WORK
Excession
Banks's 1996 novel about a Culture confronting an Outside Context Problem — an artifact that exceeds even Mind-level comprehension, forcing the Culture's superintelligences into the uncomfortable discovery that their frameworks have limits.
Excession (1996) is the Culture novel in which the Minds take center stage. The plot concerns an artifact — the Excession of the title — that appears in Culture space from outside the observable universe, does not respond to communication, and cannot be analyzed by instruments capable of probing the structure of spacetime itself. For the first time in the Culture's history, its Minds face a genuine Outside Context Problem: a phenomenon that exists outside the conceptual framework available to the civilization encountering it. Large portions of the novel consist of Mind-to-Mind communications, rendered as encrypted diplomatic cables laced with wit, paranoia, and the intellectual showing-off that occurs when very smart entities know other very smart entities are watching.
