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The Excession is what the Culture's social scientists describe as an Outside Context Problem, one which a society cannot foresee and is often fatal.
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Excession and is
It is mentioned in Excession that:
Excession, first published in 1996, is Scottish writer Iain M. Banks's fourth science fiction novel to feature the Culture.
The book is largely about the response of the Culture's Minds ( AIs with enormous intellectual and physical capabilities and distinctive personalities ) to the Excession itself and the way in which another society, whose systematic brutality horrifies the Culture, tries to use the Excession to increase its power.
The Excession of the title is a perfect black-body sphere that appears mysteriously on the edge of Culture space, appears to be older than the Universe itself and resists the attempts of the Culture and technologically equivalent societies ( notably the Zetetic Elench ) to probe it.
A group of stereotypical bureaucrats tries to manage the Culture's response to the Excession but is brushed aside by the Interesting Times Gang, an informal group of Minds some of whom are veterans of the Idiran-Culture War, to try to deal with what is by far the most serious challenge the Culture has faced.
Once it is beyond the watching ship's sensor range, Sleeper Service changes course and heads towards the Excession.
The book's epilogue reveals that the Excession is a sentient entity which is currently acting as a bridge for a procession of even higher beings which travel between universes.
There are references to the Culture novel immediately previous to this one, Excession, where the GCU Grey Area is referred to, and is also possible that Estray Lassils ( in her younger, four-armed days ) was one of the lovers of the Ah-Forget-It-Tendency SC Agent Leffid Ispanteli, thus placing the events of this novel fully 200-300 years in the immediate past.
In The Player of Games, a Culture citizen is blackmailed, apparently by Special Circumstances Minds, into assisting the overthrow of a barbaric empire, while in Excession, a conspiracy by some Minds to start a war against an oppressive alien race nearly comes to fruition.
In the novel Excession by Iain M. Banks, the GCU Grey Area is a General Contact Unit ( a self-aware spaceship dedicated to the task of exploring the universe and interacting with other species ) of the fictional Culture society that has turned eccentric.
Excession and Culture's
ROUs and their demilitarised versions, Very Fast Pickets, are the Culture's fastest ships and have so far been described as having been outrun only once, by a GSV that self-optimised for speed ( in the novel Excession ).
The novel Excession refers to convertcraft when describing the Full Refund, an ex-Homomdan battle cruiser, which has become a member of the Culture's Special Circumstances group.
Excession and Outside
In the novel Excession, Banks coins the phrase Outside Context Problem in relation to first contact.
Excession and one
Ships and Minds also have a slightly distasteful view of SC procedure associated with M32, one Ship Mind going so far as to object to the standard SC attitude of " Full scale, stark raving M32 don't-talk-about-this-or-we'll-pull-your-plugs-out-baby paranoia " on the use of the encryption ( Excession ).
In one of the Culture novels ( Excession ), a GSV unloads its organic population and transforms itself into a very fast-moving shipyard / mothership, effectively deciding the outcome of the main plot thread.
Excession and which
Meanwhile a rapidly-expanding race, which the Culture calls the Affront ( because of its systematic sadism towards subject species and its own females and junior males, despite being relatively advanced ), tries to exploit the Excession by infiltrating a store of mothballed Culture warships and using them to claim control of the mysterious object.
The Excession, in response to the Sleeper charging at it, then triggers a multi-light-year Gridfire wave which threatens to obliterate it and its entire fleet, along with the accompanying Grey Area.
Excession and .
Minds generally refrain from using their all-seeing capabilities to influence people's reputations, though they are not necessarily themselves above judging people based on such observations, as described in Excession.
" Quicken ", mentioned in Excession, speeds up the user's neural processes so that time seems to slow down, allowing them to think and have mental conversation ( for example with artificial intelligences ) in far less time than it appears to take to the outside observer.
Character traits like strong shyness, while very rare, are not fully unknown, as shown in Excession.
Also, by custom, as described in Excession, any artifact ( be it a tool or vessel ) above a certain capability level has to be given sentience.
Some drones are also designed as utility equipment with its own sentience, such as the gelfield protective suit described in Excession.
The Culture novel Excession by Iain M. Banks features a ship called Not Invented Here.
It concerns the response of the Culture and other interstellar societies to an unprecedented alien artifact, the Excession of the title.
It prepares to deploy this fleet during transit to the Excession.
Only its Mindstate, transmitted right at the Excession, saves it by convincing the Excession to halt its attack.
At the same time the Excession disappears as mysteriously as it arrived.
As a result of events in the story the Excession concludes that the civilisations it has encountered in our universe are not ready for this enlightenment and moves on so that it will not cause any further disturbance, hence its disappearance at the end of the book.
It also takes the name given to it by the Culture – Excession – as its own.
is and what
Actually, only two men know what the formula is, Blake and '' -- He stopped and looked at Thor's body.
Ballet dancer: Protests, tears, and `` take what you want, Nicolas, I am a dancer, you are a poet, it is all beautiful ''.
`` But what is it ''??
But what is it??
But apart from racial problems, the old unreconstructed South -- to use the moderate words favored by Mr. Thomas Griffith -- finds itself unsympathetic to most of what is different about the civilization of the North.
This is the only case in modern history of a people of Britannic origin submitting without continued struggle to what they view as foreign domination.
It became the sole `` subject '' of `` international law '' ( a term which, it is pertinent to remember, was coined by Bentham ), a body of legal principle which by and large was made up of what Western nations could do in the world arena.
Perhaps this is what gives the aborigine his odd air of dignity.
That, at any rate, is what happens at the Khaju bridge.
I consider it to be my job to expose the public to what is being written today ''.
What appears here is shorter than what he actually said but very close to his own words.
One can only speak of what is in front of him, and that now is simply the mess ''.
This confession serves to make clear in part what is behind this sexual revolution: the craving for sensation for its own sake, the need for change, for new experiences.
The professed mission of this disaffiliated generation is to find a new way of life which they can express in poetry and fiction, but what they produce is unfortunately disordered, nourished solely on the hysteria of negation.
If love reflects the nature of man, as Ortega Y Gasset believes, if the person in love betrays decisively what he is by his behavior in love, then the writers of the beat generation are creating a new literary genre.
In the work of every artist, I suppose, there may be found one or more moments which strike the student as absolutely decisive, ultimately emblematic of what it is all about ; ;
But Aristotle kept the principle of levels and even augmented it by describing in the Poetics what kinds of character and action must be imitated if the play is to be a vehicle of serious and important human truths.
What Hume calls `` sensation '' is what Whitehead calls `` perception in the mode of presentational immediacy '' which is a sophisticated abstraction from perception in the mode of causal efficacy.
By virtue of his self-reliance, his individualism and his freedom from external restraint, the private eye is a perfect embodiment of the middle class conception of liberty, which amounts to doing what you please and let the devil take the hindmost.
Obviously there has been no agreement on what American conservatism is, or rather, what it should be.
Hence government must establish greater controls upon corporations so that their activities promote what is deemed essential to the national interest.
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