The Culture is Iain M. Banks's Yoknapatawpha County, except with hyper-intelligent AIs, immortality, and miles-long sentient space ships that can store tens of thousands of slaved battle drones, as well as fully fledged gas giants, within their walls. The problem is that in an intergalactic paradise where material needs can be instantly provided, conflicts are hard to come by. As a result, as I noted in my review of Banks's previous Culture novel Use of Weapons, "it is at the fringes of the Culture--where comparatively primitive societies still desire to be autonomous--that Banks writes the most interesting Culture stories."

Excession breaks this trend, taking place almost exclusively within the jurisdiction of the Culture itself. Moreover, unlike Consider Phlebas, Banks's first Culture novel and one that similarly took place in Culture space, the events in Excession primarily center around the most ordinary bits of the Culture: its orbitals, its super-ships, and so on. Furthermore, again unlike Consider Phlebas, which recounted a hunt for a fugitive Mind during a major and unprecedented war, Excession takes place during an otherwise ordinary time of peace.

No wonder, then, that to create a story Banks has to introduce something else into his novel, an event so huge, so mind-boggling, that it can galvanize a society where conflicts are typically resolved by allowing everybody to win. That something is the eponymous excession, which in the parlance of the Culture means "something excessive. Excessively aggressive, excessively powerful, excessively expansionist; whatever." Two and a half thousand years ago, a Culture ship encountered a star that, to everybody’s disbelief, seemed to be almost a trillion years old, fifty times the age of the universe. Orbiting the impossibly ancient star was a perfect black-body sphere fifty kilometers across that sensors could not penetrate but that otherwise seemed completely inert. Three years later the star and the black sphere vanished. Now a frantic message is being broadcast to the AI Minds that control every Culture space ship: after 2,500 years, the inscrutable black sphere has returned.

Banks has never had trouble coming up with big ideas. The Excession (as the black sphere is quickly dubbed) is just the latest. And its spontaneous manifestation in the book galvanizes not just the Culture but also the plot: the awesome weirdness of the Excession holds the reader’s interest even as Banks flits from one character to the next, laying out the background from which he will jumpstart the next stage of the book.

Unfortunately, the Excession is the only big idea that Banks offers. For an author known for his thrilling, over-the-top action scenes and outrageously extravagant ideas, there is a surprising paucity of pretty scenery or even mere excitement in Excession. The result is a story that is remarkably thin, at least by Banks’s standards.

Excessiontantalizes more than it fulfills; it promises big things but ultimately only gives us a fairly weak conspiracy tale surrounding an enormous McGuffin. I would have been pleasantly surprised reading Excession if it had been written by another author; from Banks, though, I was vaguely disappointed. For a novel about an Excession, in a Culture of excess, Excession ends up feeling ironically--and fatally--constrained.

Copyright © 2003 Steven Wu