Excession

The fifth book in the Culture series, published in 1996, and the one that belongs to the Minds rather than to the humans. An artefact appears that nothing in the galaxy can explain or affect — the Excession of the title — and the novel follows the Culture’s artificial intelligences reasoning, conspiring and messaging each other about what to do, with much of the story carried in machine-to-machine correspondence.

Context: the Culture novel most often pressed on engineers, because it reads like an incident channel for a civilisation: distributed superintelligences with different priors, partial information and no chain of command, coordinating in writing over something none of them understands.

Connections

• a16z Infra Reading List — the list this came from.
• a16z — the firm whose infrastructure team curates it.
• Iain M. Banks — the author.
• The Player of Games — the earlier Culture novel about contests between systems.
• Surface Detail — the later Culture novel where the machines again do the deciding.
• Utopia — the concept the series argues about.
• Technological Innovation — the concept page.