The Minds realized early on that the universe was too vast to manage as an empire and so respect the many species within their purview to act as they choose, short of declaring war on the Culture. It’s a universe of plenty, run by powerful AI Minds, in which everyone’s needs are met as a birthright, so conventional jobs and money are unnecessary. There will be spoilers in this discussion, but for me the beauty of Banks fiction is not so much the secrets of plot as the richness of imagining a complicated society, surely one of the great creations of science fiction.īanks raises background information to an art form as he explains in Excession several aspects of the Culture. It captures the grandeur of space together with the folly and impermanence of human relationships. The novel has that typically Banksian mix of the bizarre, the near disaster and the comedic. Excession is experimental in many ways, shifting its style from compressed action sequences to baroque complexity as the multi-layered story lines demand.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |