As in Banks' other Culture novels the main themes are the moral dilemmas that confront a hyperpower and how biological characters find ways to give their lives meaning in a post-scarcity society that is presided over by benign super-intelligent machines.

The Interesting Times Gang (ITG), an informal group of Minds loosely connected with Special Circumstances, try to manage the Culture's response to the Excession.

The Affront, a rapidly expanding race which practises systematic sadism towards subject species and its own females and junior males, also try to exploit the Excession by infiltrating a store of mothballed Culture warships and using them to claim control of the mysterious object.

The Sleeper Service, an Eccentric General Systems Vehicle (GSV) who had nominally left the Culture, is instructed to head to the location of the Excession by the ITG.

As a condition the Sleeper Service demands that Genar-Hofoen, a human member of Contact, attend it to seek a resolution with his ex-lover, Dajeil, who lives in solitude on the GSV.

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 neighbors 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.Banks has noted that he spent much time playing the Civilization computer game (appearing to refer to the first version of the game series) before writing the book and that it was one of the inspirations for the concept of the 'Outside Context Problem' central to the novel.

"[4] Kirkus Reviews described the book as "Brilliantly inventive and amusing – whole sections read like strings of knowing jokes – but a mess: Chattering spaceships with splendid if confusing names [...] don't compensate for the absence of real characters.

"[2] Reviewed in Arcane Magazine with a 10/10 rating, the novel was an "astounding achievement," regarded as "huge in scope, intricate in detail, swaying from pathos to metaphysics and from humour to light-speed action," with Banks considered, "a science-fiction writer truly without equal at the moment.