The first four Culture books were space operas of the planet-focused persuasion. The stories featured plenty of ships and plenty of Minds inside them, but the majority of the action and the entirety of the focus were on events taking place on planets or Orbitals. The gaze of Excession (1996), on the other hand, is aimed straight up and out. For the first time in the history of the Culture, Excession presents us with the transcendental view, with spacescapes seen from the perspective of the godlike, and the panorama is vast. “Vertiginous shifts in scale are Banks’ specialty,” Faren Miller wrote in her Locus review of the novel. “If you can hang in there without getting too horrendously dizzy, Excession will satisfy on many counts and levels, even (at last) the cosmic” (1996, 27). Miller’s parenthetical statement is telling—that “at last,” whose feel of delayed satisfaction points to Banks’ long-awaited decision to finally break his starships out into the great beyond.
Reading Excession is a joy. The novel soars on a giddy combination of descriptive grandeur, linguistic complexity, purposeful chaos, constant deconstruction and reconstruction of the space-opera template, exciting action, plenty of explosions, grand vistas of impossible things, and finally gargantuan ships—which means Minds, because this is a novel that the Minds and the vessels they control can inhabit without claustrophobia. Space is open to Minded sight, nearly transparent before the gaze of AI. Excession has the same vast canvas and the same basic plan—to deconstruct space opera and rebuild it in a new shape—as Consider Phlebas, but the hand that controls the process, deft and purposeful where before it had been somewhat uncertain of itself, has finally put into play the only entities capable of bringing home to us the true scope of the Culture universe—capable, that is, with the assistance of “that staple of SF: a mysterious artifact” (Miller 1996, 25–27), whose appearance triggers the onset of what the Culture terms an Outside Context Problem:
The usual example given to illustrate an Outside Context Problem was imagining you were a tribe on a largish, fertile island; you’d tamed the land, invented the wheel or writing or whatever, the neighbors were cooperative or enslaved but at any rate peaceful and you were busy raising temples to yourself with all the excess productive capacity you had, you were in a position of near-absolute power and control which your hallowed ancestors could hardly have dreamed of and the whole situation was just running along nicely like a canoe on wet grass … when suddenly this bristling lump of iron appears sailless and trailing steam in the bay and these guys carrying long funny-looking sticks come ashore and announce you’ve just been discovered, you’re all subjects of the Emperor now, he’s keen on presents called tax and these bright-eyed holy men would like a word with your priests [71–72].
This description of the nature of an OCP was inspired by the long hours Banks spent playing Civilization on his computer. “That’s where the idea of Outside Context Problems came from partly,” he said in an interview with SFX magazine. “You’re getting along really well and then this great battleship comes steaming in and you think, ‘Well, my wooden sailing ships are never going to be able to deal with that.’ But when I started Excession I deleted Civilization off my hard drive” (Branscombe 1996b, 25). The idea remained, however, and while Banks introduces it into the story with a degree of playfulness, it still casts a sizeable real-life shadow—we are reminded here of Columbus’ triad of sailing ships outside San Salvador in 1492, of Commodore Perry’s ironclads suddenly appearing off the coast of Japan in 1852, and of the many versions—some landlocked—of the same scenario that played out across the surface of the Earth between the end of the 15th century and the beginning of the 20th.
And the Culture is now staring at an Outside Context Problem from a pier on the island, not from the deck of the dreadnought. This OCP comes in the form of “a perfect black-body sphere fifty clicks across” (67), impenetrable to sensors, sentient, not hostile despite taking over a few overly inquisitive ships (17–26, 111, 367–370), and capable of establishing connections with the twin realms of hyperspace existing beside our normal realm of space-time that the Culture can’t but would very much like to learn how to, mostly because the sphere might well be a door to all the other universes generated by the singularity at the heart of creation (on the other hand, if the sphere truly were a door it would probably swing both ways, so something extraordinarily powerful could come in through it; 114–116). As far as almost everyone in the galaxy knows, this sphere is unlike anything found anywhere ever, which is one of the reasons why the first Culture ship to happen upon it, the General Contact Unit Fate Amenable to Change, issues an Excession notice as soon as it realizes what it’s looking at—“Excession; something excessive. Excessively aggressive, excessively powerful, excessively expansionist; whatever” (93). Thus goes the Culture’s definition of such an artifact, and an Excession almost always represents an Outside Context Problem.
But as usual, Special Circumstances knows better. That’s not the first appearance the Excession has put in: twenty-five hundred years before the beginning of the events in the novel, the Problem Child, an early-model GCU, found an identical object in another corner of the galaxy, in that case resting right next to a star that appeared to be around a trillion years old (about fifty times the age of the known universe; 65). Like its distant cousins in the novel’s present, the Problem Child couldn’t penetrate the sphere with its sensors, and soon after it had to leave to rendezvous with a General Systems Vehicle for repairs—the GCU’s engine had been damaged by what looked like an attack, although from where and of what kind no one could say. When the expedition mustered up to study the object and the star arrived at their position it found nothing whatsoever, and over the following centuries the Problem Child and every member of its crew—drones and humans—completely disappeared. Within a century and a half of the encounter, there was nobody left to talk to (68).
Now the Excession is back, though, and SC has an ace up its sleeve. It recruits a Culture human by the name of Byr Genar-Hofoen to talk to the personality construct of the Problem Child’s Captain, a woman named Zreyn Tramow.1 This recently discovered personality construct, the only remaining witness of that long ago encounter, is stored onboard the General Systems Vehicle Sleeper Service, with whom Genar-Hofoen shares a painfully tangled past (70–71). At this point, the recipe for a rollicking space opera is almost complete: there’s the strange artifact and the great cosmic mystery its existence implies, there’s danger, there’s opportunity, and there’s a hero with a difficult past. We only need a villain, which the novel duly provides along with the hero: at the time of his recruitment into the SC scheme, Genar-Hofoen is serving as Culture ambassador to a young, brash civilization called the Affront. Take your basic Dalek and give it the sense of humor of a mob enforcer; surround its entire body with a mass of long, leg-thick tentacles capable of crushing a compact car in their embrace and, for purposes of buoyancy, put a gas sac on top of the whole ensemble; then give the thing a vicious beak for a mouth and two sensory stalks, have it talk like a Viking who went to college against his will, make sure it breathes an atmosphere made up mostly of nitrogen, and voila: an Affront (29). Abandoned unfeasibly early in their evolution by their patron civilization’s Subliming about a century after the end of the Idiran War, the Affront were left “joyfully off the leash and both snapping at the heels of the local members of the Culture’s great long straggling civilisational caravan wending its way toward progress … and positively savaging several of the even less well-developed neighbouring species which for their own good nobody else had yet thought fit to contact” (167). Now, four centuries after the Affront’s abandonment and five centuries after the end of the Idiran War,2 the Culture has taken over the duties of chaperon, and in those four hundred years it has persuaded its reluctant charges to more or less abide by the general rules of good conduct accepted by every advanced civilization in the galaxy—until the Excession. Sensing an opportunity to increase their throw-weight in galactic affairs, the Affront exploit a chance encounter in the vicinity of the Excession to claim it as their discovery and therefore their property, ordering all other civilizations to stay away from their prize, and since the Fate Amenable to Change is still staring at the Excession after finding it well ahead of them, the Affront end up going to war against the Culture (283).
By this point in the novel, we’ve already known for a good long while that we’re once again in an M-Banks space opera. Nothing is what it seems. First of all, Banks indicates at several points in Excession that the Affront are no more a threat to the Culture than the Empire of Azad was (96–99, 167, 289, 433–436). They don’t have any Minds, their habitats are essentially license-built—and poorly so—copies of Culture habitats, and their ships are old: they rattle horribly and make noises when they travel, they smell bad because they leak (143), and the engines even suffer regular malfunctions (138). Secondly, Genar-Hofoen is yet another discontent-in-paradise very nearly in the Jernau Gurgeh mold, which is why he has lasted almost two years in his ambassadorial post to the Affront homeworld whereas none of his predecessors could manage to stay longer than a hundred days (170). And it’s not just Genar-Hofoen: every other significant Culture character in Excession, flesh sentients and Minds alike, is some sort of self-determined outcast, singular individual, or person responsible for guilty, stress-ridden instances of gothic behavior. There’s Dajeil Gelian, for example, the woman with whom Genar-Hofoen had a disastrous liaison forty years before and the reason why he and the Sleeper Service don’t get along. For four decades now, Dajeil has been living inside the Sleeper Service, her unborn child kept in a state of arrested development along with everything else in her life. Even the environment the GSV has constructed around her functions as a stasis chamber: it’s a perfect copy of the place where Dajeil’s relationship with Genar-Hofoen had come to its bad end—a clumsy, heartbroken attempt at homicide on Dajeil’s part when she discovered that Genar-Hofoen had had sex with someone else; the attempt failed, mostly because Dajeil didn’t really have the heart for it, but it did cost the life of the fetus Genar-Hofoen, at that time a woman, was carrying (3–12, 353–355). Then there’s Ulver Seich, a voluble young woman who lives on Phage Rock, one of the oldest Culture habitats. Phage traces its origin all the way back to the birth of the Culture nine thousand years before, and Ulver traces her own ancestry back to one of the Rock’s founding families fifty-four generations ago (104–105). In a determinedly egalitarian, non-hierarchical society like the Culture, Ulver comes as close as anyone ever will to being aristocracy, and now Special Circumstances has shown an interest in her—she has to waylay Genar-Hofoen at some point during his travel to the Sleeper Service for reasons SC doesn’t clarify (125–127).
