Pretty cool but somewhat convoluted story.

I lost track of all the characters after a while and had to go back to see who is who. Especially all the different ship minds. Ships in the Culture series are (for the most part) sentient and name themselves. Names like “Attitude Adjuster”, “Anticipation Of A New Lover’s Arrival, The”, “What is the Answer and Why?”, or “Yawning Angel”. That last one is my favorite from all the books so far. But since many of the ship character often only appear in message logs at first and don’t really do much, it’s hard not to mix them up. I had to re-read some earlier chapters and later took notes who was interacting with whom. The identification issues became even harder once the same characters started to be referred to by different parts of their usually pretty long names or ships changing their names throughout the story.

Something I really enjoyed were the many chase sequences in the book. Very captivating writing IMO. There are also a lot more depictions or descriptions of sex than in the previous ones. Most of them quite normal romance stuff, others… quite exotic.

The story is pretty broad and hard to summarize, but the general set up is that the Culture is confronted by an entity (the titular Excession) that to them seem like a Culture spacecraft would seem to natives of an untouched planet.

I enjoyed it. Especially the descriptions of (dis-)trust and relationships within the Culture. But it would have probably been better to read more at a time or take notes early on to keep track of everything.