Thanks again to MVPL I did indeed read two Iain M. Banks novels back to back. Excession is another excursion into his Culture ‘verse. The other Culture books I’ve read focused mainly on human beings but this time we’re watching the Minds which inhabit and control the starships (and Orbitals) while the humans are mainly present for context and emotional bait.
Banks has said in interviews that Minds are to the huge space vessels as brains are to us, and relatively as powerful. In this novel he explains that the Minds, as a past time and intellectual tool, work at metamathics, a higher order math which take the concept of scientific elegance and purity into an entirely different realm and yet these sentient creations are still capable of managing the workings of vehicles tens of kilometers and more in diameter and interacting individually with hundreds of millions of human and drone inhabitants. Concurrently.
Excession is the story of what happens when something happens that even the greatest of these Minds cannot comprehend. Near an otherwise empty star system a sphere of perfect emptiness appears, as if someone had pushed up from underneath the fabric of existence, and attacked with instantaneous and overwhelming power any object that approached too closely. The Culture ships can’t even probe its interior, nor does it respond to communications.
Taking advantage of this extraordinary diversion, a conspiracy of Minds from Special Circumstances (think of an interstellar CIA with almost no oversight or control) has decided the time has come to teach an aggressive upstart race of beings called the Affront that in this neck of the woods the neighbors don’t appreciate unruly youngsters.
And of course Banks creates a vast cast of interesting characters, from Minds who play off against each to humans and Affronters who only wish to stretch their own boundaries. At times the style of the AI communications got a bit confusing, there were perhaps a few too many and perhaps he didn’t give them enough individuality. All told, something very different and difficult to put down.
recommended
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