Excession

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Excession is a 1996 science fiction novel by Scottish writer Iain M. Banks. It is the fifth in the Culture series, a series of ten science fiction novels which feature a post-scarcity, interstellar society called the Culture. It primarily concerns the response of the Culture's Minds (benevolent AIs with enormous intellectual and physical capabilities and distinctive personalities) and other interstellar societies to an unprecedented alien artifact, the Excession of the title, and the way in which another society, the Affront, whose systematic brutality horrifies the Culture, tries to use the Excession to increase its power. As in Banks's 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 presided over by benign super-intelligent machines.

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