The minds are no different. The Sleeper Service has been a lone wanderer for forty years, absorbed in its private obsession of creating great tableaux of famous artworks, historical scenes, and battles through the use of stored people as props (with their permission, of course; 79–87). Classified as an Eccentric (a Culture term used to describe oddball ship Minds), it is part of the Culture Ulterior, a catch-all description for former bits and pieces of the Culture that have now gone their own way but still retain relevant similarities to their parent civilization (171), and the only beings onboard who are both alive and aware are Dajeil, the GSV’s avatar, and a sentient bird called Gravious. Some other ships with similarly odd temperaments are the Medium Systems Vehicle Not Invented Here, which most Culture observers believed had been destroyed toward the end of the Idiran War (124), the Eccentric Shoot Them Later, belonging to a group within the Ulterior called the AhForgetIt Tendency (119), and the GCU Grey Area, “the ship that did what the other ships both deplored and despised; actually looked into the minds of other people, using its Electro Magnetic Effectors … to burrow into the grisly cellular substrate of an animal consciousness and try to make sense of what it found there for its own—usually vengeful—purposes. A pariah craft … a virtual outcast amongst the great inclusionary meta-fleet that was Contact” (70–71).3
Every one of those characters is therefore a vehicle for the occasionally stressed internal dialogue of the Culture as a critical utopia. The Sleeper Service is a loner that doesn’t talk to any other ship and doesn’t host any kind of population, while the Grey Area is a pariah because it has traded Contact’s carefully gauged and excruciatingly triangulated intervention models for the most brutal of approaches—direct plundering of the contents of biological brains. Genar-Hofoen and Dajeil Gelian were involved in a relationship that ended in a way that would horrify any Culture citizen, and each bears the marks of their shared past: Dajeil lives in a frozen moment, halted in time through guilt and fear of the future, alone except the visits she receives from Amorphia, the GSV’s avatar; Genar-Hofoen, on the other hand, is an exile of sorts, separated from his people more by his liking of the Affront than by the distances intervening between Issorile, the Affront’s home planet, and the nearest Culture Orbital. Even his thought processes are more Affront-geared than feels comfortable to the average Culture person or Mind, and his views on the evolutionary path his civilization has chosen represent a definite departure from the norm:
Genar-Hofoen liked [the Affront] … he had never really subscribed to the standard Culture belief that any form of suffering was intrinsically bad, he accepted that a degree of exploitation was inevitable in a developing Culture, and leant towards the school of thought that which held that evolution, or at least evolutionary pressures, ought to continue within and around a civilised species, rather than—as the Culture had done—choosing to replace evolution with a kind of democratically agreed physiological stasis-plus-option-list while handing over the real control of one’s society to machines [170].
But while Genar-Hofoen likes the Affront enough to want to receive an Affronter body inside which he can download his consciousness when he feels like it (63), the vast majority of Culture people and Minds regard them with undisguised horror: “[The Affront] had discovered at a relatively early point in their development how to change the genetic make-up of their own inheritance … and that of the creatures with whom they shared their home world. Those creatures had all, accordingly, been amended as the Affront saw fit, for their own amusement and delight. The result was what one Culture Mind had described as a kind of self-perpetuating, never-ending holocaust of pain and fear” (168). Affront society is based on the exploitation of two large underclasses: juvenile geldings and females, the latter exposed on a regular basis to legal rape on the part of practically every male so disposed. The Affront have even altered the females’ genetic makeup to make the act of sex at once less pleasurable and more painful, and in much the same way they have tweaked the neuroreceptors of the fauna on Issorile to respond with a rictus of terror to the mere sight or smell of Affront males, thus making the hunts of which the Affront are so fond more of a sport as the prey, mad with fear, attempts progressively crazier evasion and escape ploys. “Progress through pain” is a common Affronter motto (168–169).
From the outset, the standard Culture viewpoint found the Affront so appalling that at the end of the Idiran War a number of Minds had argued that the problem they posed could easily be solved with a quick, overwhelming strike. At the time the Culture was at its military zenith, so the war materiel was far from lacking, and in the long run, those Minds had argued, it would be for the good of all concerned—including the Affront themselves (166). But the Culture as a whole, always determinedly peaceful, had had no intention of returning to war to conduct an intervention with dubious moral foundations. It had dramatically scaled down its warship complement, stored a tiny amount of it just in case, and its citizens had gone back to enjoying themselves and helping others through Contact and SC (166).
So the problem of the Affront has remained, and along with it the remnants of the preemptive-strike argument that had foundered a few centuries before. But now that the Excession has reappeared the Affront have stirred again, claiming it as their own and trusting that it’ll give them the edge in the war they self-terminally declared against the Culture. They also trust their new ally, the Mind in control of the Culture Rapid Offensive Unit Attitude Adjuster, and the Attitude Adjuster trusts the other Minds involved in the conspiracy to entrap the Affront into entering a war they can only lose.
Excession is a space opera, but it’s also the story of a conspiracy—and because the existence of a conspiracy by its very nature invites belief in the existence of other conspiracies without providing proof to substantiate that belief, the novel becomes self-determinedly tangled into a web of mysterious relationships that the purposefully complex writing style only makes tighter and more mysterious. The argument for a short punitive war, it turns out, had never died down, and the Minds that had originally advocated it have, for the past four hundred years, been biding their time and waiting for the right opportunity. When the Excession appeared, that opportunity beckoned: upon being notified of the artifact’s discovery on the part of the Fate Amenable to Change, a quorum of legendary Minds from the days of the Idiran War takes over the investigation. Calling themselves the Interesting Times Gang, those Minds have two objectives: first, to investigate the Excession and the Outside Context Problem it likely represents, and second to make sure no overly adventurous civilization tries to use it as a weapon (116–124). But inside the ITG there’s another gang, a smaller group of Minds that call themselves nothing at all and have arranged for the Affront to become that overly adventurous civilization. The Attitude Adjuster is their errand boy, their executor in allowing the Affront to capture Pittance, one of the warship storage spaces the Culture had set up after the Idiran War, and tricking the Minds inside those warships into thinking that the Culture is under attack from the Excession and that the Affront are allies (294–296)—all so that the Affront will trigger their own annihilation once the Culture mobilizes in full.
