This is the 5th book in the Culture Series, giving us another glimpse at this hyper-advanced society, with its mega ships, super-powerful AIs (the “Minds”), countless alien species, ostentatious lifestyles spent having wild parties (including lots of sex), and remarkable control over the body (including being able to live for hundreds of years, change genders, and “gland” various compounds to enhance mood or performance). This book focuses on a number of sub-plots, although the main one, and the one from which the title is derived, focuses on the appearance of the Excession, a hyper-advanced artifact that seems to have capabilities that exceed even what the mighty Culture can understand.
It’s a fun premise, and it could’ve led to a story where we get to see how all the Minds and alien cultures react to the presence of unimaginable power and knowledge. And while the story delivers on a little bit of that concept, it also veers into countless other sub-plots that seem irrelevant. There’s a weird and largely unrelatable love story; a convoluted tale of a Mind becoming eccentric and using its vast powers to create entire worlds within a ship; a story of a young party girl who is sent on an important mission; numerous threads, presented somewhat like email messages, giving us a glimpse into how Minds interact with each other; an anecdote (it’s so brief, I don’t know what else to call it) of a guy so anti-social, he lives alone inside an asteroid, light years from any other human; and so on.
Just as you start to get into one of these sub-plots, the book jumps to a different one which might not be as interesting, and then to another one, and another one, and so on. The result is that none of the plots are developed fully, none of the characters have enough time to meaningfully grow, and despite there being quite a few interesting elements here, they don’t come together into a satisfying whole.
Which is a real shame. I really enjoyed some of the ideas this book explored, such as the following:
(spoiler alert)
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Mind state extract. When sending messages over vast distances (many light years), where real-time communication is not possible, instead of sending a static, pre-recorded message, you can send a mind state extract, which is like a “snapshot” of a slice of your personality and knowledge, so the recipient can have a conversation with a simulation of you. It’s such a cool concept, with so many interesting implications, but the book uses this technology once, briefly, and then moves on, without delving any deeper.
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Gelfield suit. A suit that conforms to your body, providing protection, life support, and useful services, such as real-time translation. To power all this functionality, the suit requires a built-in intelligence, and sometimes this intelligence can be quite snarky. There are a handful of hilarious scenes with one of the characters bickering with his gelfield suit, but this plot line is also quickly abandoned.
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Mutualling. Not only can citizens of the Culture easily change gender, but they can do so while reproducing. A couple starts with one person as male and one as female, and the male gets the female pregnant. The fertilized egg is then temporarily put in stasis while the couples switch genders, and the new male (who used to be female) gets the new female (who used to be male) pregnant. Then the new male switches back to female, and both of them are now pregnant, and have their babies at roughly the same time. There was so much room here to explore gender and parenting, but like much else, it’s another sub-plot that is quickly abandoned.
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Subliming. The book mentions how previous advanced societies chose to sublime, or to ascend to some sort of higher plane of existence. This raises lots of interesting questions as to what this means, why you might choose to do it, if you would ever choose to come back, and so on. The appearance of the Excession, a hyper-advanced technology from an unknown civilization, raises even more questions around this topic. The book chooses not to explore any of these.
The book has many such unique ideas, and any one of them could’ve been developed into a deep and fascinating story. But instead, each one is used as a neat gimmick, and then the book moves on to something else. This is probably the last book I’ll read in the Culture series—time for me to move onto something else as well!
