Cultural Marxism 5: Excession
Reflecting on the fact that his last book was going to turn out to be the relatively slender and small-scale The Quarry, Iain Banks made the observation that “the real best way to sign off would have been with a great big rollicking Culture novel.” It’s difficult to imagine he didn’t mean Excession. Like The State of the Art before it, Excession is a novel about pushing the premise of the Culture to a breaking point. But where The State of the Art picked an approach to this that was fundamentally a dead end, Excession comes up with one that’s thrilling in its boundless possibilities. Ironically, it basically does this by taking the premise of The State of the Art and turning it on its ear. Where that novella asked “what if the Culture met us,” Excession asks “what if the Culture met a race even more advanced than itself?”
This leads to Excession’s – and arguably the Culture’s – most enduring contribution to the broader culture, namely the phrase Outside Context Problem. The passage where Banks describes this is very possibly the most-quoted paragraph of his career, and with obvious reason:
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 neighbours 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.
There’s a lot to love here. Banks has always been a witty writer, but here he’s visibly taking on Douglas Adams as a major influence (also apparent in the book’s other great line about Outside Context Problems, namely that they’re something “most civilizations would encounter just once, and which they tended to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encountered a full stop” – the performative hesitation of “rather in the same way” prior to the sentence metaphor is a dead giveaway, as is the oblique turn of the metaphor, which is in the same basic vein as Adams’s famous “hung in the sky in much the way bricks don’t,” although the harmony of form and function involved in having the sentence end with “a sentence encountered a full stop” is a bit of sparkle above and beyond the obvious influence). But he’s also just got a damn good idea there. Contact between civilizations of wildly differing technological capabilities is a sci-fi standard, but discussions of the phenomenon are almost always framed from the perspective of the technologically superior species – “first contact” and “the Prime Directive” and the like.…
ed me off of the Firefly podcast, mostly because listening to me kvetch about sci-fi westerns and the American Confederacy is way more fun for me than for her, but thankfully for all listeners she’s replaced me with the wonderful Jessica from 
I am not a huge Bob Dylan fan. Was into him for a couple months in high school/college when I was in a big folk music phase, but I liked folk music for being melodious and pretty, and that tended to mean that I preferred Dylan when someone like Peter, Paul, and Mary were singing him. Still, for the most part I’m even less of a fan of the arguments against him winning the Nobel Prize for literature, which tend to fall into two camps, both fairly appalling. The first is the outright snobbery, whether in its hilariously cliche form of “but what about Philip Roth” or in its more jocular but still fundamentally wrong-headed “does this mean X can win a Grammy?” My distaste for this position isn’t going to surprise anyone. Indeed, I consider it actively evil, albeit in a smoldering, unremarkable sense as opposed to something pernicious and large-scale like, say, Donald Trump. 
Shabcast time again. Listen and/or download 
The recently completed second season of 
I guess it’s time to fess up: I’ve been a bit remiss in posting content for the last few weeks. Life is hectic, work is stressful, and producing podcast content (let alone essays) is possibly a bit more time-consuming than it seems.