Excession

Banks, Iain M. Excession [sic]. 1996. London, UK: Orbit ("A Division of Little, Brown and company [UK]"), 1997.

Intellectual space opera, featuring the irruption into our galaxy, and universe, of a large "excession": something totally new, different, powerful, and culturally challenging—and a brief war between the highly civilized Culture and the energetic, farcical, and highly nasty Affront. Relevant here, the major cast includes Minds that control and are ships, and other AI advanced far beyond human intelligence. Usually, the ships contain great numbers of humans, who are significantly not significant members of the cast. We have, then, the protective enclosure of humans within cybernetic environments, but most of the story is about the cybernetic Minds, not the humans. See Banks's other Culture novels, including the collection The State of the Art. (RDE, 28/08/97)