Excession

Excession is another Iain M Banks culture novel and again like the others it is a fresh story with in the same universe. This book starts with a prologue of a perpetually pregnant women’s day to day life being mildly disturbed. Then Banks proceeds to jump from character to character with no apparent link to join any of them. This cleverly draws you in as intrigue for one character causes you to read, and begin to care, about others. Before you know it you will have raced through the first half of the book with its gentle and easy to read style powered by your own willingness to know how each part of the story develops.

The anomaly that draws the attention as the focus of this story is what the culture have labelled an excession, something external to the culture’s knowledge or technology. Although it does nothing and very little information can be gathered about it the entire universe takes note, even those who don’t appear to be taking notice of anything.

This book draws the reader in taking you to the zenith of the story leaving you happy and contented with what you have experienced. This is like many of Iain M Banks’ novels it well worth a read. As it is a good story while still engaging your mind with subtle social commentary easily ignored in today’s society but unobfuscated in a fictional future.

I hope if you get the chance you will take to this book as I have and maybe venture further into Banks’ Culture universe.

Goodbye and good reading.

Ed

Solar

Solar is one of the best selling books of last year and is different for the fact that the protagonist is a physicist, a famous physicist. However unlike a Dan Brown novel the intelligent main character isn't used to solve problems, although he does find an answer to the world's energy problem that is not what the narrative follows. Alternatively it shows the man behind the genius and the troubles that cause him strife.
Even though this is a work of total fiction it feels like you are getting an insight into the mind and life of a burdened soul isolated at the top through a combination of bad decisions and bad luck.
I think this is a very readable book, there is so much to it that is engrossing to discover, hence my lack of elaboration. However, I doubt others will pick it up for the same reason I did, a book about a Nobel prize winning physicist (who could resist). So I urge you to pick it up as it is a compelling story which will keep you reading. So even though it is not the best book I have ever read, which is still Wasp, it is still worth the read.
With that I bid you goodbye and good reading.
Ed

The Player of Games

This book unlike some other Banks novels starts slowly and only hints that something may happen later on in the book. He takes his time developing the main character, a game player, as one who enjoys his own company & whose actions cause his to be seen as neither a good or bad man, just a man.

His talent for games of allsorts causes him to be chosen to be ‘champion’ of the culture society and to go and visit a civilisation that has its basis in a game, to the extent that every year on their home world the game I played in a tournament. Dependent on your finishing position would decide on things like promotions and even to the extent that the winner of the tournament became Ruler. The game player is entered into the tournament to help ties between the two societies however he was never expected to win a game.

Banks uses both societies, the culture a civilisation he uses time and again in his books, and the alien one to draw parallels with our own. Not only showing the good but the bad as well.

This book, although it gives the reader scope to think on the topics brought up within the story the story its self is mediocre and plods along to an abrupt twist with a delivery that the gravitas of it is increased due to the lackluster appearance of the story to that point.

I would say of this book that if you are a Banks fan it will be enjoyed however for newer readers of si-fi to give this one a miss there are better books out there.