Excession - Iain M. Banks

Iain M.Banks is the name used by the author Iain Banks who has written novels such as the Wasp Factory, Canal Dreams and the Crow Road. Banks has added the middle initial to his name to distinguish books that would be classed as science fiction. Excession is one of Banks’ later science fiction novels, for this reason you would need to have read some of his earlier works as the book is quite complicated. Excession assumes the reader already knows about certain concepts and ideas that Banks has dreamed up. For this reason I can’t recommend reading Excession unless you have read some of the ... more

I can’t be too knowledgeable about the bulk of this guy’s work as I’ve only encountered three of his books: Consider Phelebas, Excession and The Business. The first two are sci-fi and the second in the vein of Michael Crichton. I’m writing about the first two; more specifically about the setting they’re in and why I think it’s a work of near-genius. Consider Phelebas & Excession are set in what IMB calls the Culture Universe. Before I attempt to explain this, I’d like to point out to those of you might go off and get these books that IMB shares a trait ... more

The inevitable has happened. Humans, after leaving so much of the running of the known universe to its powerful artificially intelligent Minds, are no longer interesting enough to form the basis of a plot. Excession is largely the story of machines. As Banks admits early on, the Minds occasionally “forgot to tell everybody else about finding entire stellar civilisations, or took it upon themselves to alter the course of a developed culture”. Such a conspiracy forms the real meat of the plot of Excession, as a rogue group uses the appearance of an inexplicable object (and you know from page 1 ... more

Anyone who believes this book is nonsense needs their head examining. This has to be one of the most truly original books I have ever read. Most of the dialogue is conducted between enormous sentient spacecraft which are thousands of light years away from each other. I'll admit it can be hard going at times but it's certainly worth it in the end. Amongst other insights, you are let in on the ambitions of these sentient craft who in their spare time devise universes based on different physical laws. The book revolves around an amomaly in space that intrigues the Culture and their investigations ... more

This book is a part of Iain Bank's series of "Culture" novels, it's a look at a future society run by Minds, super intelligent AI's that run all the stations and ships that make up a vast interstellar group. The novel starts with the apperance of a strange anomaly in a remote reigion of space and then follows the actions of both the Minds and the citizens of various races as they react to this stimuli. The book is complicated and involving to read, requiring some mental agility to understand in places. Some may find this a welcome challenge that adds to the joy of reading the book, but others ... more