Excession
Review
Excession, by , is the fourth novel and fifth book in the Culture series. It follows the reaction of the Culture and other civilizations to an “excession”: an “Outside Context Problem”—something mysterious, unpredictable, and enormously powerful.
The best part of the novel is getting to see how the Culture works: how the Minds think, communicate, make decisions, retreat to “Infinite Fun Space”, and interact with an Outside Context Problem.1 The worst part was the human characters—shallow and uninteresting. Ulver Seich, the airhead socialite, is a slightly more engaging and better-written take on the “hot girl who sleeps her way through the narrative” trope that loves to use, like Mellanie Rescorai in Pandora’s Star or, to a lesser extent, Kysandra Blair in The Abyss Beyond Dreams. Even so, I dreaded the human-focused chapters. Culture books rely on their human characters to bring scale, emotion, and stakes to the drama, and Excession’s humans fall short.
The story wasn’t what I expected. I thought the book would explore how the Culture deals with something beyond its control. Instead, the book is about how the Culture tries to exploit the Excession for its own schemes. The book is full of schemes: one to disguise the nature of the Sleeper Service; another to stage a false-flag operation to justify war against the Nazi-like Affront; a third to reunite Dajeil Gelian and Byr Genar-Hofoen; and a fourth to intercept Genar-Hofoen with Seich to keep him from reaching the Sleeper Service.
One major theme is duality. The Affront’s cartoonish cruelty is set against the Culture’s carefully curated image of a peaceful and utopian existence. The interventionist Grey Area is mirrored by the isolationist Sleeper Service. Genar-Hofoen engages wildly with the universe; Dajeil Gelian withdraws. Ulver Seich is a self-absorbed hedonist; Gestra Ishmethit is an ascetic hermit. The Excession itself has no counterpart, which drives home its alienness: it doesn’t fit into any context.
Even after reading so-called “hard” books like The Quantum Thief or The Shadow of the Torturer, I still found Excession hard to track—mostly because of the flood of ship names and trying to figure out who was in on what.
Some aspects I loved:
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The Minds’ IRC-style chats.
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The glacial genocide uncovered by the Grey Area.
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The Affront, a jellyfish-like race modeled after the British Empire and the Nazis.
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The drone that embeds an SOS message onto an enemy ship using blast craters.
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The human-body BIOS that lets people control everything from muscle density to gender.
Overall, Excession is still a good book but weaker than The Player of Games and Use of Weapons.
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An Outside Context Problem was the sort of thing most civilizations encountered just once, and which they tended to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encountered a full stop. The usual example given to illustrate an Outside Context Problem was imagining you were a tribe on a largish, fertile island; you’d tamed the land, invented the wheel or writing or whatever, the neighbors were cooperative or enslaved but at any rate peaceful and you were busy raising temples to yourself with all the excess productive capacity you had, you were in a position of near-absolute power and control which your hallowed ancestors could hardly have dreamed of and the whole situation was just running along nicely like a canoe on wet grass… when suddenly this bristling lump of iron appears sailless and trailing steam in the bay and these guys carrying long funny-looking sticks come ashore and announce you’ve just been discovered, you’re all subjects of the Emperor now, he’s keen on presents called tax and these bright-eyed holy men would like a word with your priests.