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Excession Mass Market Paperback – February 2, 1998
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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.
- Print length499 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherSpectra
- Publication dateFebruary 2, 1998
- Dimensions4.18 x 1.08 x 6.69 inches
- ISBN-100553575376
- ISBN-13978-0553575378
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A mysterious artifact resurfaces after two and a half millennia, prompting an investigation by the advanced Culture civilization.Popular highlight
An Outside Context Problem was the sort of thing most civilisations encountered just once, and which they tended to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encountered a full stop.367 Kindle readers highlighted thisPopular highlight
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--William Gibson
From the Publisher
--William Gibson
From the Inside Flap
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.
From the Back Cover
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.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Somewhere, the drone Sisela Ytheleus could hear a human, shouting; then, radiating wildly over the electromagnetic bands came a voice signal similar to that carried by the air. It became garbled almost immediately, then degraded quickly into meaningless static. The human shout changed to a scream, then the EM signal cut off; so did the sound.
Pulses of radiation blasted in from various directions, virtually information-free. The ship's inertial field wobbled uncertainly, then drew steady and settled again. A shell of neutrinos swept through the space around the companionway. Noises faded. EM signatures murmured to silence; the ship's engines and main life support systems were off-line. The whole EM spectrum was empty of meaning. Probably the battle had now switched to the ship's AI core and back-up photonic nuclei.
Then a pulse of energy shot through a multi-purpose cable buried in the wall behind, oscillating wildly then settling back to a steady, utterly unrecognisable pattern. An internal camera patch on a structural beam nearby awakened and started scanning.
It can't be over that quickly, can it?
Hiding in the darkness, the drone suspected it was already too late. It was supposed to wait until the attack had reached a plateau phase and the aggressor thought that it was just a matter of mopping up the last dregs of opposition before it made its move, but the attack had been too sudden, too extreme, too capable. The plans the ship had made, of which it was such an important part, could only anticipate so much, only allow for so proportionally greater a technical capability on the part of the attacker. Beyond a certain point, there was simply nothing you could do; there was no brilliant plan you could draw up or cunning stratagem you could employ that would not seem laughably simple and unsophisticated to a profoundly more developed enemy. In this instance they were not perhaps quite at the juncture where resistance became genuinely without point, but--from the ease with which the Elencher ship was being taken over--they were not that far away from it, either.
Remain calm, the machine told itself. Look at the overview; place this and yourself in context. You are prepared, you are hardened, you are proof. You will do all that you can to survive as you are or at the very least to prevail. There is a plan to be put into effect here. Play your part with skill, courage and honour and no ill wilt be thought of you by those who survive and succeed.
The Elench had spent many thousands of years pitting themselves against every kind of technology and every type of civilisational artifact the vast spaces of the greater galaxy could provide, seeking always to understand rather than to overpower, to be changed rather than to enforce change upon others, to incorporate and to share rather than to infect and impose, and in that cause, and with that relatively unmenacing modes operandi, had become perhaps more adept than any--with the possible exception of the mainstream culture's semi-military emissaries known as the Contact Section--at resisting outright attack without seeming to threaten it; but for all that the galaxy had been penetrated by so many different explorers in all obvious primary directions to every periphery however distant, enormous volumes of that encompassing arena remained effectively unexplored by the current crop of in-play civilizations, including the Elench (quite how utterly that region, and beyond, was comprehended by the elder species, or even whether they really cared about it at all was simply unknown). And in those swallowingly vast volumes, amongst those spaces between the spaces between the stars, around suns, dwarfs, nebulae and holes it had been determined from some distance were of no immediate interest or threat, it was of course always possible that some danger waited, some peril lurked, comparatively small measured against the physical scale of the galaxy's present active cultures, but capable--through a developmental peculiarity or as a result of some form of temporal limbo or exclusionary dormancy--of challenging and besting even a representative of a society as technologically advanced and contactually experienced as the Elench.
The drone felt calm, thinking as coldly and detachedly as it could for those few moments on the background to its current predicament. It was prepared, it was ready, and it was no ordinary machine; it was at the cutting edge of its civilisation's technology, designed to evade detection by the most sophisticated instruments, to survive in almost unimaginably hostile conditions, to take on virtually any opponent and to suffer practically any damage in concentric stages of resistance. That its ship, its own manufacturer, the one entity that probably knew it better than it knew itself, was apparently being at this moment corrupted, seduced, taken over, must not affect its judgement or its confidence.
