Book Review: Iain Banks - Excession

[julesjones]

I've got the two books I read in April (only two, ulp) to review, and then I'll be caught up and can stop spamming you all for a bit. Unless I get the urge to start on some of my reference books. :-)

Iain Banks -- Excession

4 stars -- space opera by a master

Another book set in the universe of the Culture, Bank's powerful, hedonistic galactic civilisation devoted to pleasure and doing good works. This one focuses on the machine intelligences of the Culture rather than the people, and makes it clear that the machines are people too, complete with virtues, vices, and erratic behaviour. "Excession" is hard work, but worth it. It's a complex book with multiple plot threads and it's stuffed with dazzling ideas. The Excession itself is an enormously powerful alien artefact/entity that appears and then simply sits there doing nothing; but by doing so it provokes a great many other entities into action they may regret. Banks has the writing skill to pull it off, but you really do have to be paying attention right the way through. It's not perfect -- there are a lot of ship characters in this one, not all of them clearly delineated by personality, and it's very hard to keep track of who's who at times. It does repay the effort, though. It's funny, moving and thought-provoking, and holds a mirror up to ourselves in the same way the Excession does to the people and civilisations that encounter it.

Excession from amazon.com
Excession at amazon.co.uk
Excession from Barnes & Noble
Excession from Powell's

Comments

[hafren.livejournal.com]

Unless I get the urge to start on some of my reference books. :-)

Oh, do! Reading reviews is so much quicker than reading books, and sometimes more fun:)

[julesjones]

You'll like this one, I think. But I need to add more detail to the venom before I put it up on Amazon:

http://www.librarything.com/card_card.php?work=949781&book=3086469

(I'll leave A Terrible Novel alone. It's just too cruel...)

[hafren.livejournal.com]

Most concise. I'm glad you put them all on Amazon; it does allegedly make a difference.

[julesjones]

I haven't read The Algebraist yet. He's one of the few authors I read whom I can be reasonably certain of finding stocked in an airport bookshop, and a lot of his books weren't readily available in the US anyway, so I tend to buy his books on the way through Heathrow. Ditto PD James -- and Terry Pratchett until I started getting signed hardbacks via ppint of Interstellar Master Traders. And I was already well weighed down with books on the last couple of trips. :-)

I can see why he might like a break from the Culture books, even with writing his "mainstream" books. With any luck it will be just a break, and he'll get some more ideas for it.

Excession is one of my favourites. I gave it a four rather than a five because it *is* a problem keeping track of who's who, but it's still enormous fun to read.