Excession by Iain M. Banks

From The Week of October 22, 2012 We can only know what we know. While at first this statement may seem ridiculously obvious, it holds deeper truths. For while it is easy enough to confront a difficult problem and recognize that we lack the knowledge or the expertise to solve it, it is much harder to predict the manifestation of problems we cannot solve. For to predict such problems, we must be able to understand both our world and our universe much better than we do now. Only through understanding can come proper anticipation of the unknown. And even then, well, can anything short of a god perfectly anticipate the future? How should a society act when confronted with an unanticipatable problem, especially if it is an existential one? Should it attack it with vigor, or study it in hopes of future understanding? Mr. Banks speculates in one of the most thoughtful of his Culture novels.

Spanning much of the galaxy, the Culture is a multi-special, interstellar civilization of trillions of souls spread across thousands of worlds, orbital habitats and interstellar spacecraft. Governed by machine Minds that have in part transcended normal space, thus circumventing the laws of physics that apply to our reality, it is a post-scarcity, post-human, post-national collective driven and organized by a single primary purpose, the preservation and the protection of all forms of life, providing them a peaceful environment in which to acquire knowledge, experience pleasure and generally live as they choose. It is a utopia with teeth, a construct capable of defending itself and the egalitarianism it believes in.

However, a recently discovered anomaly threatens that existence. An object in space orbiting a dead star that appears to be older than the universe, Excession is, at best, a paradox. At worst, it is an incursion from another universe, another reality. It is what the Culture calls an Outside-context problem, a challenge it couldn't have predicted. With no planning in place to deal with such a problem, the Culture dispatches members of its Special circumstances division, a dirty tricks squad, to investigate, but foes of the Culture are aware of the existence of this mystery and they are determined to use it against their enemies. Time is short and the galaxy may well hang in the balance. For one, no one can anticipate the future.

Though at times burdened by wayward musings, Excession is a worthy and even gripping successor to the trio of early Culture novels that made Mr. Banks a master of speculative science fiction. Animated by alien environments, fatalistic humor, violent races and existential questions, it fuses together the funny with the macabre to create a typically British amalgam that startles as much as it entertains. Mr. Banks' characters here are as they ever were, interesting but ultimately disposable, a means to the end of his thought experiment. For in the Culture, no one man, one Mind, or one thing can save the galaxy. It cannot even save the Culture. Events are too broad, depend upon too many players, for a handful of individuals to change the fates of billions.

Instead, Mr. Banks deploys his characters as windows through which his readers can view key events in the history of the Culture, that most enviable and yet cloying of positive, galactic futures. For what else can be so simultaneously enriching and yet boring, so enlightening and yet numbing, than a civilization that requires nothing from the individual but to exist only as he sees fit? And yet, there is no outcome for our species more nobler than the one the Culture represents. It is a fascinating dichotomy.

Mr. Banks can, at times, overwhelm us with the vastness of his mindspaces. However, the degree to which they prod us to conceive of problems and possible futures prevents his work from ever slipping beneath the radar of the worthwhile. (3/5 Stars)