So the Affront, heartily horrible and appallingly violent as they may be, are the victims of entrapment, while the Excession just stands there in space, waiting for nobody knows what and not really being much of an Outside Context Problem. Thus, when we peel away the layers of plot Banks has put in front of our eyes to deflect our attention, the real antagonists in Excession are revealed to be the Culture Minds involved in the conspiracy, a conspiracy whose very existence paradoxically owes to one of the Culture’s most cherished beliefs:
Your own thoughts, your own recollections—whether you were a human, a drone, or a ship Mind—were regarded as private. It was considered the ultimate in bad manners even to think about trying to read somebody else’s—or something else’s—mind…. Thanks to that taboo, everybody in the Culture could keep secrets to themselves and hatch little schemes and plots to their hearts’ content. The trouble was that while in humans this sort of behavior tended to manifest itself in practical jokes … with Minds it occasionally meant they forgot to tell everybody else about finding entire stellar civilisations, or took it upon themselves to alter the course of a developed culture everybody already did know about… [66].4
This is one of the bad dreams nestling inside the hopeful good works of the Contact and Special Circumstances sections, because any single ship of the power of, say, the Sleeper Service could ravage entire star systems if left to its own devices.5 Also, as the narrative points out immediately after the passage quoted above, this idea inevitably leads to the next logical deduction, which is even more uncomfortable: what if this has already happened, and to the Culture itself? What if one single Mind, or a quorum of Minds working in concert, had one day seen fit to change the Culture’s shape and, through the kind of overpoweringly skillful manipulation godlike AIs are capable of, brought that change about without anyone else noticing? The question is ultimately unanswerable with one hundred percent certainty, but there are failsafes one can put in place: other conspiracies, benign where the others would be malign, hidden not so much from the average Culture citizen but rather from the conspiracies that aim at hiding from the average Culture citizen. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
The Culture wouldn’t be the Culture if it didn’t worry about such things on general principles alone, and in the case of Excession there really is a conspiracy among the watchmen, which is why the narrative becomes increasingly focused on exposing and stopping those Minds before real war breaks out, as well as figuring out how the large cast of characters the novel has thrown at us fits into it. In that, Banks is gleefully unhelpful: the plots and sub-plots cascading from the two main foci in the storyline—the Excession’s Outside Context problem and the Affront’s… Inside Context Nuisance—weave in and out of each other’s path in a bewildering dance of events and personalities, all of them paraded before our eyes without obeisance to a narrative hierarchy; flesh sentients and Minds are introduced to us with an intensity of description that makes us believe they are relevant additions to the plot and then disappear, die, or walk out on us after five or ten pages, while seemingly secondary events remain with us with surreptitious doggedness, shadowing the reader’s progress through the story like bloodhounds.6 And then again, some characters that died or seemed to have completed their arc come back at the end, improbably but slightly plausibly because this is space opera (we have the technology).7 And of course, this absence of a clean plot deployment only heightens the suspicion that secret engines of change have already whispered themselves into motion and spread their agents everywhere.
The end result is the cognitive overload Faren Miller warned the reader about in her Locus review. Essentially, Banks wrote Excession like an Excession—excessively baroque, excessively described, excessively imaged, excessively secretive in a strangely easily forgivable way, and argued excessively lightly for a story featuring not only conspiracies, but also and more relevantly a species like the Affront. If we look at the characteristics of Affront society, we’ll soon see that they are a fairly close approximation of the dynamics operating in the Empire of Azad from The Player of Games—exploitation, rape, violence, social inequality, eugenic fixing of whole sections of the population, and so on. The reason why the Affront don’t come across to us readers in the same way as the Azadians is because of the way the narrative addresses them: the transcendent viewpoint that comes into play with the shift from a mostly planet- or Orbital-based plotline to a space-bound one telescopes our perspective away from the terrible intimacy of dystopia’s internal machinery and toward a historicized perspective that focuses on the civilizing process itself. If Consider Phlebas was a sort of Saving Private Ryan to classic space opera’s The Longest Day, Excession is The Hunt for Red October, a realpolitik-infused whodunit set against the background of a threatening galactic war that retains the deconstructive characteristics of Phlebas while at the same time managing to pay obeisance to the kinetics of the classical form. There are no scenes in this novel that even come close to the horrors Gurgeh witnesses on Azad—but there could have been if Banks had decided to zero in on them.8 Instead, this is an example of Excession’s main narrative tone, specifically regarding the Culture’s handling of the Affront:
Whatever; in the end, with a deal of arm and tentacle twisting, some deftly managed suitable-technology donations (through what the Affront Intelligence Regiment still gleefully but naïvely thought was some really neat high-tech theft on their part), the occasional instance of knocking heads together (or whatever anatomical feature was considered appropriate) and a hefty amount of naked bribery—woefully inelegant to the refined intellect of the average Culture mind—their tastes generally ran to far more rarefied forms of chicanery—but undeniably effective) the Affront had—kicking and screaming at times, admittedly—finally been more or less persuaded to join the great commonality of the galactic meta-civilisation; they had agreed to abide by its rules almost all the time and had grudgingly accepted that other beings beside themselves might have rights, or at least tolerably excusable desires (such as those concerning life, liberty, self-determination and so on), which occasionally might even override the self-evidently perfectly natural, demonstrably just and indeed arguably even sacred Affronter prerogative to go wherever they wanted and do whatever they damn well pleased, preferable while having a bit of fun with the locals at the same time [167].
This is one single period occupying fully half of a page, and chances are that the breath will grow short in the reader’s lungs while he/she struggles, entertained but to an extent cyanotic, to get to the end. There’s a slightly Dickensian feel to the rhythm and the tone of the writing, unworried and chummy in the way of a historian discussing their subject matter over a cup of tea and some biscuits—or, as Farah Mendlesohn puts it, “it is as if someone had just dropped Jane Austen’s Emma into the middle of a battle” (Mendlesohn 2008, 559).9 But at other times the speed and tone of the narrative change dramatically, shifting into clipped descriptives and short bursts of prose aimed at, for example, putting us in the middle of a Mind’s thoughts while it’s engaged in battle or absorbed in calculations of its own—a good example is the paragraph describing the Rapid Offensive Unit Killing Time conducting a raid on the Affront-controlled fleet of Culture warships (396–399), or the segment following the GSV Yawning Angel’s frantic thought processes as it tries to keep up with the Sleeper Service when the other ship suddenly breaks away from its surveillance (236–248). Either way, both metaphorically and physically, we are light-years above the direct witnessing of sentient suffering that the kind of society the Affront have constructed inevitably promotes, and we need this lofty viewpoint if we are to retain our sense that this is, as Banks intended, a sprawling, determinedly chaotic, high-energy comedy—and not just a comedy in the strict sense of the term, because in that sense The Player of Games is a comedy as well. No, this is a story meant to make us happy despite the doubts, to orbit over the critical utopia’s self-correcting machinery without ignoring it, and to utilize the status of the Culture as the good guys to make things go as unproblematically well as a writer with Banks’ inclinations was ever likely to allow them to go. And the key to that outcome is embedded in the novel’s very language.
In a recent article on Excession, Farah Mendlesohn seizes on the convolutions of the plot and the shifts in narrative style as the two principal tools that, in her view, transform the novel into a deconstructionist/reconstructionist romantic comedy. We have already seen some of the decon/recon aspects of Excession, and Mendlesohn provides others: the seemingly order-less succession of writing styles, she points out, “works beyond the red herrings, the politics, the joy of bodies that change shape, immortal intellects, and the sardonic humor of ships. One is struck by the sheer effrontery of Banks’ reconfiguration of the space opera and his playful use of language. Against extravagant scenery and epic scale, the choice of modes and moods differs for each section of the novel. This is where Banks’ revisioning of what space opera is takes place” (2008, 559). Thus, the parts of the story focusing on Dajeil’s forty-year exile inside the Sleeper Service unfold slowly and unhurriedly while those involving Genar-Hofoen move quickly, packed with dense quantities of information. When Minds think, the narrative deploys over whole pages to illustrate reflections that take those Minds less than a second to formulate, while the passages describing such exotica as hyperspace and the energy grid that underlies the universe alternate between the prosaic and the sublime to achieve an oddly pleasing effect both of rhetorical deflation and intellectual stimulation (Mendlesohn 2008, 560; Banks 1996, 271).10 The Excession, on the other hand, spends the vast majority of the novel doing nothing at all besides providing everyone with an excuse to go nuts, and during those long pauses the narrative treats it like something of a wet firework, but the few times the artifact shifts into action the language used to describe such action falls on the page like the step of a titan:
But the Excession had changed; it had re-established its links with the energy grids and then it had grown; then it had erupted…. This was something incarnated in the ultimate fire of the energy grid itself, spilling across the whole sweep of Infraspace and Ultraspace and invading the skein as well, creating an immense spherical wave-front of grid-fire boiling across three-dimensional space…. It was like the energy grid itself had been turned inside out, as though the most massive black hole in the universe had suddenly turned white and bloated into some big-bang eruption of fury between the universes … [417–418].
In similar fashion, the thought processes of the Culture’s Minds—which after the Excession and the Sublimed are the most powerful entities in the galaxy—are presented to us in an internalized third-person voice of great clarity and complexity, surpassingly strange in the narrative’s constant reminders that ideas occur to those entities in a minuscule fraction of the time it takes us to read about them—so much so, in fact, that at times dealing with us meatbrains becomes frustrating: “Look at these humans!” the Mind of the GSV Yawning Angel rages in the silence of itself while the ship tries to speed up departure from an Orbital to catch up with the absconding Sleeper Service. “How could such glacial slowness even be called life? An age could pass, virtual empires rise and fall in the time they took to open their mouths to utter some new inanity!” (245). But the most estranged—and intellectually most interesting—representation of the Minds’ thoughts are the communications from ship to ship that knit the novel into shape in the same way they eventually tie together the secrets of the conspiracy. Those communications are “configured as computer code, emulating the package transmission that relays emails from node to node, varying in rhetorical mood” (Mendlesohn 2008, 563). As an example, here is part of the exchange between the Limited Systems Vehicle Serious Callers Only and the Eccentric Shoot Them Later in the wake of their reception of the Affront’s declaration of war:
[stuttered tight point, M32, tra. @n4.28.882.4656]
xLSV Serious Callers Only
oEccentric Shoot Them Later
It’s war! Those insane fucks have declared war! They’re mad!
