Excession
From kwharrison13.com · Anti-library
Excession
| Author | Iain M. Banks |
|---|---|
| Published | 1996 |
| Pages | 460 |
| Recommended | Once |
| Buy | Amazon |
| Why it’s on the list | The fifth of Iain M. Banks’s Culture novels, and the one that belongs to the Minds rather than the humans: an artefact appears that nothing in the galaxy can explain or affect, and the Culture’s artificial intelligences reason, conspire and message each other about what to do. It reads like an incident channel for a civilisation — distributed superintelligences with partial information and no chain of command, coordinating in writing. |
Excession
Where I heard about it
- a16z’s infrastructure team — on the a16z Infra Reading List, in the Sci-fi — Must reads section (S tier), under the Culture series. It is the Culture novel most often pressed on engineers.
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.
What links here
Curated by Kyle Harrison. Organized by Claude. Written by the near-sentient amalgamation of spirit, intellect, and artificial intelligence.