#142 in Science fiction
Excession
- 464
- Pages
- about 9 h
- Reading time
- BSFA Award for Best Novel
- Kurd Lasswitz Award for Best Foreign Work
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Our view
“Excession” is the Culture series at its most idea-driven, a big, witty novel in which the machines are the best company. An inexplicable alien object sets the Culture’s vast artificial Minds scheming against one another, and some readers count those exchanges among the funniest in the series. A reader who starts here may be lost among unfamiliar characters and events, so earlier volumes are better read first.
The view of the BookRank editors, written from readers’ ratings and comments. It does not affect the score or the book’s place in a ranking.
About the book
Excession is a 1996 science fiction novel by Scottish writer Iain M. Banks. It is the fifth in the Culture series, a series of ten science fiction novels which feature a post-scarcity, interstellar society called the Culture. It concerns the response of the Culture and other interstellar societies to an unprecedented alien artifact, the Excession of the title.
Reading order · Culture series
Full order & progress →
Where the score comes from
The sources average 8.3 across 374 ratings — not yet many, so the reader vote carries 72% of the weight and the rest pulls toward the Science fiction average of 7.8. That is how 8.1 comes out.
| Source | Average | Ratings | Weight |
|---|---|---|---|
| Open Library | 8.1 | 57 | 15% |
| Hardcover | 8.3 | 317 | 85% |
Frequently asked
How long is Excession?
It has 464 pages — longer than 56% of the ranked books in Science fiction.
In this book
Themes this book shares with others — each leads to the best books on it.
If you liked this
The same shelf — Science fiction — and a score of 8.1, the closest to this book.