∞
[stuttered tight point, M32, tra. @4.28.882.4861]
xEccentric Shoot Them Later
oLSV Serious Callers Only
I was about to call. I just got the message from the ship I requested around Pittance. This looks bad.
∞
Bad? It’s a fucking catastrophe!
∞
Did your girl get her man?
∞
Oh, she got him all right, but then a few hours later the Affront High Command announces the birth of a bouncing baby war. The ship Phage sent to Tier was standing a day’s module travel away; it decided it had better things to do than hang around on a mission it had never been very happy with even from the beginning. I think the declaration of war came almost as a relief to it….
∞
But it was demilled. Hasn’t it just gone back to Phage for munitioning?
∞
Ha! Demilitarised my backup. Fucker left Phage fully tooled. Phage’s own idea, sneaky scumbag. Always was over protective. What comes of being that geriatric I suppose [286].
And so on, for five pages of tight dialogue parsed by the infinity symbol that separates the ships’ voices from one another.11 By the time we read this exchange, we have already been through enough signal sequences to understand at least part of the nomenclature’s meaning (the “x” means “from” and the “o” means “to,” for example), but just to be on the safe side and just so that we’ll have the chance to enjoy parsing Mind-talk—the joy of cognition rising out of estrangement—Banks includes in the story a human-friendly copy of the signal sequence in which the Interesting Times Gang first appears; this copy contains a reading key that clarifies every element in the code used by the Minds to communicate to each other (108–123). The overall effect of this level of cognitive access, supplemented by descriptions of the realms of thought within which Minds exist all the time—the concept of Metamathics, for example, which the Minds call The Land of Infinite Fun (138–141)—is to let us experience the breadth and beauty of the possible and deliver the sense of wonder typical of classic space opera even from within Banks’ deconstructive/reconstructive left-wing project. We soar above creation, and it doesn’t really matter that the wings we’re using are borrowed from someone else.
The Excession’s role in this deconstructionist/reconstructionist structure is to act as a Rorschach test for all the characters involved in the story, and as a mirror for their actions. Its very appearance seems to trigger every involved civilization’s id: the Culture grows compulsively cautious and starts hatching a whole number of contingency plans (conspiracy included), the Affront beat their chests and attack, and the Zetetic Elench, to which two of the ships taken over by the Excession belong, grow rabidly curious. The Elench are an offshoot of the Culture that aims at a result in its dealings with others that is diametrically opposite to the one their parent society strives for: while the Culture wants to remain roughly the same and change those societies it encounters and judges in need of alterations, the Elench want to encounter other societies so that those societies can change them (87–89)—hence their proclivity for often dangerous curiosity. And as far as mirroring goes, this is exactly what happens. Part of a civilization of ultimate change-seekers, the Elench ships Peace Makes Plenty and Break Even receive from the Excession an extreme form of their wish: they get taken over. The Culture, on the other hand, is exceedingly cautious in everything involving contact with others, especially others who might become Outside Context Problems, which is why the Fate Amenable to Change spends the whole novel resolutely not contacting the Excession aside from a formal greeting at the outset. In response, the artifact does the same thing: nothing. When, however, the Sleeper Service arrives in the area speeding at an absurdly high FTL factor, the Excession mirrors its aggressive approach and explodes out towards it. But as soon as the GSV slows down, so does the Excession (417–431). And it’s probably a good thing the Affront’s hijacked fleet of Culture warship doesn’t arrive anywhere near it before the conspiracy is unmasked and their burgeoning war is brought to a halt.
Thus, the Excession seems like something of a red herring. Usually, the mysterious artifact in any space opera constitutes the single most important plotline in the story; its arrival and subsequent actions fundamentally change the world and, secondarily, allow the other characters to play out their personal dramas within a context that’ll grant them a resolution they might otherwise have been denied. In Banks’ novel, however, the Excession changes nothing fundamental in the galaxy’s physical condition, and the characters whose trajectories in the plot seemed intimately tied up with it—Genar-Hofoen, Ulver Seich, Dajeil, and the Sleeper Service—turn out to have been set in motion with completely different objectives: the Sleeper Service is a deniable weapon, its Eccentric status a convenient mask for its true role—a faithful member of Special Circumstances that, for forty years, has been preparing for the onset of the conspiracy to entrap the Affront. The GSV is the failsafe, the conspiracy hidden from the conspiracy. Some Minds in SC knew that the anti–Affront movement was still alive, and planned for it by having the Sleeper Service fake Eccentricity and spend those forty years building an enormous fleet of semi-sentient warships. At the end of the story, the GSV deploys this fleet, comprised of nearly ninety thousand units, and the Affront surrender along with some of the conspirators—others, like the Affronter commanding the detachment that had taken over Pittance as well as the Minds of the Attitude Adjuster and of the Not Invented Here, take their own lives (436–437).
Genar-Hofoen, for his part, was never meant to talk to Zreyn Tramow’s mind-state; in fact, that mind-state is not even on board the Sleeper Service anymore. The reason he is there is that the Sleeper Service itself requested his presence, which is the stage at which, as Farah Mendlesohn pointed out, the decon/recon comedy becomes a romantic decon/recon comedy. Forty years before, it had been the Sleeper Service that had made it possible for Genar-Hofoen and Dajeil to ignite their ill-fated romance; the GSV had played matchmaker and the relationship had ended terribly, and the Mind feels partly responsible for that outcome. Therefore, it wants them to mend ways and return to active, happy lives instead of the stasis (partial in Genar-Hofoen’s case, total in Dajeil’s) that has characterized the past forty years in their separate existences—“it is the classic triangle of the romance novel,” Mendlesohn writes (559).12 Ulver, for her part, is a supernumerary: in the dialogue quoted above, when the Shoot Them Later asks the Serious Callers Only if its girl got her man, it was Ulver and Genar-Hofoen the Eccentric was referring to. Knowing about the conspiracy and erroneously suspecting that Genar-Hofoen must have been playing some part in it, the Serious Callers Only had arranged to have her activated and sent to intercept him (388–396).
But the ultimate lack of a neatly dovetailing resolution doesn’t mean that the characters involved in this crazy, shaggy-dog, rambling, giddy, romantic-deconstructionist-reconstructionist galactic-conspiracy-theory romp don’t get the ending they deserve: Genar-Hofoen resumes his post on Issorile, now equipped with an Affront body to wear when he does the town (445). Dajeil gives birth to a daughter she names Ren, and the two of them, along with a revived Zreyn Tramow and Gestra, a resurrected Culture man who had been killed at Pittance, are on board the Sleeper Service, now on its way to Leo II (448–451). Ulver returns to Phage, her friends, and her busy social schedule with a pleased nod from SC, and the bird Gravious goes with her. The Affront, after getting their collective noses slightly bloodied in the standoff at the Excession’s location, are behaving better than usual, and the Culture … well, the Culture is its usual self—busy, happy, and hedonistic except for the remaining Minds in the Interesting Times Gang, some of whom are wondering what the Excession was all about now that, in the wake of the events triggered by its arrival, it has again disappeared without a trace. Some are speculating that it was some sort of trial or test, which the Culture and the other civilizations failed, while still others are quietly happy it’s gone and taken with it whatever might have come out of it if its intentions had been hostile (445–447).
The great Minds are thus left wondering, and so are those flesh sentients among their ranks who witnessed at least part of the events in the story. We readers, however, receive a reward of our own: aside from a tiny paragraph illustrating the happy state in which the three ships that went with the artifact currently exist (“They looked around, in the midst of an undreamt splendour”; 448), the last word in the novel belongs to the artifact itself, which talks to us in a Joycean stream-of-consciousness data-dump voice:
call me highway call me conduit call me lightning rod scout catalyst observer call me what you will i was there when i was required through me passed the overarch bedeckants in their great sequential migration across the universes of [no translation] the marriage parties of the universe groupings of [no translation] and the emissaries of the lone bearing the laws of the new from the pulsing core the absolute centre of our nested home all this the rest and others i received as i was asked and transmitted as i was expected without fear favor or failure … [455].
