Excession

Two and a half millennia ago, the artifact appeared in a remote corner of space, beside a trillion-year-old dying sun from a different universe. It was a perfect black-body sphere, and it did nothing. Then it disappeared. Now it is back.’Banks is a phenomenon … wildly successful, fearlessly creative’ William Gibson’Thrilling, affecting and comic … probably the finest science fiction he has written to date’ New Scientist’Banks has rewritten the libretto for the whole space-opera genre’ The Times