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Book: Excession
Quotes of Book: Excession

Iain M. Banks _ Excession
An Outside Context Problem was the sort of thing most civilisations encountered just once, and which they tended to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encountered a full stop. The usual example given to illustrate an Outside Context Problem was imagining you were a tribe on a largish, fertile island; you'd tamed the land, invented the wheel or writing or whatever, the neighbours were cooperative or enslaved but at any rate peaceful and you were busy raising temples to yourself with all the excess productive capacity you had, you were in a position of near-absolute power and control which your hallowed ancestors could hardly have dreamed of and the whole situation was just running along nicely like a canoe on wet grass . . . when suddenly this bristling lump of iron appears sailless and trailing steam in the bay and these guys carrying long funny-looking sticks come ashore and announce you've just been discovered, you're all subjects of the Emperor now, he's keen on presents called tax and these bright-eyed holy men would like a word with your priests. That was an Outside Context Problem; so was the suitably up-teched version that happened to whole planetary civilisations when somebody like the Affront chanced upon them first rather than, say, the Culture.
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Iain M. Banks _ Excession
Two hundred and thirty-three thousand times the speed of light. Dear holy fucking shit. The Yawning Angel thought there was something almost vulgar about such a velocity. Where the hell was it heading for? Andromeda?
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Iain M. Banks _ Excession
The Culture had a problem with the Affront. The Affront had a problem with the Culture, too, for that matter, but it was a pretty plain thing in comparison; the Affront's problem with the Culture was simply that the older civilisation stopped it doing all the things it wanted to do. The Culture's problem with the Affront was like an itch they couldn't scratch; the Culture's problem with the Affront was that the Affront existed at all and the Culture couldn't in all conscience do anything about it.
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Iain M. Banks _ Excession
SPADASSINS DIGLADIATE! ZIFFIDAE AND XEBECS CONTEND! GOL-IARD DUNKING! Slogans, signs, announcements, odours and personal greeters vied for attention, advertising emporia and venues. Stunning 'scapes and scenes played out in sensorium bubbles bulging out into the centre of the street, putting you instantly into bedrooms, feast-halls, arenae, harems, seaships, fair rides, space battles, states of temporary ecstasy; tempting, prompting, suggesting, offering, providing entrance, stimulating appetites, prompting desires; suggesting, propositioning, pandering. RHYPAROGRAPHY! KELOIDAL ANAMNESIS! IVRESSE!
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Iain M. Banks _ Excession
Still guarding against threats and possibilities even it found difficult to specify, some of the Culture's stored warvessels were harboured not in or around highly populated Orbitals full of life and the comings and goings of cruise ships and visiting GSVs, but in places as far out of the way as it was possible to find amongst the cavernously cold and empty spaces of the great lens; quiet, secret, hidden places; places off the beaten track, places possibly nobody else even knew existed.
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Iain M. Banks _ Excession
Genar-Hofoen found himself wondering again about the trade-off between skill-honing and distraction that took place in the development of any species likely to end up as one of those in play in the great galactic civilisation game. The Culture's standard assessment held that the Affront spent far too much time hunting and not nearly enough time getting on with the business of being a responsible space-faring species {though of course the Culture was sophisticated enough to know that this was just its, admittedly subjective, way of looking at things; and besides, the more time the Affront spent dallying in their hunting parks and regaling each other with hunting tales in their carousing halls, the less they had for rampaging across their bit of the galaxy being horrible to people}. But if the Affront didn't love hunting as much as they did, would they still be the Affront? Hunting, especially the highly cooperative form of hunting in three dimensions which the Affront had evolved, required and encouraged intelligence, and it was generally - though not exclusively - intelligence that took a species into space. The required mix of common sense, inventiveness, compassion and aggression required was different for each; perhaps if you tried to make the Affront just a little less enraptured by hunting you would only be able to do so by making them much less intelligent and inquisitive. It was like play; it was fun at the time, when you were a child, but it was also training for when you became an adult. Fun was serious.
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Iain M. Banks _ Excession
The black bird Gravious made to settle on her shoulder; she shooed it off and it landed flapping uproariously on the edge of the opened trap door. 'My tree!' it screamed, hopping from leg to leg. 'My tree! They've - I - my - it's gone!' 'Too bad,' she said. The sound of another great tumble of falling rock split the skies. 'Stay wherever it puts me,' she told the bird. 'If it'll let you. Now get out of my way.' 'But my food for the winter! It's gone!' 'Winter has gone, you stupid bird,' she told it.
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Iain M. Banks _ Excession
Genar-Hofoen had arrived a few days after the end of Tier's annual Festival. There was an air of autumnal desuetude mixed with high-summer torpor about the place when he arrived; people were cleaning up, calming down, getting back to normal and generally behaving themselves. He'd signalled ahead and succeeded in booking the services of an erotroupe as well as reserving a garden penthouse in the View, the best hotel on Level Three.
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Iain M. Banks _ Excession
It wasn't a finite supply of promiscuity he was draining, it was an ever-replenishing fixation that was eating up his potential for future personal growth.
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Iain M. Banks _ Excession
{I agree we cannot yet bruit our suspicions abroad; there probably never was a proper moment for that, but if there was, the war has negated its relevance},
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Iain M. Banks _ Excession
He walked along Street Six, in the heart of Night City Tier. There were Night Cities throughout the developed galaxy; it was a kind of condominium franchise, though nobody seemed to know to whom the franchise belonged. Night Cities varied a lot from place to place. The only certain things about them was that it would always be night when you got there, and you'd have no excuse for not having fun.
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Iain M. Banks _ Excession
And suddenly it knew what it had to do.It de-coupled its engine fields from the energy grid and plunged those vortices of pure energy deep into the fabric of its own mind, tearing its intellect apart in a supernova of sentient agony.
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