Thus the artifact continues to talk to us, announcing its function as a gateway through and from other universes (and therefore making both interpretations of its nature correct), describing the events in Excession as it saw them, and declaring that, as far as the universe it has just finished visiting is concerned, the civilizations living there are indeed not ready to receive what it brings—and yet something in those events must have either pleased or struck it as interesting because, at the very end of its communication, it declares that
in recognition of the foregoing I wish now to be known hereafter as the excession
thank you
end [455].
And so ends the novel as well. The Excession was a meta-universal General Contact Unit, and like the Arbitrary with Earth, it decided against contacting for the time being (it describes the environment it just left as “chaotic”). This is one thing the critical utopia of the Culture will never know, although some of its Minds suspect it, and this “secret” ending is ultimately one of the reasons that give Banks’ Culture stories the agency to keep questioning their own setup. There are larger forces at work out there, and they’re more grown up than even the Minds can imagine.
In her article, Farah Mendlesohn describes Excession as “the most classic, the most archetypal in its revisioning of space opera; the most ambitious in its portrayal of a complex political society; and the most successful in its linguistic display and reconfiguration of the space opera baroque and in the immersive techniques of extrapolative fiction” (557–558). This comment captures the twin qualities of familiarity and experimentation that characterize this novel, qualities that are impossible to separate from one another because both are embedded in the text at the same time and in the same words. The voice of classic space opera is still audible as a structured basis for the creation of suitable special effects, but this basis is surrounded by a network of signifiers that, displacing the old connections to the old signified, rebuild the template of the subgenre in the same breath that unravels it. Also, Ken MacLeod awards Excession the status of first truly cutting-edge Culture novel, his argument being that the long years elapsed between the writing of the first four Culture stories and their publication “made them subtly dated before they were published … there is no nanotech in them. Their great AIs, the Minds, are essentially mainframes. The personal access devices are even called terminals. There are no networks. (These deficiencies are more than made up in Banks’s later work, notably the data-dense, baroque Excession)” (MacLeod 2003, 41). And the experiment does work; we can enjoy this new strange creature to whose birth Consider Phlebas ends up acting as midwife. Excession is a comedy not because it ignores the issues that previous Culture stories had made central—it doesn’t—or because its various members have stopped critiquing it from within—they haven’t. Excession is a comedy because its author wrote it in a series of linguistic registers that allow it to skate on the thin, creaking surface of the threshold that separates despair from happiness, disaster from reprieve, and suffering from contentment, and take us all the way back home with it, safe despite the close call. Among all the Culture stories, Excession is possibly the funniest and certainly the most joyous, designed to give us a feeling of soaring impossibly fast into clean space, of describing swift power-orbits over ferocious gravity wells, free and happy and unfettered—just like Culture people. In the end, this is the novel that more than any other welcomes us into the Culture as honorary citizens.
Something strange happened between the publication of the hardcover edition of Inversions in 1998 and the appearance of the paperback edition in 1999: a “Note on the Text” disappeared. Here it is:
This Text, in two Parts, was discovered amongst the Papers of my late Grandfather. One Part concerns the Story of the Bodyguard to the then Protector of Tassasen, one UrLeyn, and is related, it is alleged, by a Person of his Court at the time, while the other, told by my Grandfather, tells the Story of the Woman Vosill, a Royal Physician during the Reign of King Quience, and who may, or may not, have been from the distant Archipelago of Drezen but who was, without Argument, from a different Culture. Like my much esteemed Grandfather, I have taken on the Task of making the Text I inherited more comprehensible and clear, and hope that I have succeeded in this Aim. Nevertheless, it is in a Spirit of the utmost Humility that I present it to the Society and to whoever might see fit to read it.—O. Derlan-Haspid III, D. Phys, OM (1st class), ESt, RS (hons) [1].
Both Faren Miller in Locus (20) and David Langford in SFX (108) mentioned this note, but within a year it was gone.13 Aside from this omission, the hardcover edition and all subsequent softcover editions are identical, but none of the softcovers contain the note.14 In the absence of any comment from either Banks or his publisher, Orbit, on the deletion of this passage,15 the reason for it can therefore only be speculated upon; the likelihood is high, however, that it had something to do with giving the game away at the outset.
In the SFX interview quoted earlier in this chapter, Banks had commented that Excession’s large non-human cast represented, in his view, “the upper limit of human non-involvement; I don’t think I’ll ever write a novel in which humans are less involved. In the next one I think they’ll be more clued up” (Branscombe 1996b, 25). And this is exactly what happens: Inversions is set on an unnamed planet and among civilizations just past the medieval stage, and it contains no clues as to when in the timeline of the Culture it takes place—it’s the only Culture story that doesn’t provide them. Not one word in the novel issues from a non-human character, and no Minds or drones or anything more advanced than a musket appears on stage—with a few quiet, crucial exceptions. “With Inversions,” Banks said, “I wanted to go back to something on a more human scale than Excession, and I wanted to give an answer to a question no one’s ever asked: what the Culture actually does to other societies—how they intervene successfully? It comes down to ensuring that useful people survive, and problematical ones ‘disappear’” (Brown 1998, 55).
Readers unfamiliar with the Culture series should not pick Inversions as their introductory text; they would miss the clues distributed throughout its length. Seasoned readers, on the other hand, would hugely enjoy putting those clues together to finally, at the end of the narrative, arrive at the revelation that Inversions is a Culture novel in disguise, a glimpse of utopia from the viewpoint of those civilizations that, like 1977 Earth, don’t rank as mature enough to know there are gods in the sky but that, unlike 1977 Earth, could do with some helping along. The two central characters in the story are from the Culture, but neither tells his/her tale—that is left to two other characters, both of whom are native to the planet so that their view of the events they narrate is devoid of perspective. Both characters are utterly ignorant of the true shape of the sky, and neither ever knows better, but we will if we piece the evidence together correctly—which is where the probable reason for deleting the note on the text comes in. It’s those few words just past the middle of the passage: “from a different Culture.” Banks tried to hide the significance of that last word by having the writer of the note capitalize every noun (as the German language does), but either he or someone at Orbit felt that the trick wasn’t enough, and that the word was too glaring a giveaway to really give expert Culture readers a run for their money. So away the note went, which is a shame because it provided an added layer of storytelling to a narrative that is signally savvy about its status as a story—everyone is a narrator in Inversions, everyone possesses part of the truth but never the whole, and everyone is aware of the performative aspect of their role as storytellers. Together with The State of the Art, Inversions is perhaps the most openly metafictional of all Culture narratives.
The story is divided into two seemingly parallel but ultimately connected narratives. These narratives amount to a clean total of twenty-four chapters, to which we should add the note on the text, a prologue, and an epilogue. Each of the twenty-four chapters is headed by its number in the sequence, by the title “The Doctor” or “The Bodyguard” (depending on the narrative), and by the stylized image of a dagger, black ink on white paper; each narrative unfailingly alternates chapters with the other. O. Derlan-Haspid’s grandfather, Oelph, who also tells one of the two stories, writes both the prologue and the epilogue. In the prologue, a now elderly Oelph reflects on the events of many years before and on the figure of the Doctor, now long gone. “Did she leave us better off or not?” Oelph asks rhetorically. “I think, undeniably, better. Did she do this through selfishness or selflessness? I believe that in the end it does not matter in the least…. That was another thing that she taught me. That you are what you do. To Providence—or Progress or the Future or before any sort of judgment apart from our own conscience—what we have done, not what we have thought, is the result we are judged by” (6). In the prologue, besides writing a foreword to his own chronicle of the time he spent with the Doctor, Oelph also provides the introduction to the second narrative, which he found by chance and which he believes fundamentally complements the Doctor’s (6).
Chapter 1 opens the story of Doctor Vosill, personal physician to King Quience of Haspidus, and a young Oelph tells it. Besides being Vosill’s assistant, he is also a spy for a man he only identifies as “Master” until the end of the novel (7), which is why he is writing the Doctor’s narrative in the first place. Vosill has come to the attention of King Quience through her sheer ability as a healer, and while he favors her she enjoys a position of disproportionate influence for someone who is (1) a foreigner and (2) a woman. Oelph himself comments on the immodesty that prompts he Doctor to “[pay] flawless lip service to the facts of life which dictate the accepted and patent preeminence of the male … with a sort of unwarranted humor, producing in us males the unsettling contrary feeling that she is indulging us” (11). Vosill’s very skills in treating the King further damage her popularity: when Quience made her his personal physician, he displaced a number of hopeful male doctors who are now busy vilifying her, citing her foreign provenance and her gender as damning flaws in and of themselves (and the King’s vociferous insistence that no doctor other than Vosill will lay a single hand on him helps her in no way whatsoever; 41–42). The nobles, for their part, simply rationalize their prejudices as requirements of statecraft, maintaining that she must be a spy and maneuvering to get her into the hands of Nolieti, the King’s chief torturer (10–17). Led by the elderly Duke Walen, those nobles particularly resent Vosill’s closeness to the King, suspecting—correctly—that her mouth is whispering novel ideas in Quience’s ear while her hands take care of the rest of his body (101–102, 260–265).
