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Excession (A Culture Novel Book Book 4) by [Iain M. Banks]

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Iain M. Banks

Excession (A Culture Novel Book Book 4) Kindle Edition

by Iain M. Banks (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

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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

Length: 500 pages	Word Wise: Enabled	Enhanced Typesetting: Enabled
Page Flip: Enabled	Audible Narration: Audible Narration Switch back and forth between reading the Kindle book and listening to the Audible narration. Add narration for a reduced price of $9.49 after you buy the Kindle book. Ready	Language: English

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Product description

From the Back Cover

Iain M. Banks is a true original, an author whose brilliant speculative fiction has transported us into worlds of unbounded imagination and inimitable revelatory power. Now he takes us on the ultimate trip: to the edge of possibility and to the heart of a cosmic puzzle....
Diplomat Byr Genar-Hofoen has been selected by the Culture to undertake a delicate and dangerous mission. The Department of Special Circumstances--the Culture's espionage and dirty tricks section--has sent him off to investigate a 2,500-year-old mystery: the sudden disappearance of a star fifty times older than the universe itself. But in seeking the secret of the lost sun, Byr risks losing himself.
There is only one way to break the silence of millennia: steal the soul of the long-dead starship captain who first encountered the star, and convince her to be reborn. And in accepting this mission, Byr will be swept into a vast conspiracy that could lead the universe into an age of peace...or to the brink of annihilation. --This text refers to the mass_market edition.

Review

"Banks is a phenomenon...wildly successful, fearlessly creative."
--William Gibson --This text refers to the mass_market edition.

Review

Gripping, touching and funny - TLS

The story is vital and urgent and has a brilliantly subtle resolution ... wildly enjoyable - INTERZONE

A dizzying adventure - DAILY MAIL

Explosive but tender - SUNDAY TIMES --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

From the Publisher

Iain Banks came to widespread and controversial public notice with the publication of his first novel, THE WASP FACTORY, in 1984. He has since gained enormous popular and critical acclaim for both his mainstream and his science fiction novels. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

From the Inside Flap

Book Description

A Culture novel from a modern master of science fiction - a tour de force of brilliant storytelling, world-building and imagination

--This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

About the Author

ASIN : B002TZ3DEO
Publisher : Orbit; New Ed edition (4 September 2008)
Language : English
File size : 690 KB
Text-to-Speech : Enabled
Screen Reader : Supported
Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
X-Ray : Not Enabled
Word Wise : Enabled
Print length : 500 pages

Best Sellers Rank: 37,358 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- 398 in Space Fleet Science Fiction
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- 35,876 in Kindle eBooks

Customer Reviews:
533 ratings

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Customer reviews

5 star		69%
4 star		17%
3 star		7%
2 star		5%
1 star		2%

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Top reviews from Australia

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Damian

Excessionly Complex!

Reviewed in Australia on 1 September 2020

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The book is well written and entertaining. My minor complaint is that I couldn't really understand at all what is going on. People and ships are going here and there - its all a confused mess. Long sequences of Ship computers talking to eachother just add further confusion.

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Mr. M. Read

Great book, very compelling, slightly complex though

Reviewed in Australia on 23 September 2017

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Hence the four stars, not 5. Minds play a big part in this book, there are a lot of them, and I found it difficult to tell them apart and remember their respective roles at times. Otherwise, though, the book was touched on some very interesting concepts and responses to them. Highly recommended.

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James

A fine read.

Reviewed in Australia on 6 August 2017

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As always seems to be the case, Iain M Banks has wrought a, well written sci-fi adventure that fits in well with his epic Culture series.

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Cara Phillips

Slow build to an epic crescendo.

Reviewed in Australia on 5 January 2021

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Great SciFi world building. Great drip feeding of information reveal a network of conspiracy. Excellent use of extreme examples to raise moral questions.

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Jackson Staub

Decent Banks Books

Reviewed in Australia on 14 November 2018

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Good overall story but as per normal Banks books it can be a slow read for much of the book

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russell

Too slow

Reviewed in Australia on 31 May 2016

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Lots of ideas. Cast of dozens. Way too slow. Never really engaged. Started speed reading half way through and gave up a short while later.

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Amazon Customer

Five Stars

Reviewed in Australia on 3 May 2016

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One of the better of this series. Great ending.

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Winter

They are just as funny, petty and psychotic as you secretly suspected

Reviewed in Australia on 6 January 2015

This book shines the light on the inner workings of the Minds. They are just as funny, petty and psychotic as you secretly suspected. Love, love, love this book!!!

One person found this helpful

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falcorob

Another great Banks......

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 14 November 2018

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Starts slowly and builds to a crashing finale. The subplots and characterisations are typical Banks and will keep you entertained for hours. The blasé acceptance of, and refusal to explain the workings for, the technology is also a trademark, and a welcome one at that. Who wants reams and reams of scientific mumbo jumbo about something that doesn’t exist and wouldn’t be viable within those parameters anyway?

