Excession
Book 5 of Culture
Language: English
1-award-winner 13 of 1997 Locus Award for Best SF Novel Artificial Intelligence Fantasy Fantasy - General Fiction Fiction - Science Fiction General Kurd Laßwitz-Preis Award: Best Foreign Novel Library - Science Fiction and Fantasy Nanotechnology Nominations Below Cutoff of 1997 Hugo Award for Best Novel Novel Science Fiction Science Fiction & Fantasy Science Fiction - General Singularity Space Opera Utopia Win of 1996 BSFA Award for Best Novel _isfdb august derleth nominee bsfa award for best novel finalist bsfa award for best novel winner galactic empire james tiptree jr award finalist locus award for best science fiction novel finalist pick post-scarcity ship AI transhuman
Publisher: Orbit
Published: Jan 2, 1996
Description:
SUMMARY: Iain M. Banks is a true original, an author whose brilliant speculative fiction has transported us into worlds of unbounded imagination and inimitable revelatory power. Now he takes us on the ultimate trip: to the edge of possibility and to the heart of a cosmic puzzle....Diplomat Byr Genar-Hofoen has been selected by the Culture to undertake a delicate and dangerous mission. The Department of Special Circumstances--the Culture's espionage and dirty tricks section--has sent him off to investigate a 2,500-year-old mystery: the sudden disappearance of a star fifty times older than the universe itself. But in seeking the secret of the lost sun, Byr risks losing himself.There is only one way to break the silence of millennia: steal the soul of the long-dead starship captain who first encountered the star, and convince her to be reborn. And in accepting this mission, Byr will be swept into a vast conspiracy that could lead the universe into an age of peace...or to the brink of annihilation.