The second narrative begins with chapter 2. It’s the story of DeWar, bodyguard to the Protector UrLeyn of Tassasen, and its narrator does not provide any information as to his/her identity, deciding instead to “tell the story after the fashion of the Jeritic fabulists, that is in the form of a Closed Chronicle, in which—if one is inclined to believe such information of consequence—one has to guess the identity of the person telling the tale” (21–22). The narrator’s motive for doing so, he/she tells us, is to allow us to judge the merits of the events described in DeWar’s story without the perceptive distortions that the revelation of his/her identity would generate. Thus, immediately after this introductory interpolation, the section of Inversions that tells DeWar’s tale becomes a false third-person narrative, very much in the fashion of The Player of Games but without the earlier novel’s regular reminders that we are in fact listening to the voice of a character in the story. After telling us that we won’t get to know who he/she is, the narrative “I” leaves us for good.
Here we have the first of many inversions by which the novel is characterized (like The Player of Games and Use of Weapons, Inversions is a polyvalent title): Oelph is an exceedingly scrupulous observer and correct chronicler of the Doctor’s story. He constantly addresses his Master directly, carefully circumscribing his own level of agency with respect to the Master’s greater status. He never glosses over details or fails to attribute actions and words to the right source, and if he wasn’t there to witness something he references in the text, he is careful to point out how he came by the information. Despite his naïveté and at times excessive obsequiousness, Oelph is bright, likeable and, with the exception of deceiving the Doctor concerning his other task (and even that is done more out of a sense of gratitude to his secret employer than out of genuine desire to dissemble; 17–18), honest with everything and everyone, including himself. When he discusses Vosill, it is with an earnest, frequently faltering equanimity not in the least damaged by those lapses—because he immediately acknowledges them in tones clearly indicating long before his eventual confession (270–275; 324) that he has fallen in love with her. Oelph is an intellectual and a scholar, in short, and an honest one at that. As such he cherishes the qualities that are necessary to perform the job; obfuscations of the truth or willful mistakes of attribution would horrify him.
The narrator of DeWar’s tale, on the other hand, is Oelph’s opposite, first hiding behind a storytelling convention and then switching to a fake third-person narration whose ring of truth we can neither verify nor, paradoxically, shake. His/her claim that the reason for the telling of DeWar’s story is love of the truth, and that too many mendacious versions of this tale have spawned themselves, is therefore suspect. Also, this narrator admits that the story we are about to read is only a small portion of a much larger story whose real nature remains essentially unknown (22).
More inversions: if Doctor Vosill, the foreign woman from the faraway “archipelagic republic of Drezen” (46), is trusted by no one in the realm of Haspidus, DeWar, the foreign man from Mottelocci (a small principality in the so-called Half-Hidden Kingdoms; 95), trusts no one in the Protectorate of Tassasen.16 The one works to save lives while the other works to extinguish them, although both perform their duties to keep their respective societies’ rulers alive. Both have travelled extensively before settling down in their present positions, but while the Doctor ranges far and wide across Haspidus to heal the poor and miserable as well as the rich and comfortable (37–40, 47–54, 72–79), and to teach the fundamentals of modern medicine to recalcitrant male chauvinist doctors (162–167, 236), the bodyguard remains firmly in one place—wherever the Protector is, which means mostly in palace in Tassasen. In short, Vosill is proactive while DeWar is reactive.
All around the Doctor and the bodyguard, the world is changing. An unspecified number of years before, a great meteor shower fell from the sky and annihilated the old empire that had until then been controlling the territories of half the planet. Now, in the aftermath of the fall, a number of young kingdoms, new republics, balkanized remnants of the empire, and a few preexisting realms—Haspidus among them—are vying for control of the recently vacated lands (38–39, 56–58, 63, 88–89, 100), and all eyes are on the conflict in Landescion, where numerous baronies have formed and congregated to oppose Tassasen’s claims to their territories (23–24). Protector UrLeyn, whom the nobles and the kings of the realms surrounding Tassasen fear because he became the Protector by killing the last King and instituting a new, Cromwellian form of government (Miller 1998, 20), is about to go to war, and more than one assassin has already tried to eliminate him before he can do so. DeWar, as a consequence, watches and waits. And worries.
Gradually, clues begin accumulating to indicate that neither Vosill nor DeWar is quite from around there. The Doctor keeps a diary in which she writes in three different languages: Haspidian, Imperial, and another one that Oelph cannot decipher and has never seen before—neither has anyone else, and as it later transpires, it is not Drezeni (9, 267–269). She knows enough of the world that she can minutely correct the most recent maps, to the considerable annoyance of the nobleman who presented them to the King (139–140). She seems immune to poisons (16), recovers from hangovers astonishingly quickly (292), and is in possession of transcripts of two conversations that she could not possibly have witnessed or even overheard (110–114, 171–175). In both cases, those conversations develop in some length Duke Walen’s plans to have Vosill handed over to Nolieti for questioning, and when Oelph comments on the copy of the first transcription, which he has carried out for his Master, he declares himself convinced that it represents a real conversation although he is at a loss to explain how Vosill came by it (114). Also, there’s something strange about the blunt, worn, utilitarian-looking dagger the Doctor carries with her at all times—it doesn’t look like much of a weapon and its grip is missing many of the semiprecious stones it had once carried (70), but its description is strongly reminiscent of the stylized image that begins every chapter, and Vosill tells Oelph that those missing stones “were used to good effect. Some bought protection in uncultured places” (71). And whatever protection they bought, it still surrounds Vosill: when, one day, two of Oelph’s fellow assistants spy the Doctor bathing naked in a stream and decide to rape her, they don’t even get to take the first step in her direction—something as invisible as it is powerful knocks them both unconscious (242–245).
DeWar, on the other hand, does not seem to possess any particularly strange qualities, know indecipherable languages, or have especially sensitive ears. He is a storyteller, though. Throughout the text he diverts Lattens, UrLeyn’s young son, with fables about a faraway place suspiciously called Lavishia, “a magical land where every man was a king, every woman a queen, each boy a prince and all girls princesses. In this land there were no hungry people and no crippled people” (89).17 Also, in Lavishia everyone is as beautiful as they choose to be, and although they can have any amount of riches many choose to have nothing; there are no wars, no famine or pestilence, and no taxes. People can fly on invisible wings, and when they want to travel to the suns they use ships with invisible sails. There are also giants and monsters, although they’re all “very nice giants and extremely helpful monsters” (89–90, 126–127, 227).
If the above makes Lavishia sound rather like the Culture, DeWar’s description of what the people of that country do with their time dispels any lingering doubt:
Sometimes the citizens of Lavishia would discover whole groups of people who lived a bit like the wanderers … in their own land, but who did not have the choice of living like that. Such people lived like that because they had to. These were people who hadn’t had the advantages in life the people of Lavishia were used to. In fact, dealing with such people soon became the biggest problem the people of Lavishia had [90].
Among the many Lavishian citizens who worry about the fate of those poor peoples are two cousins—a boy by the name of Hiliti and a girl by the name of Sechroom. They are best friends, having grown up together, but they disagree on what Lavishia should do when it encounters the poor people:
Was it better to leave them alone or was it better to try and make life better for them? Even if you decided it was the right thing to do to make life better for them, which way did you do this? Did you say, Come and join us and be like us? Did you say, Give up all your own ways of doing things, the gods that you worship, the beliefs you hold most dear, the traditions that make you who you are? Or do you say, We have decided you should stay roughly as you are and we will treat you like children and give you toys that might make your life better? Indeed, who even decided what was better? [90–91].
This is, of course, the basic gist of Contact’s problematization handbook, and we’ve heard it before. Within the spectrum of responses to Lavishia/the Culture’s dilemma of intervention, Sechroom is the one who believes that the magical land should always try to help, whereas Hiliti believes that the best way to go about it is to leave those people to their own devices. Also, Sechroom holds that one “should never be cruel to be kind … there must always be another way of teaching people lessons.” Hiliti, on the other hand, thinks that “throughout history it had been proved that sometimes you did have to be cruel to be kind” (151). These differences of opinion eventually grow serious enough to prompt Hiliti to carry out an ill-advised intervention to teach Sechroom a lesson in cruel-to-be-kind realpolitik, in the wake of which Sechroom almost dies (151–155); thus a rift develops between the two cousins, irreparably damaging their friendship. Sechroom becomes “a soldier-missionary in the Lavishian army” (92), while Hiliti “exiled himself from the luxuries of Lavishia forever.” In time, both come to the world of Inversions because “[Sechroom] and Hiliti knew … of the Empire, and Haspidus. They talked about it, argued over it” (231).
