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Iain M. Banks' Culture books - cont.


Hello World

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The last thread is archived. I'm currently 170ish pages into Excession and liking it a lot so far. Every time I start a Culture book I immediately think this is my favorite in the series yet. Even though this one is mostly setup thus far.

The only thing I really dislike is the communication in symbols and numbers. It's making me lose focus pretty badly.

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On 25/05/2016 at 2:39 PM, Hello World said:

The last thread is archived. I'm currently 170ish pages into Excession and liking it a lot so far. Every time I start a Culture book I immediately think this is my favorite in the series yet. Even though this one is mostly setup thus far.

The only thing I really dislike is the communication in symbols and numbers. It's making me lose focus pretty badly.

Probably his best sci-fi together with Use of Weapons.

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5 hours ago, maarsen said:

Banks uses the actual definition as set out by physicists; matter that has a opposite charge from normal matter.

I see. I thought it was a complete mystery as far as we know. But how are the drones carrying it around then?

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Love Excession.  Hydrogen Sonata is not as good, but a follow up to Excession in a lot of ways, so would recommend that. 

 

Also so for those that are drawn towards Excession as a favorite in the Culture series, I highly recommend Neal Asher's Polity series. Start with Gridlinked. 

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I think Excession is maybe the most Culture-focused of all the Culture novels. Most of them tend to focus more on outsiders to the Culture and their interactions with it, there's a bit of that in Excession as well but it seems to spend more time on the Minds and showing the inner workings of the Culture than any of the other books. I wouldn't quite rank it as my favourite but I would put in the top 5 of Banks' SF.

6 hours ago, Hello World said:

I see. I thought it was a complete mystery as far as we know. But how are the drones carrying it around then?

I think you may be confusing it with the often-theorised but never discovered dark matter. Antimatter is a much better understood, it has even been made in tiny quantities in particle accelerators.

I can't remember if Banks explained it, but in a lot of SF which uses antimatter they use magnetic fields to contain it and keep it from interacting with normal matter.

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  • 2 weeks later...

I'm 30% into Consider Phlebas and really don't like Horza.  He's too much of a Johnny Goodboy.  He has a near-death experience every 10 pages, and there's never a worry that he won't survive.  When the Culture is on-screen the book is infinitely more interesting.  This series as a whole is spoken of very highly here, so I'll stick with it for a while longer.

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Is there somewhere I can get these in e-book format? Amazon has some of them, but not all. Also, are there any compilations? I hate hunting down five old books and then discovering that there's a single big one that includes all of them.

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I've not read the Algebraist, but I have read the other two non-Culture books; Against a Dark Background, and Feersum Endjinn, which are both pretty good (although Feersum Endjinn can be tough going since about a quarter of it is written as the journal of the massively dyslexic protagonist).

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17 hours ago, Teng Ai Bellerin said:

I'm 30% into Consider Phlebas and really don't like Horza.  He's too much of a Johnny Goodboy.  He has a near-death experience every 10 pages, and there's never a worry that he won't survive.  When the Culture is on-screen the book is infinitely more interesting.  This series as a whole is spoken of very highly here, so I'll stick with it for a while longer.

As others have said it is one of the weaker books in the series, although I think the second half was better than the first.

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  • 4 weeks later...

I had to take a break from reading Excession, unfortunately. I said that it seemed to me the first 170ish pages were setup. Now having continued reading I'm thinking the first 350ish pages are actually setup, and the story only picks up from there. It's all great though...

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