Excession by Iain M Banks

1. What’s interesting to me about Banks is how every Culture book sets me up for the next: after Use of Weapons, I was curious about AI cores in general, and this book’s major characters are mostly AI cores—ships. After Consider Phlebas, I was curious about Culture on a non-wartime footing, and The Player of Games certainly gave me that. After The Player of Games, I was interested in other contact methods besides game tournaments, and Use of Weapons certainly satisfied that curiosity. Now I’m curious about the Galactic Council, so I’ll have to see if the next book deals with that. This brief explanation shows how within the same series, Banks is exploring wide ranging parts of his built-world, which allows him to examine and deal with many different themes and topics consistently.

2. The themes here are central—more so than the overarching plot or sub-plots. The themes here are simply stated: love, death, and the fact that as far as we know, intelligence never changes. Here we have an excession—a contact or artifact from outside Culture that exceeds the technological limits of Culture. Culture is currently in the process of civilizing the Affront, but this Excession throws them into a panic and, well, they end up not being any more moral or advanced than the Affront are. Despite their lack of organic body, despite their hyper-intelligence, despite everything, the AI are just like us. They’re petty, they’re searching for meaning, they’re cliquish. In other words, Banks doesn’t believe post-singularity (here it’s post-sublimation, but essentially the same concept) humanity will suddenly be better moral agents, or hyperintelligent to the point of godhood. He thinks beings are like beings are like beings, and his plot lays this out brilliantly. And they’ll always face a singularity—death is the most discussed one here. Banks uses death to explore meaning and morality. I remember in college a professor once said that only works that deal with death and love are still existing in the cannon. This book would work for that definition: death is contemplated and experienced in detail here, while Dajeil and Genar’s extended discussion and memory of love is poignant and fascinating throughout. These themes simply take over the plot, take over the book, and drive it forward. They are central to the whole thing and satisfyingly discussed, observed, and faceted.

3. And that’s a negative for some people: the book isn’t terribly easy to follow or get a good grasp on, especially as a new Culture reader. I can imagine this could be very confusing because there is little plot to follow. The plot is important within the context of the Culture that Banks has set up over the rest of the novels, but I’m not sure this novel stands on its own perfectly. I loved it, but I think it might need the other novels to work here.

4. One other common criticism about this book says that the importance of the plot points exists solely within the context of the Culture novels and Banks’ made-up physics. But that criticism ignores three things to me: the plot is not the point, the discussion of themes is—not to say the novel is plotless, just that the point is the examination of death, morality, and love; it’s science fiction, and invented importance is the name of many plots, so I don’t see this criticism as necessarily a detriment. Some people dislike this novel for these reasons, but it probably comes down to a matter of taste.

5. The language is fascinating. Banks travels back and forth between colloquialisms and the more formal narrative voice in a super engaging way. He’s been doing this throughout the rest of the novels, most apparently in his ship names, but he really nails it here. I mean it: this novel is a pure pleasure to read because of the writing. It’s fascinating with the themes and sub-plots and character creation, but I would still recommend it to people solely for the utterly delightful voice that Banks has developed over the last three Culture novels, and perfects here. Here’s an example:

The Grey Area watched it all happen, carried in its cradle of fields by the three silent warships. Part of it wanted to whoop and cry hurrah, seeing this detonation of materiel, sufficient to smash a war machine ten times - a hundred times - the size of the approaching Affronter fleet; ah the things you could do if you had the time and patience and no treaties to adhere to or agreements to uphold!

Another part of it watched with horror as the Excession swelled, obliterating the view ahead, rampaging out like an explosion still greater than that of ships the Sleeper Service had just produced.

Here’s another example, showing how this switching embraces a wry wit:

As a thermonuclear fireball was to a log burning in a grate, so this ravening cloud of destruction was to a fusion explosion. What she was now witnessing was something even the GSV was undeniably impressed with, not to mention mortally threatened by. Ulver saw how to click out of the experience, and did so.

