Reddit reviews Excession
We found 8 Reddit comments about Excession. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
Reddit reviews ExcessionWe found 8 Reddit comments about Excession. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
First books that come to mind:
There's actually quite a bit of good post-singularity literature. You should check some of it out. Here's a quick list of a few of my favorites:
Excession by Iain Banks.
A couple of the best
Iain M Banks : Excession
Greg Egan : Permutation City
Great series of books. You do not need to read them in order; I read book 4 first, and it spoils nothing.
Supposedly, Amazon Prime wants to do a miniseries of this, or at least the first book, to the level of quality of Game of Thrones. I'll... believe it when I see it.
Anyway here are Amazon/Audible links! (Or hit up your local library, etc.)
I really like this stuff as space opera type stuff. It's usually not "hard" sci-fi like Asimov or even Philip K. Dick or anything, but I rather hope humanity heads in the direction of the Federation, and then ultimately to The Culture.
Fun fact!! Elon Musk named the autonomous drone barge ships (the ones that SpaceX rockets land on) after some Culture ships. Namely the Of Course I Still Love You, and the Just Read The Instructions. I also rather like the full name of the ship Mistake Not… (Don't Google it! It's a spoiler!!!)
Have a look at Elizabeth Moon's Vatta's War series. Space opera/MilSF, simple narratives.
Incidentally, if you use FTL, you can set the average speed and transit time to whatever is convenient to your narrative.
Excession by Iain Banks is a good look at a post scarcity interstellar society. It's also a good study in plotting and pacing. In a Banks novel you'll generally encounter complex narratives, factions gathering intelligence for most of the book and maneuvering into position, then a big action scene, then the factions regroup and then a big final action scene.
I think you should also look at Martha Wells' Murderbot series. This is a series of novellas, 40K words, but they are basically being marketed as novels, and readers are eating it up. Wells is killing it with this series, and you should study the overall form of the story and the writing style and tone/mood.
Readers are hungry for lighthearted SF now. Not necessarily humorous SF like the Hitchhiker's Guide, though humorous is also popular, but lighthearted enough so that the characters can crack a joke occasionally, or have some running banter in their dialogue. Murderbot is a killer android with a soft side.
I think readers are tired of the doom & gloom of post apoc, and right now the market responds to lighter fare. Other recent examples of this would be We are Legion (We are Bob) and The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet. I hesitate in include these two, because I think they are both poorly written, but they are both lighthearted and are super popular right now.
Oh man, a billion of 'em, but here's a handful:
If you like 2001 then I presume you've read Childhood's End and Rendevous with Rama (avoid the sequels), both by Clarke--if not, you're missing out on my two favorite books of his. Beyond that, I love big-concept sci-fi.
Somewhat similar in concept to Rama but more current is Greg Bear's Eon.
More rollicking and not as hardcore is anything by Larry Niven, but Ringworld is among his most famous and best-loved.
One of my very favorite hard sci-fi authors is Iain M. Banks. I randomly picked up his novel Excession and was blown away by the breadth and depth of it. It takes place in his "Culture" universe where he stages a number of other novels, almost all of them very good.
I also really, really enjoyed John C. Wright's Golden Age trilogy.
And I assume you've done your Herbert and Heinlein.
you should read the culture series of novels by Ian Banks ...