy. It's almost impossible for a writer to portray people much smarter than you, especially when they're several hundred orders of magnitude more intelligent... If anybody could've done it, it was Banks, but unfortunately he didn't. Neither their conversations (represented in a pseudo-internet-like protocol) nor their actions are that out of the ordinary, if we overlook the fact that this takes place over a good chunk of the Galaxy using energies well beyond our own total annual energy budget...

When I first read Excession, shortly after it came out, I too was somewhat disappointed with it, for the same reasons given above. That dissappointment has slowly worn away thoug h and having now read it without the perhaps ridiculously high expectations I had then, I can see that Excession actually lives up to the standard set by the earlier Culture novels, even if it isn't as new as Consider Phlebas or as clever as Use of Weapons. In fact, I can see now that the novel is not as straightforward as I thought it was at first...

The main plotline revolves around a several thousand year old mystery. Back in the early days of the Culture an impossible object was found: a trillion year old sun, orbited by a perfect sphere. Now the sphere, suspected to be an emissary from a more advanced universe, has come back and the Culture is faced with an Outside Context Problem. An outside context problem is what happens when you're the Aztec Empire say, absolute ruler of your neck of the woods and the Spaniards land on your coast with their big sailing ships, their horses and muskets. Handled wrongly, it means the end of your civilisation.

It's a bit worrying then that a group of high reputation Minds is using the Excession, as the sphere is christened, as a macguffin in a conspiracy to start a short, happy interstellar war between the Culture and the Affront, the latest badboys to join the Involved, the group of civilisations advanced enough to have interstellar travel and all that, but who haven't sublimed yet, buggered off from the universe into whatever destiny awaits civilisations outgrowing the purely physical. The Affront are literal gasbags, jolly psychopaths from a high gravity giant gasplanet, who have the charming habit of remaking their whole ecology into one revolving around their pathalogical needs to have all living beings in constant terror of them. They've been merrily cutting a swat through their part of the galaxy until the Culture started to shepherd them, expecting them to mature a bit and lose their taste for warfare and hunting quickly, so far to no avail. Hence some Minds thought it would be best for all concerned to start a short war with them after which the Culture could guide them to enlightment more directly.

To this end a complicated conspiracy is woven around the Excession, as part of which Byr Genar-Hofeon, the Culture's ambassador to the Affront, who is asked to steal the memory of the last surviving witness to the first time the Excession appeared. That survivor is stored in the Culture ship gone excentric, the Sleeper Service, with whom Byr has a History, as the ship also houses the woman he once loved, who is still carrying his child in a forty year long sulk. Now the thing is, the whole conspiracy and everything it involves can just as well have been said to have been set up to reunite Byr and his lover as it has been to lure the Affront into a war with the Culture, something I didn't notice the first time I read the book.

But then that's why you reread good books: to catch the things you missed the first time around and Banks' novels almost always reward you for it. As per usual with Banks, Excession was also quite entertaining. In short then, despite initial disappointment, Excession, is still superior space opera.

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Iain M. Banks, Excession, science fiction, book review