Excession
Two and a half millennia ago, the artifact appeared in a remote corner of space, beside a trillion-year-old dying sun from a different universe. It was a perfect black-body sphere, and it did nothing. Then it disappeared. Now it is back.
Stats for nerds
8recommend
15mentions
15people
2011–2026years
53% recommend40% neutral7% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Iain Banks - Excession - 5 stars and the most optimistic series on AI
Dungeon Crawler Card - Not for me but I might give it another chance
Bukowski - Post Office - Worth reading, Gen-Z might get triggered
- Iain Banks already wrote this for you, it's called Excession, and it is even better than you imagine.
I'm pretty sure the concept comes up in other Culture Novels but one of the main characters in Excession is the Sleeper Service, a ship which does precisely this.
- Heh and farming, even subsistence farming, is at the mercy of weather/climate, animal migration patterns, human labor and thus health…
Nobody has perfect knowledge of their world. All we have are heuristics that work well enough to get by. It’s by definition impossible to anticipate out-of-context events that barge in like the Vogons.
Excession by Iain Banks is a fun exploration of this concept. It’s set in his “Culture” universe, where a hybrid human/AI culture enjoys an interstellar empire. Excession imagines that powerful civilization encountering a phenomenon that is as far beyond them as they are beyond us, or we are beyond the subsistence farmer.
- I strongly recommend the audiobooks of Iain Banks work as read by Peter Kenny or Anton Lesser.
Absolute genius, the best audiobooks I’ve heard behind Nicol Williamsons The Hobbit.
In particular, listen to Excession and The Algebraist.
I never tire of the audiobook of the Algebraist, amazing.
Anton Lesser reading The Algebraist is the strongest case for why AI should never be used for narrating audiobooks.
- Excession. Iain Banks.
The culture series explores a universe where machine intelligence has obsoleted mankind, mostly through the perspective of individual people interacting with earlier stage societies.
Excession explores that higher intelligence interacting with a power they cannot comprehend.
I read that each vacation as a reminder of where I want tech to end up.
- Read Iain Banks' Culture novels, starting with The Player of Games and going on with Excession
