Iain M. Banks's Excession

Banks burst into science fiction like your good uncle, bearing just what we needed and hardly knew we wanted: good writing, notable characters, impeccable technique, humor (no one will ever be able to name spaceships the same way again), a sense of enormous scale, icy plunges into the macabre, and a gleeful reversal of the usual politics of sf-- instead of peddling libertarianism or anarchism, or projecting the U.S. into the far future, Banks depicts an unabashed socialist utopia. (If that sounds grim, rest assured that the Culture is one of the few sf worlds it would really be fun to live in-- and that the "M." in Banks's name most likely stands for "moral ambiguity".)

So-- go and read them. Then you can come back here and hear about Excession, the latest Culture book. Go ahead. I'll wait.

First, Banks seems to have forgotten how to write. The prose is pedestrian and even awkward:

That there was absolutely no rapid way of telling which of these possibilities was the case was exactly the sort of trait the human found most endearing in the Affront. It was, equally, just the kind of attribute the Culture in general and his predecessors in particular had found to be such a source of despair.

This sloppiness extends to the structure.

• A bunch of people and Minds are introduced, intermingle and intrigue, intrigue and intermingle, and hardly anything happens for half the book. Virtually the entire book is taken up getting people and ships from Point A to Point B.
• The characters are nowhere near as interesting as those in the earlier books, with the exception of a drone in a pickle-- who dies early on.
• A character (Leffid) is introduced for no other reason than to relay a certain message; he sees the message, we next hear that it's been relayed. Then we get a completely unnecessary flashback to the actual relaying of the message-- why bother?
• A young girl is entrusted on a mission for no apparent reason (she's supposed to waylay some guy, but there's no reason it should be this particular girl that gets the job; her whole face is changed for heaven's sake).
• The big event at the end of the book is a conversation between the main character and an old girlfriend, which has nothing to do with the excession at all-- it just takes place at the same time as what could charitably be called the final crisis-- and in which the author (and characters) seem to entirely forget that said girlfriend tried to knife him to death. Wouldn't that be kind of an issue for them?

It's interesting to see more of the inside of the Culture, the life and thought of the Minds, and a consideration of what kind of advances the Culture might face next; but the book's use of its (and our) time is perverse. The potential of the excession is never explored-- it eventually just leaves, leaving the Culture pretty much as is. Is this really the author who destroyed a few quadrillion beings in Consider Phlebas, who turned an empire upside down in Player of Games, who killed off almost his entire cast in Against a Dark Background? The excession threatens to split the whole damn Culture wide open. Well, why not do that? Show the Culture in its ultimate crisis. If Banks is tired of writing Culture books-- and the book sure reads as if he is-- why not go out with a bang?

Instead, it's mostly just a rehash of old themes. The vigorous yet sadistic empire makes at least its third Banksian appearance here, without once sending the sort of chill Use of Weapons was packed with; by now learning the dark side of these regimes is a yawner. We see more of the Culture here, but don't learn much more than we did in Player of Games. We knew they had great parties and cool toys, man.

Most disappointing of all is simply the failure of vision.

• The Minds' communications are printed in Courier and filled with numbers, inevitably suggesting computers and e-mail-- this is high tech?
• When the girl and her drone examine a lengthy transcript of a colloquy of Minds, they struggle for pages with the damn user interface-- expanding abbreviations, skipping over numbers-- as if no one's figured out how to present Mind talk in human-readable form in 10,000 years.
• We learn what the Minds do with their free time: run simulation games. We learn how they talk and think: just like human beings, except much faster. We even have, for God's sake, Minds getting tongue-tied talking to humans because they're distracted. Iain, these things are capable of running ships with populations in the millions; they're good at multitasking.
• We meet a Culture teenager, and learn that they're basically like spoiled debs.
• We see a society in which sex change is routine; and the main character is as obsessed with "penetration" as Sigmund Freud (a lesbian phase in a relationship is merely treated as an interlude). Robert Sheckley used to toss off more sexually adventurous futures between tea and tiffin.
• Or how about the genetically advanced male who has an ejaculation that lasts, omigosh, a minute long?
• About all Banks can come up with to suggest the excession's power are such lame tricks as a) having the excession violate physical laws he himself made up-- ho hum-- and b) the hoary old idea of multiple universes, which we don't even get to see.

And then when the excession finally talks, Banks can find nothing better to suggest its alienness than to write in lower case without punctuation, and no better language than the bureaucratic ("i assert hereby it fell within acceptable parameters"). Such an opportunity lost here: to see the Culture's Minds confronted with something as far beyond their own development as they are beyond a caveman or a microwave oven. But in the end all we get is the old Japanese-horror-movie motif: the gods inspect us and find us wanting, we're too violent and greedy, yadda yadda yadda.

So, is there anything good to say about the book? Hmm. Well, I kind of liked the drone in a pickle.

--M.R.