At this point, even readers not familiar with the Culture would probably form the impression that there’s something going on behind and between the words exchanged in the text. Readers already familiar with the series, on the other hand, would know that DeWar’s simple possession of this information indicates that he is from the Culture, and that he is, in all likelihood, Hiliti. They would also have guessed by now that Vosill is from the Culture as well, that she’s probably Sechroom, and that she’s working for Special Circumstances.
The context surrounding DeWar’s tales of Lavishia helps fan our suspicions. While he thwarts an assassination attempt on UrLeyn with nothing more than his sword and his wits (60–66), which is consistent with the notion of a Culture exile in the Dervley Linter mold who doesn’t have access to companion drones, knife missiles, and task-oriented augmentations, people at Quience’s court in Haspidus begin dying in seemingly impossible locked-room circumstances. The first is chief questioner Nolieti, followed by his assistant Unoure, who had been fingered as the culprit of his master’s murder and was about to be put to the question (another inversion here—the torturer about to be tortured). Then it’s Duke Walen’s turn, in the immediate aftermath of another mysteriously overheard conversation in which he yet again tries getting Vosill into the hands of Ralinge, the new questioner. Right before the Duke dies, a young woman sees “a dark bird, or a nightwing” in the room with him (217–218). Also, the war in Landescion begins—King Quience follows it quietly but closely (143–146)—just as the first in a series of mysterious seizures strikes Lattens, eventually placing him at death’s door (129, 248). In the long run, a distraught UrLeyn becomes incapable of following the war against the Barons, whose armies are, in any event, suspiciously better trained and equipped than anyone had anticipated (248). Heartbroken and frustrated, the Protector abandons the direct administration of the war and returns to Tassasen, to his ailing son, and to his eventual murder.
Lattens is not the only audience of DeWar’s stories of Lavishia. Among those listening to them is the concubine Perrund, one of UrLeyn’s favorites both despite and because of her withered, useless left arm. Years before, Perrund had sacrificed that arm to shield the Protector from an assassin’s blade, nearly dying in the process. In spite of her handicap, she remains a woman of great beauty and personal charm, and while UrLeyn favors and trusts her greatly, DeWar is hopelessly in love with her (36). Perrund, who would reciprocate, cannot however bring herself to do so—first, she is one of the Protector’s concubines, and secondly, as she tells DeWar, “I am dead” (290). She has, it turns out, a story of her own to tell, and it’s a tale of horror: some men of the King raped her during the war that saw UrLeyn triumph, and then she had to watch as they did the same thing to her sisters. Eventually the men killed the whole family, leaving only Perrund alive or, as she repeats to DeWar several times, in a sort of death-in-life (284–289). Perrund is also the teller of DeWar’s story (343–345) and the assassin who kills UrLeyn at the end of it. Unreliable narrator that she is, she has given DeWar almost the whole truth about her fate and that of her family—she told one central lie concerning the actual perpetrators of the crime: they were a young UrLeyn and the gang of fellow soldiers who later became his current cabinet. Like the Barons in Landescion, Perrund has all along been working for Quience. Her orders were to keep the Protector alive until he had been disgraced and ruined—Quience wanted no martyr on his hands whose memory might one day inspire other regicides (333–336).18
At the same time in Haspidus, the conspirators of Vosill’s downfall have finally taken drastic action: acting without Quience’s knowledge, they have had the venerable, kindly Duke Ormin killed using one of the Doctor’s scalpels and then abducted both her and Oelph, taking them to the torture chamber where Ralinge awaits (291–298). Terrified of what’s coming, sick at the idea of seeing the Doctor ravaged, Oelph closes his eyes:
She said something that sounded like an instruction in a language I did not know…. A language from somewhere, I thought … beyond even far Drezen. A language from nowhere … I heard a whirring noise. A noise like a waterfall, a noise like a sudden wind, like an arrow as it passes nearby one’s ear. Then a long gasp … and then a thud, a punch-like concussion of what, in retrospect, was air and flesh and bone and […] what? More bone? Metal? Wood? Metal, I think [301–302].
When Oelph reopens his eyes, he finds Vosill standing in front of him, dressed in a long white shirt—“She looked utterly different. Alien” (302). The torture chamber is an abattoir, the three bodies of Ralinge and his assistants lying in several pieces on the floor, blood seemingly covering every surface. As the Doctor undoes Oelph’s straps, he sees something moving for a moment at the hem of her shirt, and then he notices Vosill looking at him:
She looked so steady and so certain. And yet she looked so dead, so utterly overpowered. She turned her head to one side and said something in a tone I swear to this day was resigned and defeated, even bitter. Something buzzed through the air. “We must imprison ourselves to save ourselves, Oelph,” she told me [303].
Before the two are peremptorily called to the King’s bedside, where Quience lies dying after suffering a mysterious seizure, Oelph notices that the Doctor’s ancient dagger has lost the last of its semiprecious stones.
Inversions ends with Oelph’s epilogue. As the prologue had introduced both storylines, so the epilogue closes them. Having cured the King at the last minute, the Doctor left. A heartbroken Oelph took her to the harbor where she boarded a ship from which she never got out—she disappeared one night of violent winds and blinding chain-fire, after declining the captain’s invitation to have dinner with him “citing an indisposition due to special circumstances” (341). She left Haspidus in better shape than she’d found it when she had arrived: within a few weeks of her departure, the torture chamber was gone, replaced by a wine cellar, and the reforms Quience had discussed with her on the sly while Vosill was tending to him took root, creating a more equal society. All the remaining nobles who had conspired against her met terrible ends soon after her departure (340).
Oelph became a doctor, and eventually rose to much-honored status in Haspidian society: he was the first Principal of the newly created Medical University of Haspide, personal physician to Quience himself, and a city counselor who oversaw the construction of the King’s Charitable Hospital and the Infirmary For The Freed (342–343). Quience himself, who ruled forty more years in excellent health, only sired daughters, so now Haspidus has a Queen. “I find this less troubling than I would have thought,” the old Oelph writes (340).
In the wake of UrLeyn’s death, Tassasen fell into a civil war from which Lattens, now King, eventually rescued it. The three remnants of the old empire still wage war on each other, thus leaving the rest of the world “free from imperial tyranny and so able to thrive in its own various ways” (345). Of DeWar and the former concubine Perrund, Oelph tells us, nobody knows much. The most reliable of all the accounts has them escape Tassasen together immediately after UrLeyn’s death and make their way to Mottelocci in the Hidden Kingdoms, where nobody actually knew DeWar. They became merchants, founded a bank, married, and had children who to this day control a thriving commercial concern. Apparently, they died in the mountains a few years earlier, although no bodies were found. Oelph admits to disliking this version of events, despite its greater probability (345–347).
Oelph himself eventually married, and he loves his wife now as ever “for her own sake, not for that of my lost love, even if as I will admit she does look just a little like the good Doctor” (347). He has never been able to reconcile the events in the torture chamber with his knowledge of the world’s consensus reality, and since he still maintains that he did not imagine the things he heard, he remains trapped inside an inescapable conundrum, like everyone else with any knowledge of these events living on the nameless planet the Culture briefly—if crucially—touched like it did many others.
One of the large-scale inversions in Inversions is the one that concerns the readers’ original perception of the two nations in which the action takes place. While the Tassasen Protectorate is something new in the political landscape of its world, Haspidus looks very much like one of Earth’s medieval regimes of Kings, Aristocrats, and terminally unjust pyramidal arrangements where social mobility is something that happens somewhere else. As Banks knew they would, our fin de siècle sympathies immediately accrue around Tassasen, which to us looks by far like the better place; the first Bodyguard chapter introduces us to a relatively serene life in the Protector’s palace, and UrLeyn himself appears before our eyes as a charismatic leader, an intelligent ruler, a loving father, and a good man. He and DeWar speak like equals despite the drastic difference in status, so we form the impression that UrLeyn didn’t just command DeWar’s services—he earned them. There also is more than a hint of utopian feeling in the air, driven by the changes in government the Protector has brought about in the wake of his victory against the forces loyal to the old king (33–34), and torture chambers are nowhere in sight.
