
The Interesting Times Gang (ITG), an informal group of Minds loosely connected with Special Circumstances, try to manage the Culture's response to the Excession. The Excession of the title is a perfect black-body sphere that appears mysteriously on the edge of Culture space, appearing to be older than the Universe itself and that resists the attempts of the Culture and technologically equivalent societies (notably the Zetetic Elench) to probe it. In terms of style, the book is also notable for the way in which many important conversations between Minds resemble email messages complete with headers. The book features a large collection of Culture ship names, some of which give subtle clues about the roles these ships' Minds play in the story. As in Banks' other Culture novels the main themes are the moral dilemmas that confront a hyperpower and how biological characters find ways to give their lives meaning in a post-scarcity society that is presided over by benign super-intelligent machines. The book is largely about the response of the Culture's Minds (benevolent AIs with enormous intellectual and physical capabilities and distinctive personalities) to the Excession itself and the way in which another society, the Affront, whose systematic brutality horrifies the Culture, tries to use the Excession to increase its power. It concerns the response of the Culture and other interstellar societies to an unprecedented alien artifact, the Excession of the title.

It is the fifth in the Culture series, a series of ten science fiction novels which feature a utopian fictional interstellar society called the Culture. Excession is a 1996 science fiction novel by Scottish writer Iain M.
