Excession by Iain M. Banks
We had nine participants in the discussion of Excession, the latest “Culture” novel from Iain M. Banks. This hard-to-summarize novel includes elements of romance, political intrigue, and reader misdirection while handling such standard SF tropes as Big Dumb Objects and Artificial Intelligence.
Opinions on this book were mixed. Five of us finished the novel, and the other four didn’t find the book interesting enough to finish. All of us who’d gotten to the end had read Banks before, so we concluded that this book was a poor choice for a reader’s first Banks novel. While Excession‘s plot did not depend on plot elements from other books, familiarity with the book’s setting (“The Culture”)