I’m probably on my 5th or 6th reading of the series now and have to say that it doesn’t get any worse for that. If you love your Sci-Fi in the form of huge, galaxy encompassing adventures, then these are the stories for you.

11 people found this helpful

Fleecy Moss

Even better the second time around.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 3 May 2020

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Next book in my decade re-read of the master himself & I loved it more than the first time, probably because I was able to see how the three streams knitted together into a final, incredible whole.

First off, the Affront are just brilliant – a caricature of every Wetherspoons’ lads party turned into a space capable civilisation, their adopted name a play on the description of them offered by the culture: teenages with big ships and bigger guns! It is genius that the Culture ambassador wants to be an Affronter even as he enjoys all the pleasures offered by the more mature Culture: a comment on moving from child to adult perhaps.

On first read, I found the “couple” relationship a bit boring but now I can see how it’s importance is more to do with ship itself, which brings in one of the key concepts of the Culture, that the Minds decided it was more of a challenge to keep humans around and happy than it was to wipe them out.

The conspiracy I still find a bit contrived, although I now recognise that again it links back to the same theme as the ambassador: do you allow an individual/culture develop themselves or do you intervene.

At the other end, we have the tables turned on the Culture themselves, when faced with something so beyond them that they are humbled, and ultimately judged in the same way that they have judged the Affront.

A classic so much better, perhaps because I also have made the same journey as an person, hopefully wiser ten years on.

Fleecy Moss, author of the Folio 55 SciFi fantasy series (writing as Nia Sinjorina), End of a Girl, Undon , and 4659 now available on Amazon.

One person found this helpful

Kindle Customer

Slighter than I recall

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 17 December 2018

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I'm re reading the culture series and this has been the first disappointing book. It was the first culture book I bought on it's release and I recall it as being stronger than it is re reading it.

The Minds and their plotting is both hard to follow and the plot they are involved in seems trivial.

The ending is a giant deus et machina. Really; an adult came and stopped your fighting?

The Affront are excellent.

The human character's subplot is the biggest disappointment. Two unlikable, boring, self indulging idiots. I really didn't want to spend time with either of them

The Paige Rock subplot fizzles out.

Overall a bit of a mess of a book. That said a Banksian mess is still better than just about anything else out there. I recall enjoying it so it may work better on a first reading.

2 people found this helpful

J Jones

Superb! I Love This Book

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 31 March 2020

Verified Purchase

Arrived on time & as described. I got this as been a while since I've read it but it's absolutely brilliant. I love the exchanges between the ships, the way Banks doesn't try to go into totally undecipherable science to explain how Culture vessels can go so fast, just takes it as read that they can with a bit of a nod to how they do it. Some sci-fi authors try to explain the science behind what they write, makes reading their books like wading thru treacle. Banks just states it, says how it's done & doesn't bore the living daylights out of you/leave you way behind when explaining the tech with reference to present theory. Funny, exciting, had me hooked & I've already read it before.

TWB

Sci-fi that deserves an audience beyond the genre cul-de-sac

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 2 November 2012

Verified Purchase

The egalitarian, interstellar society, the Culture faces the twin threat of a developing war and an `Excession'. The latter is described as the kind of event that has a similar effect on a civilisation that a full stop has on a sentence. In this instance it is an enigmatic, moon sized, black sphere that appears to be -circumstantially and impossibly- older than the universe itself. Against this backdrop a variety of sub-plots begin to collide including half-millennium old conspiracies, rogue star-ships and a four-decade long bout of depression.

I've always enjoyed Iain Banks' sci-fi. His contemporary fiction -whilst always entertaining- seems to suffer from being too much of its time; many of his early novels already seem a tad dated due to the many time-specific references. The same detail heavy descriptions, when applied to a sci-fi context, make his fantastical environments believable and relatable. That same creative and engaging world-building is on display here. This is an author completely and comfortably in control of his writing.

Now twenty-five years old, the Culture has become a rich playground for Banks. It has a texture and depth that is now so well established, he is able to develop themes with real finesse whilst developing a rollicking good plot. As ever, there is real wit in the names and exchanges of the Culture's genius artificial intelligences, the Minds. If anything, the wonderful wordplay and banter between these city-sized egos makes the human characters seem rather pallid and uninteresting and it is certainly the sections of the book featuring the meat based characters that dragged a little for me.

Nevertheless, this is a smashing addition to Banks' output. Lasers are fired, civilisations brought to the edge of extinction and between all that the moral limits of anarcho-democratic societies are explored, the extent to which the ends justify the means considered and the comparative relevance of personal and pan-galactic tragedy contrasted.

I suspect that you have to already be inclined toward books with spaceships and reactionary, right-wing societies composed of tentacle bearing aliens to really enjoy this novel. That seems a real pity as `Sleeper Service' is a more complex and captivating character than you would find in many literary works, despite being a seventy kilometre long rocket-ship. And I challenge anyone not to love a battleship called `A Frank Exchange of Views'.

6 people found this helpful

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