Reviews and Comments

North gives you a detailed vocab but not really glossary. The Shine, arcspace, the Slow. You work it out, but it’s more disorienting than usual, and it helps with world building.

The technology gets the same treatment, and that’s where many readers will give up. What the Slow actually is, what happened to the narrator at the moments that determined the course his life, none of it is really ever explained. The narrator never really understands it either. He was there. He’s telling you what he remembers.

The revenge takes centuries and comes to nothing much. He lives long enough that the accounting stops making sense. The wrong is still a wrong. There’s just nobody left it means anything to.

I enjoyed this quite a lot. It’s more literary than genre in its aspirations.

Inspired by recent interest in the Ulm School of Design, I went and borrowed this print book from the university library.

Worthwhile and brimming with ideas that speak to our current moment. I’ll have to sit with it for a while before writing a review.

More of a polemical slog than I’d expected.

A re-read, and one that brings home how important this book is in grounding the series in some sense of reality, bureaucracy and the mundane. It’s a necessary second work, handled well.

Charming and original. I want to see more fiction like this!

Hard to describe without spoiling. It has a propulsive style that belies the almost physical senses the words and the text evokes. Wholly original.

A re-read. The first time I read this I was in a deep depression so I recall almost nothing. As a result everything I’ve read so far is familiar and unfamiliar, and deepens the unnerving nature of the text.

My failure to connect with this on rereading may be more about changes to me, and perhaps changes to reading itself in the intervening years. It seemed unnecessarily drawn out and kind of… dull? I hasten to reiterate that I think this reflects on on me than the author or the work. I struggle with books that resemble shaggy dog stories or don’t seem to really be about anything other than the plot. That means there are many narrative forms that are artful that I now feel… alienated from perhaps?

If I have a chance to revisit this again in my life I think my view will change.

Rereading books is an interesting exercise. Books are unchanging. They remind us of their original qualities; what drew us to them. They can never change with us.

Excession is the first Culture novel where Banks gives us much insight into the Minds and the Culture itself. I remember loving this book in the ‘90s, it felt so fresh and original.

Now it seems more like a shaggy dog story. It never gets to the point, if there is a point, and the characters are single-note vehicles for plot alone. I was really disappointed.