Rating: 
Summary: This book reads like it was written in three days.
Review: by a very intelligent and talented writer. I've loved every other Banks novel I've read, but this one was really carelessly written. Banks is capable of much more than this.
Rating: 
Summary: Packed full of the best in sci-fi concepts. A good read.
Review: Banks is certainly a MIND! Excession is sci-fi unbridled by convention and completely refreshing. No assumptions here that intelligent species require two arms and two legs. Excession was the first Banks novel I read, but I intend to read them all now. One review star deducted because although his characters are interesting, they are thrown together in a stretched sub-plot that moves further and further from the Excession itself. Ironically, the Excession plot, and the interaction of the Minds in the Affront affair, is more believable and certainly more entertaining than the forced web surrounding the principal players. The result leads to a somewhat disappointing, but ultimately forgivable denouement.
Rating: 
Summary: This book restored my faith in Science Fiction.
Review: This book was the most enjoyable science fiction book I have ever read. O.K., the book has flaws, such as the completely pointless subplot that appears to be associated with the plot, but actually isn't. Banks also places an unspeakably horrible bit in the book (this is becoming a trade mark, what with the Eaters in Consider Phlebas and the chair in Use of Weapons). Although the book is unfocussed, it is still brilliant and is one of the few books I have re-read, and more than once. I thought that (minus the numbers) the computer conversations were great-like ideal Internet discussion groups. Bu contrast, the humans were self-absorbed and irritating. Perhaps I liked this book because I read it before CP, which I didn't like as much.
Rating:
Summary: Neato keen
Review: This was the first Culture book that I have experienced, and I must say that I enjoyed it immensely. Banksies' technique is to introduce vastly different plot elements in the beginning, and then to draw as many of them as possible together by the end. Just as in Feersum Enjinn, Banks seems to drop mind-boggling ideas like bird-seed all over the place, effortlessly.
Rating:
Summary: Bigger yet than that..
Review: "the Culture" is a civilisation advanced beyond imagining, a technologist's utopia, where the only real threat is existential ennui. Yet suddenly, something appears in their backyard that's beyond even anything they had though of.An excellent book, and extremely funny.
Rating: 
Summary: TEDIOUS
Review: There are whole pages in this book containing sentence fragments burried in random computer gibberish like this: //8367309//!2384#@459003000. I got the point the first time Mr. Banks--YES THESE ARE COMPUTERS TALKING TO EACH OTHER! I get it already, so drop the silly gimmick. Unfortutely, the author seems to have forgotten his audience is...HUMAN. The only reason I didn't give "Excession" a 1 is because it contained some cool ideas about dual hyperspace planes I havn't encountered before. Forget "Excession" and read Peter F. Hamilton's "The Reality Dysfunction" series. It delivers.
Rating:
Summary: Fantastic! Ignore all pessimists and give it a shot!
Review: Excession is among the five best books I have ever read. This is the first of Ian Banks' books that I have read and I couldn't put it down. It does take a bit to become immersed in the plot but once there, it's absolutely fantastic. The ideas will stretch the limits of your mind and leave you with a new perspective on the universe.
Rating: 
Summary: Banks falls way short of his own high standards
Review: If you fancy reading a book full of conversations between computers which are written half in English and half in some meaningless gibberish concocted by the author after spending the night with a bottle of Scotch, then this is the book for you. Tedious, unfocussed, all-over-the place rubbish. Scarcely believeable that it was written by the same pen as the beautiful "Consider Phlebas" or even the highly effective "Player of Games". A big letdown.
Rating:
Summary: All skin, no meat
Review: I found Excession a disappointing, if entertaining, read. I've read two of his other Culture novels -- Player of Games and Consider Phelbas -- and found them both intriguing and thought-provoking. Excession, however, has no real main plot but a thousand sub-plots that lead nowhere, serve no clear purpose, and end with a colossally boring anticlimax. All I got from this book was a renewed sense of loathing for the Culture (I've loved to hate them since the dungeon scene on the Planet of the Gerontocrats in Consider Phelbas) and a sneaking regard for the "bad guys", the gasbag Affront.
Rating:
Summary: Banks's best sci-fi so far
Review: AN interesting book, enlivened up by the characterisation of the various ships who seem far more appealling than the humans involved.
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