The displacer, it thought. All I've got to do is get near the Displace Pod, that's all...
Then it felt its body scanned by a point source located near the ship's AI core, and knew its time had come. The attack was as elegant as it was ferocious and the take-over abrupt almost to the point of instantaneity, the battle-memes of the invading alien consciousness aided by the thought processes and shared knowledge of the by now obviously completely overwhelmed ship.
With no interval to provide a margin for error at all, the drone shunted its personality from its own AI core to its back-up picofoam complex and at the same time readied the signal cascade that would transfer its most important concepts, programs and instructions first to electronic nanocircuitry, then to an atomechanical substrate and finally--absolutely as a last resort--to a crude little (though at several cubic centimetres also wastefully large) semi-biological brain. The drone shut off and shut down what had been its true mind, the only place it had ever really existed in all its life, and let whatever pattern of consciousness had taken root there perish for lack of energy, its collapsing consciousness impinging on the machine's new mind as a faint, informationless exhalation of neutrinos.
The drone was already moving; out from its body-niche in the wall and into the companionway space. It accelerated along the corridor, sensing the gaze of the ceiling-beam camera patch following it. Fields of radiation swept over the drone's militarised body, caressing, probing, penetrating. An inspection hatch burst open in the companionway just ahead of the drone and something exploded out of it; cables burst free, filling to overflowing with electrical power. The drone zoomed then swooped; a discharge of electricity crackled across the air immediately above the machine and blew a hole in the far wall; the drone twisted through the wreckage and powered down the corridor, turning flat to its direction of travel and extending a disc-field through the air to brake for a corner, then slamming off the far wall and accelerating up another companionway. It was one of the full cross-axis corridors, and so long; the drone quickly reached the speed of sound in the human-breathable atmosphere; an emergency door slammed shut behind it a full second after it had passed.
A space suit shot upwards out of a descending vertical tubeway near the end of the companionway, crumpled to a stop, then reared up and stumbled out to intercept the machine. The drone had already scanned the suit and knew the suit was empty and unarmed; it went straight through it, leaving it flapping halved against floor and ceiling like a collapsed balloon. The drone threw another disc of field around itself to match the companionway's diameter and rode almost to a stop on a piston of compressed air, then darted round the next corner and accelerated again.
A human figure inside a space suit lay half-way up the next corridor, which was pressurising rapidly with a distant roar of gas. Smoke was filling the companionway in the distance, then it ignited and the mixture of gases exploded down the tube. The smoke was transparent to the drone and far too cool to do it any harm, but the thickening atmosphere was going to slow it up, which was doubtless exactly the idea.
The drone scanned the human and the suit as best it could as it tore up the smoke-filled corridor towards it. It knew the person in the suit well; he had been on the ship for five years. The suit was without weaponry, its systems quiet but doubtless already taken over; the man was in shock and under fierce chemical sedation from the suit's medical unit. As the drone approached the suit it raised one arm towards the fleeing machine. To a human the arm would have appeared to move almost impossibly quickly, flicking up at the machine, but to the drone the gesture looked languid, almost leisurely; surely this could not be all the threat the suit was capable of--
The drone had only the briefest warning of the suit's holstered gun exploding; until that instant the gun hadn't even been apparent to the machine's senses, shielded somehow. There was no time to stop, no opportunity to use its own EM effector on the gun's controls to prevent it from overloading, nowhere to take cover, and--in the thick mist of gases flooding the corridor--no way of accelerating beyond the danger. At the same moment, the ship's inertial field fluctuated again, and flipped a quarter-turn; suddenly down was directly behind the drone, and the field strength doubled, then redoubled. The gun exploded, tearing the suit and the human it contained apart.
Product details
- Publisher : Spectra (February 2, 1998)
- Language : English
- Mass Market Paperback : 499 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0553575376
- ISBN-13 : 978-0553575378
- Item Weight : 12.2 ounces
- Dimensions : 4.18 x 1.08 x 6.69 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #76,856 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1,853 in Space Operas
- #2,893 in Science Fiction Adventures
- #3,277 in Fantasy Action & Adventure
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Iain Banks (1954-2013) came to widespread and controversial public notice with the publication of his first novel, The Wasp Factory, in 1984. Consider Phlebas, his first science fiction novel, was published under the name Iain M. Banks in 1987 and began his celebrated ten-book Culture series. He is acclaimed as one of the most powerful, innovative and exciting writers of his generation.
