Books: Excession

[tiredstars]

Some lighter reading now. The other two Culture novels I've read left me with the impression that (spoiler alert) the Culture always wins. The Culture is a tremendously advanced, post-scarcity, civilisation; the most powerful in the galaxy. Excession poses the question: what happens when it encounters something that seems more powerful than it

Comments

[dissident_hope]

I was wondering about whether the Culture had almost reached the pinnacle of achievement/perfection (besides Subliming should that actually be a good idea, & excusing a few bad decisions like the botched interference with the canine-like aliens [I forget their name] that led to a terrible civil war followed by a conflict against the Culture) when I was reading Look to Windward...

Then at the end of the book there's that odd bit where some alien race reanimates that Culture observer who was killed trying to warn them about the attempt to destroy that ringworld, & he finds out it's an aeon since the Culture existed. Doesn't actually say what happened to it though.

After reading a couple of Banks books I've not been overly impressed by his writing style & pacing, though I have been intrigued enough to actually finish the novels. Both the books I've read have had a very labourious build-up to a not entirely satisfying conclusion.

[tiredstars]

I'm still not sure if Look to Windward and Consider Phlebas are atypical books from the series. They're told largely from the perspective of outsiders, people who don't want to fit into the utopia.
I think the conclusion of Windward may be deliberately unsatisfying. You end up asking the same "what was the point of all that?" question that the protagonist might ask. But that is part of the point - to a large extent the characters are pawns, all watched over by machines of loving grace who won't let them harm others or themselves (thus even that observer gets reincarnated... eventually).

Excession is a rather lighter book than either of those. The ending is more conventional, although even in this book the emphasis is kind of skewed from what you might expect.