Book Review: Excession

A mysterious black sphere appears in deep space; it’s impervious to any analysis and with his unfathomability challenges the most advanced intelligences of the galaxy.

This is hard sci-fi, very hard sci-fi.

Iain M. Banks novels are all set in the “Culture” universe. Just the premise is very complicated. A “post scarcity” universe where everything that you could wish for or just imagine is common place thanks to an incredibly advanced science. Kilometers long ships are inhabited by hundreds of millions, there are incredibly sophisticated artificial minds who govern an extremely peculiar society where human like being coexist with aliens and droids and everybody, from the normal human to all kinds of AI, is a citizen of the “culture”. Actually this universe is so peculiar that it would merit an essay just for itself but is not the case to go into too many details here so let’s just say that this is as advanced as it gets.

The story centers on an “outside context problem”. The definition given by Banks himself is so good that is worth putting it again here, “is the kind of problem most civilizations would encounter just once, and which they tended to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encountered a full stop.". Banks conceived it while playing Civilization, the computer game. In the game you could develop your little country and go around in your little wooden vessels and then be extremely surprised when another civilization comes along and they’ve been so technologically advanced that they have the battleship, which in Civilization term is like saying that they are invincible. This, apart from confirming that the battleship is the coolest troop ever in Civ, it’s also the protagonist of my favorite personal experience with the game, means that an “outside context problem” is just that, something that comes from beyond the horizon and is so big that you can’t even conceive it.

Applying this kind of problem to the culture is very interesting because the culture is as advanced as something could possibly be and there a lot of very interesting implications for Banks to explore.

He is also a difficult writer, he likes to explore and experiment but in the end it’s worth it because he gives us a really unique experience.