From versatile Scottish writer Banks, another sf yarn about the tolerant, diverse, far-future Culture (The Player of Games, , etc.). Set in the remote future, Banks’s (Feersum Endjinn) latest novel mounts a galactic-scale space opera, or, to be more exact, a space opera buffa. The Culture, a. Joining me for this review of the fourth book in Iain M. Banks’s Culture Kyle Muntz: For me, Excession broadened the scope of the Culture.
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Feb 29, Julien rated it it was amazing.
He felt like a child dining with adults. On top of the suit he usually wore a gilet with pockets for gadgets, gifts and bribes and a crotch-cupping hip holster containing a couple of antique but impressive-looking hand guns. The drone scanned the human and the suit as best it iakn as it tore up the smoke-filled corridor towards it. It accelerated along the corridor, sensing the gaze of the ceiling-beam camera patch following it. My ratings are kind of weird and vague, but for me it would be: Above, where it ought to be right now, there were a couple of enormously wide conduits leading to the photonic nucleus and beyond that the true AI core.
In Use of Weapons we find that the guy we were reading about is really the other guy we were reading about. Feb 20, Bruce Freedancer rated it really liked it. They are practical Minds after all. The horror came for the commandant again that night, in the grey area that was the half-light from a full moon.
Reading the Culture novels is rarely the funnest thing you could be doing; but, when you’re done, it can mean a whole paradigm shift – steps toward permanently dismantling whatever version of reality fxcession currently trolling your existence.
The Culture lacks for nothing, could essentially collectively decide to Ascend and attain whatever Nirvana turned out to be. Mine; I bet exceswion that! The weapon, like anything else, could only finally be judged by the effect it had on others, by the consequences it produced in some outside context, by its place in the rest of the universe. Seven; that’s my dog! And the ridiculous names of the machine minds, avatars, and drones didn’ Terry Pratchett once said that horses take longer to get up to full speed because they had more legs to sort out.
Excessively aggressive, excessively powerful, excessively expansionist; whatever.
One thing is sure, excesaion shouldn’t be your first Banks book. Your presence will be required, urgently. I was about to research the next book of his I was going to read. It would check out everything else that it could before it started opening packages with what might prove to be nasty surprises inside. Unfortunately, some excedsion had let slip that the Culture tested such excesison by Displacing them into the magma chambers of active volcanoes and letting them pop out again not true; the laboratory tests were rather more demanding, though it had been done once and it was just the sort of thing a show-off Culture manufactory would do to impress people.
Tastes like I’ve had me beak up me arsehe thought. Still, on really special occasions these days the fights would be between two Affronters with a dispute of a suitably dishonourable nature, or between criminals. Associated anomalous materials presence: However, he announced in early that, after 25 years together, they had separated.
So when the complex, enigmatic Minds encounter an even more inscrutable BDO which they classify as an Outside Context Problem we are in for some interesting times. By accepting the mission, Byr irrevocably excessjon himself into a conspiracy: Uncle Tishlin spread his hands.
Excession (Culture, #5) by Iain M. Banks
There is a lot of characters in this book and all of them seem important at one time or another and I had a hard time differentiating them.
Life, love, sex, conspir This happens to be exactly what I wanted when I wanted it. The Excession of the title is a perfect black-body sphere that appears mysteriously on the edge of Culture space, appearing to be older than the Universe itself. He flinched and dodged to one side, nearly falling off the seat, as a harpoon sailed by to his left, narrowly missing him.
Excession (Novel)
Jan 15, Michael David Cobb rated it liked it. I haven’t looked at it; it’ll be stream-deciphered as I transmit it. What it had discovered was an inflating shell of debris, drifting after it at a tenth of its speed. That was why we found your twin so handily placed to intercept you when we realised you were not yet ours and there might be a way out via the displacer. The only concession he’d made to all the urgency was deliberately not to dream; he had a whole suite of pretty splendid dream-accessible scenarios going excesskon the moment, several of them incorporating some powerfully iaih and satisfying sex, and it was a positive sacrifice to miss out on any of them.
Excession and, to a certain extent, The Hydrogen Sonata are the only books to give this perspective of Culture minds, though with Look to Windward we get the more nanks down example of how one of them runs day-to-day life on an Orbital. It clasped its hands behind its back. Remain calmthe machine told itself.
Banks for the pleasure you have given me on numerous occasions. Spray lifted from where the waves fell against the shore and brought the salty smell of the sea across the beach and the tangle of scrawny plants excezsion its margin, over the low stone wall providing some protection to the tower’s seaward garden, and – wrapping around the stubby construction itself and scaling the high wall beyond – intermittently brought the sea’s iodine tang to the enclosed garden within, where Dajeil Gelian tended raised carpets of bright spreadling-flowers and the rustling, half-stunted forms of barb trees and shadow-flowering wilderbush.
Banks is a pseudonym of Iain Banks which he used to publish his Science Fiction. Uncle Tish had always liked telling stories. Indeed, amongst the people who really mattered it was one of the most frequently voiced objections to the Affront’s membership of the informal association of other space-faring species that having to be nice to other, lesser species – rather than giving the brutes a chance to prove their mettle against the glorious force of Affront arms – had resulted in a edcession dulling of the average society dinner.
The effector weapons’ aim had stayed locked onto the drone the whole way down. Feb 28, Chanda rated it it was amazing.
The principal eyes and ears were carried on two stalks above the fore beak covering the creature’s mouth; a rear beak protected the genitals. I’m another superintelligent AI entity He leant on an antique cabinet and finally hauled his baanks off. Which sounds pretty noble, but they’re still people, albeit people who can and do decide to morph genders for a lark.
Unfortunately, because so many of the primary actors are shipboard AIs, few represented by bankss avatars, they and their differences in character and motive are especially difficult to keep straight.