Excession
by Iain Banks · first published 1996
53% recommend40% neutral7% critical
Why HN recommends it
Space opera set in Banks's Culture, a post-scarcity society run by machine intelligences. It offers imaginative ideas about AI and a vast, optimistic universe, and it is a series favourite.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
Two and a half millennia ago, the artifact appeared in a remote corner of space, beside a trillion-year-old dying sun from a different universe. It was a perfect black-body sphere, and it did nothing. Then it disappeared. Now it is back.
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…Stephenson's "Anathem" - this is absolutely an amazing book for anyone familiar with geek culture and the interplay of academia and industry - anything by Iain Banks (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iain_Banks). "Excession" (http://www.amazon.com/Excession-Bantam-Spectra-Book-Banks/dp...) is good, but the culture series in general is very nice literate approach to imagining a post-singularity scifi future that manages to…
on “Sci-Fi Novels You Should Read” ↗…strongly recommend the audiobooks of Iain Banks work as read by Peter Kenny or Anton Lesser. Absolute genius, the best audiobooks I’ve heard behind Nicol Williamsons The Hobbit. In particular, listen to Excession and The Algebraist. I never tire of the audiobook of the Algebraist, amazing. Anton Lesser reading The Algebraist is the strongest case for why AI should never be used for narrating audiobooks.
on “Why the Culture Wins: An Appreciation of Iain M. Banks (2017; by Joseph Heath)” ↗I'm a big fan of Iain Banks since reading Excession (which still remains my favourite). Also loved Dune, but haven't read any of the sequels yet. I'd also recommend Catherine Asaro's saga of the Skolian Empire to anyone that is into physics/maths.
on “The Best Science Fiction Books (According to Reddit)” ↗Read Iain Banks' Culture novels, starting with The Player of Games and going on with Excession
on “Brian Aldiss has died” ↗Excession. Iain Banks. The culture series explores a universe where machine intelligence has obsoleted mankind, mostly through the perspective of individual people interacting with earlier stage societies. Excession…
on “Ask HN: Which book would you pick to re-read for the rest of your life?” ↗…Nobody has perfect knowledge of their world. All we have are heuristics that work well enough to get by. It’s by definition impossible to anticipate out-of-context events that barge in like the Vogons. Excession by Iain Banks is a fun exploration of this concept. It’s set in his “Culture” universe, where a hybrid human/AI culture enjoys an interstellar empire. Excession imagines that powerful civilization encountering…
on “Show HN: I made a discrete logic network card” ↗Iain Banks already wrote this for you, it's called Excession, and it is even better than you imagine. I'm pretty sure the concept comes up in other Culture Novels but one of the main characters in Excession is the Sleeper Service, a ship which does precisely this.
on “In ‘The Book Against Death,’ Elias Canetti rants against mortality” ↗Iain Banks - Excession - 5 stars and the most optimistic series on AI Dungeon Crawler Card - Not for me but I might give it another chance Bukowski - Post Office - Worth reading, Gen-Z might get triggered
on “Ask HN: What are you reading?” ↗Recently finished Robert Cialdini's Influence: Science and Practice, a great horrifying psychology book. Now I've started Iain Banks' Excession, giving his Culture universe another go. (Player of Games was good, but not great.)
on “Ask HN: What book are you reading right now?” ↗…formatted copy of your book. I assume I could spend a bit more time on this and come up with something better that would keep formatting. I agree that piracy is bad and basically theft (disclosure, I pirated Excession because it wasn't available on Kindle and I knew I wouldn't buy a physical copy and Iain Banks is dead so I don't feel bad). I don't think this post is particularly compelling though.
on “Piracy, Overcoming Gravity, and the Digital Edition” ↗FWIW, the term "neural lace" was coined by Iain Banks. From Excession: One of the exhibits which she discovered, towards the end of her wanderings, she did not understand. It was a little bundle of what looked like thin, glisteningly blue threads, lying in a shallow bowl;…
on “Will This “Neural Lace” Brain Implant Help Us Compete with AI?” ↗https://jango-index.ml/src/ Yeah that's right. I'm back for Show & Tell. Tell first: I've been reading Excession by Iain M Banks again. Not because Elon Musk pays superficial lip service to Iain Banks. Not because of peer pressure among posers to read Excession. Because I genuinely identify with some of the characters.…
on “Show HN: Collecting song metadata from Jango Radio” ↗…of the Outside Context Problem, as a temporary case (the US service personnel eventually left, giving rise to the cult). Iain Banks purportedly coined this term and uses this as the basis of his novel Excession: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outside_Context_Problem#Outsid... Amusingly, Banks also had a ship named Cargo Cult in another Culture novel (The Player of Games).
on “Cargo-culting to success and understanding” ↗…Iain Banks's SF, so I'll skip the ranting, but I'd love to have someone convince me what there is to like. A loved one loves Banks, so I've tried really hard to get it, and I've failed. I recently read Excession and got zero value out of it. Also recently read Feersum Endjin; it was alright, but suffered from the same flaws as other Banks. I did enjoy The Algebraist, though I read it a while ago so it's a bit…
on “A Personal Statement from Iain Banks” ↗…food crisis, one obstacle at a time. Aboriginal Tasmanians survived crisis after crisis for tens of thousands of years, until one arrived they weren't equipped to deal with. Iain Banks would call it an Excession or "out of context problem".
on “The Fertilizer Shortage Will Persist in 2023” ↗