An Excession is an object that does not belong to the Culture, or that of any other species they know. It is beyond their current level of technology. Moreover, they have no idea what it is or how it does what it can do. It is potentially a threat. It potentially means the end of life as they know it. When such an object appears, everyone concerned rallies to try and work out what the object is, what it wants, and how to get rid of it.
As a novel, Excession is yet another example of the Fear of Editing. Aside from more typos than I’d usually accept, the introductory section of this novel is far longer than it needs to be. At least half of the book deals with introducing new characters (human, alien and Mind). There are innumerable names to remember, of ships and people and drones, and many of them appear only once or twice and have very minor roles to play. By halfway through, I was thoroughly confused as to which ships were aligned with which people, and who was on which side of confrontations. By the very end it is just about made obvious again, but I feel that a good editor could have encouraged Banks to be a little clearer.
Another problem I have with Banks’ less-edited works is his overly long sentences. Especially earlier in the novel, Banks seems to think that sentences are almost passé and decides instead to focus on the paragraphs. It makes much of it very difficult to read. Consequently, the first half of the book took a lot of reading to get through. The dialogue between Ships, especially, bordered on the florid and reading at any speed was almost impossible.
After that, though, the style starts to settle down a bit and get on with the plot. The story itself is actually quite good, as long as you can hold about a dozen ship names and several humans in your head at once. It follows a twisting thread of conspiracies, several strategies by various groups to attack or preserve or communicate with the excession. As each plot thread makes its way towards the conclusion, there is a definite sense of tension and intrigue. The ending itself is a bit of a disappointment, after all the build up, but as a whole the second half delivers almost enough to reward a reader that survives the first half.
In this story, the people are at worst incidental, at best pawns to the ship Minds. They have very little say in what goes on. While in some ways this makes for a unique perspective, it makes the story ring a little hollow. The ships themselves are quite brilliant characters and generally more interesting than the humans. The most intriguing thing is that they all think they are doing the right thing, even though this leads them to totally different conclusions. However, it is much more difficult to assign motivations and reasoning processes to AI Minds. As a consequence, the novel lacks a real human perspective to make it possible to really engage with the plot. In space opera, this is nearly unforgivable. Unfortunately, I also have trouble thinking of Banks’ Culture novels as anything other than space opera.
I enjoyed the latter half of the novel, but I felt it was excessively hard to get into, if you’ll excuse the pun. This novel could, and possibly should, be cut down to at most two thirds its current length, and then it would become a very good read. As it is, I wouldn’t recommend this book to any but the most devoted Banks fan, and certainly not to a first-time reader of SF or of Iain M.
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