She'd been in for less than two seconds. In that time her heart had started racing, her breathing had become fast and laboured and a cold sweat had broken on her skin. Wow, she thought, some drug! Genar-Hofoen and Dajeil Gelian were staring at her. She suspected she hardly needed to say anything, but swallowed and said, 'I don't think it's kidding.'

One more example showing the contrast of the switch:

There was silence for a moment. Then Ulver collapsed back dramatically in her seat, arms dangling towards the floor, legs splayed out under the table, gaze directed upwards at the translucent dome. 'Fucking hell!' she shouted. She tried accessing the Jaundiced Outlook's senses, and eventually found a view of hyperspace ahead of the Sleeper Service. More or less back to normal, indeed. She shook her head. 'Fucking hell,' she muttered.

I never thought I’d be praising a Banks novel this much for the writing, but this is a wonderful voice. For such a long novel, this wry-wit is a great way to break it up and keep the reader interested. Through these extended discussions of death, these little lighter moments keep the reader from getting bogged down.

6. The character creation embraces variation within certain sets of characters: hardcore Culture members, outlier Culture members, and Culture outsiders. This could also be stated as humans, ships, and others. But these two categories mix and match in interesting ways: Genar is a human Culture outlier; the Excession is a Culture outsider that is an other; Sleeper Service is a hardcore Culture ship. This variation allows characters to fit into the plot and themes of this novel, but still retain uniqueness. There are a lot of characters—the Interesting Times Gang, the biologicals, the other ships, the others—and sometimes it is hard to keep track of them all. Banks attempts to make it easier on the reader by giving characters distinctive names—Shoot them Later, Genar, Ethics Gradient, Ulver, Risingmoon Parchseason IV, Honest Mistake. But though he names them distinctly, there are so many it’s still hard to keep them all straight at times. Again, he helps the readers by making much of the dialogue basically email based. And this really does solve the problem for the me. But still, the characters are mostly quite engaging. (See this wonderful Wikipedia page listing ship names in Banks' Culture series. The ships are themselves independent moral entities, characters, citizens, beings.)

7. Back to the writing for a brief couple of other notes. The writing here experiments with transmissions that mirror emails and include technical information. Some of the information given is uninteresting and uninformative—read it once and the rest can be skimmed. But the writing helps get the reader in the mindset of the style and type of communication involved. My second note here about the writing is that lengthy portion with the message to Ulver. Here, Banks attempts to write essentially a computer program the offers secure communications. It’s strange writing, but it works for the book because, again, it gets the reader in a mindset that reflects the workings of the communication involved. It’s effective despite working within a new logic for writing.

8. The structure is convoluted, like Use of Weapons was. Most of the novel is straight narrative, but Genar’s chapters often include flashbacks to his earlier relationship with Dajeil. The structure also jumps around between situations and doesn’t proceed at a consistent pace—some chapters are seconds later than the last, some are weeks. However, Banks is able to tie these disparate tactics together through keeping the plots where these tactics are used distinct in their own chapters, and only bleeding them together over the last portion of the novel. He also includes distinct, unimportant scenes—like the two bat-ball scenes—that excellently build characters, but do not bog the book down in plot-unimportant scenes like those in Consider Phlebas did, where most of the book lacked importance and if it was there to build characters, it took too long. The structure works well here and that conclusion is spectacular—everything came together all at once and I read quickly through the last third or so of the novel.

9. In all, this is a fantastic book, but you might have to have read other Culture books in order to fully understand the importance and interest this book can hold—it doesn’t necessarily stand on its own, but a better sequel is hard to think of off the top of my head. The characters and plot are interesting, but the themes and writing really take this book from good to great. It’s a great book, and well worth the read. Like The Player of Games, I want to read this one again. Sure, The Player of Games was more my book than this, because it stands on its own much better, but this is clearly my second favorite Culture novel that I’ve read.