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Most, though not all, of his SF is written in the Culture milieu. The Culture is an extremely advanced post-scarcity galactic society in which most of the hard decisions of running the society are made by hyper-intelligent, self-aware starship Minds. Many of the ship Minds are as interesting characters as the people are. It is a vastly imaginative, enormously rich setting, covering expanses of space and time possibly second only to Steven Baxter and Olaf Stapledon, though with much more human and sympathetic characters than Baxter (and without Baxter's tendency to "everyone dies happily ever after" endings).
In my opinion, Excession is the best introduction to the Culture, and the best place to start reading Iain M. Banks' SF works, even though it is not chronologically the earliest. My suggested reading order would be Excession, then Consider Phlebas, followed in pretty much any order by Look to Windward, Matter, Surface Detail, and The Player of Games. Use of Weapons and The State of the Art are side threads that can go into the list at any point, and The Algebraist, while technically not a Culture novel, is not incompatible with it. And you should finish up with The Hydrogen Sonata, the last Culture book Iain completed before his death, because ... well, by then, you'll understand why.
It is an incredibly bitter irony that Iain's final book (which was general fiction) was about a man dealing with the discovery that he has terminal cancer and has only a few months to live, and that a few months before completing the book, he discovered that he himself had terminal cancer and had only months to live. But those of us who know and love his Culture novels will forever believe that Iain M. Banks did not die. He sublimed.
By the time you reach The Hydrogen Sonata, you'll understand that statement.
I only had a few problems with the book. Remembering which ship was which was sometimes confusing, I think partially because the (wonderful) names of the ships and Minds are just hard to keep straight for me sometimes (my fault) and partly because we only get viewpoints from a couple of them. Perhaps a second read-through would fix this for me. I also found the ending a little confusing - until I read the epilogue. Finally, there was an event that happened the past between two of the characters which was probably about the worst thing you could possible do to another person. The one that it happened to seems to have just shrugged it off, which I found .. difficult to relate to. All in all these are fairly minor points, and I overall really enjoyed the story.
I love The Culture series and The Culture, and this book gave us a lot more insight into the machine intelligences that run it. It was a face-paced novel set within this amazing universe, and really was very enjoyable. I've been reading the books pretty much in order and Player of Games is definitely my favourite so far, with this a close runner up. On to the next!
This one, "Excession," is a bit further back in time. There's a Big Strange Object out in space, and a number of Culture Minds (who compare to our idea of AI the way a whale compares to phytoplankton) who want to exploit it, and a different group of Minds who want to stop them. If that seems boring, well...these Minds are funny AF as well as being hyper-smart. The inter-ship communications alone are well worth the price of this book. When the Culture's Special Circumstances division (they would -hate- to be called -spies-) get involved, along with an equivalent civilization's exploration fleet, it could mean war, or...maybe something else.
And that's all I can say without spoilers. Read this novel and find out for yourself!
What makes these characters enjoyable, though, is that their culture (as, in effect, de facto protectors of The Culture civilization) feels so human, with dignity, noble goals, ethics, protocols, social norms, and an admirable overall desire to make things better. The fact that The Culture is built on individual freedom, including freedom to do what you will and freedom from the nasty and brutish challenges of illness, physical disadvantages (let alone disabilities), and poverty, makes it easier to root for these "Minds". And the fact that The Culture is not perfect at achieving these goals, especially when it comes to meddling with less advanced civilizations, makes it all the more believable. Otherwise it'd just be too utopian.
There's a mystery at the heart of this novel: A mysterious ship (if it is in fact a ship) that suddenly appears in a corner of the galaxy. Nobody knows what it's about, where it's from, what it wants. But it may have appeared previously long ago. The only thing that's clear is that it's vastly more powerful than the Minds who are the giants of The Culture.
This is a very enjoyable read, and is one of the few novels I've read that I plan to read again.
Top reviews from other countries
Difícil não associar os Afrontes com Klingons (ou guerreiros vikings) e acabar gostando deles... Um reflexo de parte do que nós somos.
Que filme não daria!
Con personajes bastante sarcásticos, una buena dosis de humor negro y en general bastante agradables, si es que un poco bidimensionales.