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Excession by Iain M. Banks

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Excession by Iain M. Banks ENTROPY https://entropymag.org Excession by Iain M. Banks Author : Peter Tieryas Liu Categories : Collaborative Review Date : 20-03-2014 by Joseph Michael Owens, Kyle Muntz, and Peter Tieryas Liu Excession by Iain M. Banks Spectra, 1998 499 pages / Amazon / Goodreads If Use of Weapons was a psychological investigation into the world of the Culture, Excession is a philosophical excavation, featuring the AI Minds going to war [JMO: Such a gotdamn great opening line!!]. The Culture have come across an ancient artifact that is “a perfect black body sphere the size of a mountain” and a “dead star that was at least fifty times older than the universe.” Its disappearance and reappearance decades later spurs off a string of events that make for one of the most frenetic, 1 / 7 ENTROPY https://entropymag.org entertaining, and metaphysical science fiction narratives I’ve read. Joining me for this review of the fourth book in Iain M. Banks’s Culture Series are Joseph Michael Owns and Kyle Muntz in our followup to our Use of Weapons review (which was at HTMLGiant). So let me ask first: what exactly is a black body? Joseph Michael Owens: A black body is an idealized physical body that absorbs all incident electromagnetic radiation, regardless of frequency or angle of incidence. A black body in thermal equilibrium (that is, at a constant temperature) emits electromagnetic radiation called black-body radiation. The radiation is emitted according to Planck's law, meaning that it has a spectrum that is determined by the temperature alone (see figure at right), not by the body's shape or composition. Peter Tieryas Liu: I’d say temperature makes for a perfect allegory for the state of mind in this book, especially with the way it delved into the world of the Culture, particularly the Minds. In the first three books, the protagonists were always human and told from their perspective. In Excession, the human arc is secondary to the conversations of the AI Minds as they try to uncover what’s really going on and discover a conspiracy among some of the older Minds of the Culture. What are some of the things you guys enjoyed about Excession? Kyle Muntz: For me, Excession broadened the scope of the Culture universe more than any of the books so far, as well as going in really different directions formally and structurally. It’s a smart book that verges on to metaphysics, that ramps up Banks’s invention even further than he’d taken it before. There’s just an endless amount of cool stuff in this book, but it’s also funny, challenging, and takes its already great premise in a very interesting direction. JMO: I agree with both of you. To emphasize even more what Kyle said, there really is an endless amount of cool stuff, but the thing(s) I liked most were the Interesting Times Gang (ITG), the group of Minds who are sort of . I’m not even sure how to describe them. It’s not like they are in charge because there’s pretty much no hierarchical structure, but perhaps they are the best decision makers among the Culture’s Minds. Plus I think most or all of them have been around since the time of the Idiran War, so there’s a lot of history there. PTL: Excession introduces us to the Affront. They are a particularly savage race “described as a kind of self-perpetuating, never-ending holocaust of pain and fear. Affronter society rested on a huge base of ruthlessly exploited juvenile geldings and a subclass of oppressed females.” And: “They glorified, first and foremost, in their cruelty. Their cruelty was the point. They were not thoughtless.” I kept on thinking of a race of violent aerial octopi. Next to some of the bestial races introduced in the Culture like the Azadians and Idirans, where does the Affront stand for you guys? KM: I think more than any other race introduced in the series, the Affront challenge the Culture’s idea that technological progress is a good thing: it brings freedom, increases quality of life, decreases violence, etc. Instead the Affront, despite being advanced enough the Culture actually have to negotiate them, have used their technology to become one of the most oppressive and cruel species in all of fiction. In that sense they really are an ideological “affront” to the Culture’s way of life (who are based on universal freedom, safety, rights), this sort of terrible blip in the universe. There have been some pretty aggressive races in the series, but I think only the Affront have been completely cruel. Before them, it’s always been races that, you know, have their good and their bad elements. Considering the Affront are aiming to conquer so many other species, I think it explains (at least to a certain extent) why for the first time in the series you have factions in the Culture actually pushing for a 2 / 7 ENTROPY https://entropymag.org preemptive war… which takes the novel into some interesting (and difficult) territory. JMO: Up until this point in the series, the Affront were one of the more compelling races Banks had introduced, though I still think I prefer the Idirans as opponents of the Culture. I think Consider Phlebas made me nostalgic for those guys! Though, like Kyle said, the Affront really challenges the Culture’s way of life in a way probably not seen since the Idirans. PTL: One of the absolute joys of reading Excession was reading all the interchanges between the Minds and finding out how the Culture thinks with their computerized syntax and witty brevity. In terms of pacing, Excession was by the far the fastest page-turner for me in the series. I love the Minds. We also get a glimpse of what the Excession could potentially signify, giving them: “the ability to travel-easily-to other universes… An entire universe would be yours alone. In fact, go back far enough-that is, to a small enough, early enough, just-post-singularity universe-and you could, conceivably, customize it; mold it, shape it, influence its primary characteristics.” We also find out how the Minds spend their time: metamathics. “They imagined entirely new universes with altered physical laws, and played with them, lived in them and tinkered with them, sometimes setting up the conditions for life, sometimes just letting things run to see if it would arise spontaneously, sometimes arranging things so that life was impossible but other kinds and types of bizarrely fabulous complication were enabled.” What would your metamathics universe be like? KM: For sure. I loved the Minds. Earlier in the series, they seem cold, impassive, distant, but for the first time Excession gives us a top-down perspective of how the Culture is run. Plus they’re hilarious when they talk. Excession (and, to a certain extent, The Hydrogen Sonata) are the only books to give this perspective of Culture minds, though with Look to Windward we get the more toned down example of how one of them runs day-to-day life on an Orbital. The thing is: they’re endlessly intelligent and knowledgeable, but also endlessly infused with their own personalities… which is why so many of the oldest ones just spend their time wandering the universe, being eccentric and marveling at existence or whatever. With metamathematics though… I don’t even know. Haha. PTL: My favorite Mind was the Killing Time. He was a badass battle cruiser (Torturer-class Rapid Offensive Unit), but he also felt surprisingly, well, human. Did you guys have a favorite? 3 / 7 ENTROPY https://entropymag.org KM: This is probably too easy, but for me it’s the Sleeper Service for sure. A ship that’s spent hundreds of years filling itself with recreations of historical events, carrying a woman whose kept herself pregnant for hundreds of years? Yes. JMO: Mine is also the Sleeper Service because of the reasons Kyle mentioned, but also because it’d been totally retrofitting itself in case of an impending crisis such as this. It’s cool to think that, as smart as some Minds are, some are even smarter and cleverer still. Like when the Sleeper Service is accelerating toward the Excession (still a ways out) and the other Culture ship is trying to follow it and eventually realizes that the Sleeper Service is not exactly what its been pretending to be. In fact, it’s way more badass! PTL: Byr undergoes a gender change (Mutualing) and becomes a woman, even becoming pregnant. I’ve sometimes joked with my wife that I would love to be her for a day, just to see life through her eyes and understand her better (which I meant). In fact, if I could do this gender change for a short time (“The process was painless and set in action simply by thinking about it), I would probably jump at it just to experience it. Would you guys try it out if it was as easy to switch back and forth as in the Culture? KM: I would for sure. This is a difficult subject to talk about well, but I think a world where the physiological elements of gender were that fluid is infinitely preferable to the one we live in: with its (generally harmful) gender binaries, ideologies, and whole institutions so complex they’re almost impossible to discuss objectively—or even, you know, civilly. I’m not sure what it would mean exactly, but I think it would be better for all of us if gender could be so easily experienced from both sides.
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