Iain M. Banks

Excession

Gavin

In one sentence: A psychologically realistic utopia (: a flawed one) nestled in a soft opera-of-space-operas.
 
 To be read when: you don't think we have anywhere to go. / On a train.

(This is more of a review of the Culture series. Excession is my favourite of them - even just seeing that slightly bad 90s cover gets a reaction out of me - but none of the books is so great on its own. I just keep re-reading them. This essay gives a flavour of the intellectual thrill underneath Banks' hand-waving, hand-wringing, and gags. Start with Player of Games or Use of Weapons, and leave Phlebas to last, it's not great except thematically.)

The two worst omissions from sci-fi are social development and software development. Banks covers the first so memorably, so thrillingly, that the series is a permanent touchstone for me. The Culture is actually different from us - even though underneath their society revs our great alien machine, liberalism unbound.

Banks was always quite open about how didactic his sci-fi was; it is saved by his inventiveness and psychological realism amidst technological fantasy.

This scene (from Use of Weapons) had a large effect on me as a child:

  
 'Of course I don't have to do this,' one middle-aged man said, carefully cleaning the table with a damp cloth. He put the cloth in a little pouch, sat down beside him. "But look; this table's clean.'
 He agreed that the table was clean.
 "Usually,' the man said. "I work on alien -- no offence -- alien religions; Directional Emphasis In Religious Observance; that's my specialty ... like when temples or graves or prayers always have to face in a certain direction; that sort of thing? Well, I catalogue, evaluate, compare; I come up with theories and argue with colleagues, here and elsewhere. But ... the job's never finished; always new examples, and even the old ones get re-evaluated, and new people come along with new ideas about what you thought was settled ... but,' he slapped the table, "when you clean a table you clean a table. You feel you've done something. It's an achievement."
 "But in the end, it's still cleaning a table."
 "And therefore does not really signify on the cosmic scale of events?' the man suggested.
 He smiled in response to the man's grin, "Well, yes.'
 'But then what does signify? My other work? Is that really important, either?' I could try composing wonderful musical works, or day-long entertainment epics, but what would that do? Give people pleasure? My wiping this table gives me pleasure. And people come to a clean table, which gives them pleasure. And anyway" - the man laughed - "people die; stars die; universes die. What is any achievement, however great it was, once time itself is dead? Of course, if all I did was wipe tables, then of course it would seem a mean and despicable waste of my huge intellectual potential. But because I choose to do it, it gives me pleasure. And," the man said with a smile, "it's a good way of meeting people." 



As did this, before I studied formal philosophy and received a resounding confirmation of it:


  
 “Aw, come on; argue, dammit.”
 “I don’t believe in argument,” he said, looking out.
 “You don’t?” Erens said, genuinely surprised. “Shit, and I thought I was the cynical one.”
 “It’s not cynicism,” he said flatly. “I just think people overvalue argument because they like to hear themselves talk.”
 “Oh well, thank you.”
 “It’s comforting, I suppose.” He watched the stars wheel, like absurdly slow shells seen at night: rising, peaking, falling... (And reminded himself that the stars too would explode, perhaps, one day.) “Most people are not prepared to have their minds changed,” he said. “And I think they know in their hearts that other people are just the same, and one of the reasons people become angry when they argue is that they realize just that, as they trot out their excuses.”
 “Excuses, eh?"
 "Yes, excuses," he said, with what Erens thought might just have been a trace of bitterness. "I strongly suspect the things people believe in are usually just what they instinctively feel is right; the excuses, the justifications, the things you're supposed to argue about, come later. They're the least important part of the belief. That's why you can destroy them, win an argument, prove the other person wrong, and still they believe what they did in the first place." He looked at Erens. "You've attacked the wrong thing.” 


But this was also before I got into technical pursuits which lend us hope that the above grim realism can be defeated by self-awareness, quantification, and epistemic care. Sometimes. 


 
    Galef type: 

Theory 2 - model of what makes something succeed or fail &
 Values 2 - thought experiments for you to reflect on how you feel about something.
  Style 3 - tickles your aesthetic sense in a way that obliquely makes you a more interesting, generative thinker.

Kyle S

I love this series, but Excession fell victim to having too ambitious of a plot without much of a payoff nor focus. There are three storylines in this book that would have been better as their own stories.

Ignacio Velarde

Jamie R

Eric Jacobsen

Naomi J.

Sherry

Adam Perfect

Kevin Finlayson

Scordatura

The fifth Culture book from the awesome imagination of Iain M. Banks, a modern master of science fiction. Two and a half millennia ago, the artifact appeared in a remote corner of space, beside a trillion-year-old dying sun from a different universe. It was a perfect black-body sphere, and it did nothing. Then it disappeared. Now it is back. Praise for the Culture series: 'Epic in scope, ambitious in its ideas and absorbing in its execution' Independent on Sunday 'Banks has created one of the most enduring and endearing visions of the future' Guardian 'Jam-packed with extraordinary invention' Scotsman 'Compulsive reading' Sunday Telegraph The Culture series: Consider Phlebas The Player of Games Use of Weapons The State of the Art Excession Inversions Look to Windward Matter Surface Detail The Hydrogen Sonata Other books by Iain M. Banks: Against a Dark Background Feersum Endjinn The Algebraist

Excession

Reviews