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 that it will remain inexplicable) as an excuse to dish out justice to a rather nasty species that the Culture forgot to deal with when they had the chance. In the meantime, the human characters dance about like farts in a trance and never quite get to grips with what’s going on. In fact the entire human side of the book is inserted as one enormous red herring, turning on one unconvincing point. Infidelity may make a perfect plot in a Mills and Boon, but in the decadent, anything-goes universe of the Culture it jars badly. Excession is a storming addition to the Culture lore, with two caveats. It suffers from Banks’ frequent problem that half the book doesn’t have much to do with the other half; and anyone who hasn’t read the previous books won’t understand a word of it.
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It's not easy to disturb a mega-utopia as vast as the one Iain M. Banks has created in his ... more
popular Culture series, where life is devoted to fun and ultra-high-tech isde rigueur. But more than two millennia ago the appearance--and disappearance--of a ...
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It's not easy to disturb a mega-utopia as vast as the one Iain M. Banks has created in his ... more
popular Culture series, where life is devoted to fun and ultra-high-tech is de rigueur. But more than two millennia ago the appearance--and disappearance--of a...
Postage & Packaging: £2.75 Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days...
It's not easy to disturb a mega-utopia as vast as the one Iain M. Banks has created in his ... more
popular Culture series, where life is devoted to fun and ultra-high-tech is de rigueur. But more than two millennia ago the appearance--and disappearance--of a...
Postage & Packaging: £2.75 Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days...
Aug 12th, 2000
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