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Review title: Great ingredients but grossly undercooked
Product review: As I waded through Banks' story I wondered why I didn't like it more. I never got engaged or really found a character about whom I cared deeply. Compared to Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep which I read straight through, Excession is a complete misfire. It has galactic travel, ship minds, suspended animation, time shifting, exotic xenobiology, and more but the story is related in episodic sections jumping around so much among points of view that a sense of plot or character is lost in the riffing on the certainly fascinating concepts Banks envisions. So this is more a book of ideas and concepts many of which are well realized than it is a novel or even a compelling story.