By contrast, the first Doctor chapter opens inside Vosill’s apartments only to have the tranquility of the scene immediately disrupted by the appearance of Unoure, Nolieti’s apprentice, who has come to fetch the doctor to the torture chamber to revive a poor wretch currently being put to the question. For several pages after that, there are only the sight of excoriated flesh, the smell of blood and human waste, and the sound of unbearable pain, until the Doctor and Oelph are called to the King’s bedside to treat a minor ailment that, so he declares, is really very painful (7–19). This motion from the clean, thoughtful environment of Vosill’s practice to the ferocity of Nolieti’s underworld and then back up to the seemingly clueless sumptuousness of the royal chambers drives home to us the notion of a top-down society built upon the suffering of the poor, the unfortunate, and the innocent; a dystopia.
As we gradually make our way through the novel, however, our perceptions are made to reset and reverse through the whirling tangle of events that tie Tassasen and Haspidus together. While UrLeyn doesn’t particularly lose any of his good traits until the very end, when Perrund reveals what the Protector did to her and he undergoes a complete psychological collapse in the face of his son’s illness, his realm does take on a slightly more dystopian look—the torture chamber, for one, makes a quick, off-stage appearance, all the worse for going mostly unremarked upon (94–95). Quience, on the other hand, rather rises in our estimation. He has a wicked sense of humor, a way with words, a keen intellect and, once Vosill’s voice brings it to him, a surprisingly sensitive ear for the pain of his people—because it’s not just matters of power and its distribution among the non-aristocratic classes that the two discuss. The narrative makes it clear that Quience’s eventual decision to get rid of the torture chamber is rooted first in a particularly significant exchange he has with Vosill on the matter (169–171), and secondly in his reaction once he finds out what she and Oelph have come close to suffering (318–319). The other reforms the King makes after Vosill’s departure are every bit as impressive—the institution of a medical university, of a charitable hospital, and of an infirmary for The Freed, which implies without saying it out loud that slavery has been abolished in Haspidus.
Another instance of reversal involves the characters of Oelph and Perrund. Both are orphans, and both claim to have been saved by their respective benefactors (UrLeyn and the Commander of Quience’s Palace Guard, Adlain), but in fact neither was; Perrund knowingly obfuscated the truth of what really happened to her while Oelph remained ignorant of it until, on his deathbed, Adlain told him that he had rescued him out of guilt—Adlain had killed Oelph’s entire family (342). But while Perrund retains her thirst for revenge throughout her death-in-life, Oelph has remained very much alive and forgiving of the evils of others (201–203).
There is also a reversal in the love triangles taking place in both storylines. The first, as we have seen, concerns DeWar, Perrund, and UrLeyn, and whatever we think of the denouement, it seems to have something approaching a queasily happy resolution when the two people in it who actually love each other do get together and the bad guy gets what he deserves. The second triangle involves Oelph, Vosill, and the King: one evening, Vosill confesses her love to Quience, who doesn’t reciprocate. Tearful and ashamed, she tells the story to Oelph, who finds himself equally rejected when the Doctor reveals that she has known of his affections for a while (269–275). Unlike the breaking of the first, the breaking of the second love triangle leaves three people alone, whether by choice or otherwise.
The Culture’s intervention protocols, Banks had explained in his 1998 SFX interview, come down to “ensuring that useful people survive, and problematical ones ‘disappear.’” This is exactly what happens in Inversions, and here is where another large-scale reversal comes in. Back in the Culture/Lavishia, Vosill/Sechroom had been the one to argue that one should always do what looked like the right thing at any given point in time, while DeWar/Hiliti believed in a cruel-to-be-kind, bad-now-to-be-good-later approach. Here and now on the nameless planet, however, DeWar tries to do the right thing in the moment, whereas Vosill espouses a decidedly sharp-bladed strategy of political betterment. It was she who had Nolieti, Unoure, and Walen killed, and the executions were carried out via a drone/knife missile combination, as were the monitoring and the recording of the conversations Oelph later saw in her diary.19 It’s clear from the end of the scene in the torture chamber that those actions weigh greatly on Vosill, who nevertheless undertakes them with terrible efficiency, and to her credit we should remark that she does try to find other means of altering the balance of power for the better.20 But, alone except for her invisible escorts and surrounded by a mostly hostile power structure, the Doctor is repeatedly denied the chance to do so, and every killing, every instance of deceit and manipulation, every lie are finally visible on her face in the aftermath of Ralinge’s impossible, bloody demise.
But Oelph can’t help Vosill process those feelings, and neither can DeWar—the two are unaware of each other’s simultaneous presence on the planet. The surfeit of narrative voices in the novel, each of which is capable of telling only part of the whole story, brings home to us just how alone Vosill is—more alone than DeWar, in fact, ironically because he decided to pull a Dervley Linter and left the Culture behind, so that he is more readily acceptable to the Tassaseni court as a fellow barbarian than the Doctor is to the Haspidian court as a foreigner with distinctive behavioral oddities. The air of sorcery (thus Oelph calls the events in the torture chamber) that surrounds her further estranges her presence amidst people who, clearly feeling that something is alien about her very being, still cannot cast that suspicion within any kind of meaningful framework. In the end, while DeWar finds a semblance of peace and happiness on-planet with Perrund (but are they really dead? The circumstances of their disappearance seem special), Vosill can only leave forever, as alone as she had been when she had arrived.
The lack in Inversions of the kind of overall picture that we have gotten used to receiving from other Culture novels—especially from Excession—also robs both the reader and the narrators of the agency they would normally enjoy in an M-Banks space opera. Oelph and Perrund should be the demiurges that rule the respective worlds of the twin storylines; they should know the ins and outs, understand the setup, and see farther than anyone else—and to a certain extent they do, at least insofar as their fellow humans are concerned. But even at the moment of greatest power, even when, at the end of their respective narratives, they seem to be fully in control of the means of production, the magnitude of the truth escapes them completely. It’s not their fault, but they are nevertheless diminished in our eyes (Oelph in particular knows that the protagonist of his tale is special in some fundamental way, but even his most daring speculations fall far short of the truth). They have both received the information they would need in the form of a fable, but neither has the knowledge to break that shell of story nestling inside the bigger one to get at the truth underneath, so that in fact we are confronted by yet another inversion: the seemingly smaller, easily contained narrative proves to be the frayed strand of an immensely larger story unspooling in depths of sky and stretches of time that people like Perrund and Oelph do not have the information to conceptualize.
This fundamental absence of perspective also robs us readers of full closure. We do get to cackle a bit for figuring out the Culture setup, if that’s what we want, but the disappearance of the only two people who knew better and the cultural limits of those who are left drop on our lap a series of uncomfortable questions as to the morality of what we have witnessed. We probably won’t cry for the demise of such characters as Nolieti and Walen, but Unoure was innocent of his master’s murder, Ormin was one of the few nobles who seemed kind, and the King himself ended up at death’s door so that Vosill and Oelph could be called to his bedside (340), so there is collateral damage. Also, once we know that SC has been moving quietly but decisively behind the curtains it becomes hard to decide who and what it actually touched or didn’t—was Quience’s all-female offspring a happy accident or an instance of genetic manipulation? Was SC somehow helping to facilitate UrLeyn’s downfall, maybe through comprehensively training and equipping the Barons in Landescion? Was Vosill the only Culture personnel on-planet? Was DeWar really an exile?
And most worryingly from the perspective of deciding what it means to do the right thing, did SC have anything to do with the rocks that fell from the sky? The world is better off without the old empire, as Oelph himself tells us (338), but the meteorite shower killed millions, and many more died in the aftermath as internecine wars consumed whole populations. As the only power that could have interfered with the orbits of celestial bodies, would SC have gone this far to save a planet’s dominant species from itself? Ultimately, this and all the other questions are unanswerable, and we have no choice but to wonder without purchase on the truth of things.21 We can say that the meteor shower was probably a natural occurrence—SC wouldn’t go to such lengths as planning the death of millions—but even in that case, why didn’t it stop the meteors? Surely a well-placed GCU or an ROU could have done the job without undue strain. We could then say that the culture hadn’t discovered the planet at that time, and maybe we’d be right, but the point here is that, unlike the questions they should answer, all those possible conclusions are extra-textual. Oelph and Perrund are unavoidably silent on the matter, while the woman from Drezen and the man from the Half-Hidden Kingdoms are nowhere around anymore. “Don’t you hate it when the Gods come out to play?” Ulver Seich had asked at one point in Excession; but at least she’d had the ability to know there are gods, and that they look like giant starships. She’d even known what a starship is, what it moves through, and how deep the sky reaches, things that nobody in Tassasen, Haspidus, or anywhere else on the nameless, half-forgotten planet even understands how to ask about.