Excession – Iain M. Banks

Well, shit.

I didn’t like this. Really, not at all.

This is the fifth book in the series, but also the first one that was not a kind of reread for me. I was looking forward to it immensly, and this made the disappointment even greater. I read a digital copy on my kobo, and really my lasting memory of it is occasionally glancing at the progress bar at the bottom and wondering when the fuck something of note was going to happen. A lot of smaller things happened, but for me at least they failed to ever add up to a significant whole.

The book is supposedly about a mysterious object, older than the very universe itself, discovered by the Culture. But there is also a race of sadistic aliens whose domination of other races (and memebers of their own species) must be stopped. There are also two characters who have a love affair, and this last plot thread seemed comepletly out of the other ones. The human characters are thinly crafted, and the Minds of the culture (the artificially intelligent ships really running the civilization) all read exactly the same, and most of their conversations were really boring.

Science-fiction is hard to write. The challenge comes a bit from the misconception that it is a genre of fiction that is about ideas. Olaf Stapeldon wrote science-fiction that is just about ideas, and it is genuinely awful writing. Good fiction writing often centers about a human experience. Sure, one could say that 1984 is about a totalitarian state, but what the reading experience really creates is an opinion about a totalitarian state as illustrated by showing how a singular individual is ruined and forced to submit to said state. The book is titled Excession, and from what I knew of the plot before reading it, I supposed it was going to be about that human reaction to encountering the unknowable. That would have made for a better human-experience centered story. As it were, I have no idea what I read.

Particular loathing goes out to the epilogue, where the Excession reveals who it is and what its purpose is. It left me with that awful sense of a punch line in search of a story.

I will get around to Inversions, and probably the rest of the titles in the series. But I think a little break is in order.