Excession
First edition
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| Author | Iain M. Banks |
|---|---|
| Cover artist | Mark Salwowski |
| Country | Scotland |
| Language | English |
| Series | The Culture |
| Genre | Science fiction novel |
| Publisher | Orbit Books |
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Publication date
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1996 |
| Media type | Print (Hardback & Paperback) |
| Pages | 451 |
| ISBN | |
| OCLC | 35379578 |
| Preceded by | Use of Weapons |
| Followed by | Inversions |
Excession, first published in 1996 and written by Scottish writer Iain M. Banks, is the fifth and one of the most popular novels in the Culture series, a series of 10 science fiction novels. It features a utopian fictional interstellar society called the Culture. It concerns the response of the Culture and other interstellar societies to an unprecedented alien artifact, the Excession of the title.
The book is largely about the response of the Culture's Minds (Benevolent AIs with enormous intellectual and physical capabilities and distinctive personalities) to the Excession itself and the way in which another society, the Affront, whose systematic brutality horrifies the Culture, tries to use the Excession to increase its power. As in Banks' other Culture novels the main themes are the moral dilemmas that confront a hyperpower and how biological characters find ways to give their lives meaning in a post-scarcity society that is presided over by benign super-intelligent machines. The book features a large collection of Culture ship names, some of which give subtle clues about the roles these ships' Minds play in the story. In terms of style, the book is also notable for the way in which many important conversations between Minds resemble email messages complete with headers.
The Excession of the title is a perfect black-body sphere that appears mysteriously on the edge of Culture space, appearing to be older than the Universe itself and that resists the attempts of the Culture and technologically equivalent societies (notably the Zetetic Elench) to probe it. The Interesting Times Gang (ITG), an informal group of Minds loosely connected with Special Circumstances, try to manage the Culture's response to the Excession. The Affront, a rapidly expanding race named for its systematic sadism towards subject species and its own females and junior males, also try to exploit the Excession by infiltrating a store of mothballed Culture warships and using them to claim control of the mysterious object.
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