What do you think?
Rate this book
Culture #2
The Player of Games
The Culture - a human/machine symbiotic society - has thrown up many great Game Players, and one of the greatest is Gurgeh. Jernau Morat Gurgeh. The Player of Games. Master of every board, computer, and strategy. Bored with success, Gurgeh travels to the Empire of Azad, cruel and incredibly wealthy, to try their fabulous game... a game so complex, so like life itself, that the winner becomes emperor. Mocked, blackmailed, almost murdered, Gurgeh accepts the game, and with it the challenge of his life - and very possibly his death.
12 pages, Audible Audio
First published August 1, 1988
3190 people are currently reading
46103 people want to read
About the author
Iain M. Banks
59 books6,564 followersIain M. Banks is a pseudonym of Iain Banks which he used to publish his Science Fiction.
Banks's father was an officer in the Admiralty and his mother was once a professional ice skater. Iain Banks was educated at the University of Stirling where he studied English Literature, Philosophy and Psychology. He moved to London and lived in the south of England until 1988 when he returned to Scotland, living in Edinburgh and then Fife.
Banks met his wife Annie in London, before the release of his first book. They married in Hawaii in 1992. However, he announced in early 2007 that, after 25 years together, they had separated. He lived most recently in North Queensferry, a town on the north side of the Firth of Forth near the Forth Bridge and the Forth Road Bridge.
As with his friend Ken MacLeod (another Scottish writer of technical and social science fiction) a strong awareness of left-wing history shows in his writings. The argument that an economy of abundance renders anarchy and adhocracy viable (or even inevitable) attracts many as an interesting potential experiment, were it ever to become testable. He was a signatory to the Declaration of Calton Hill, which calls for Scottish independence.
In late 2004, Banks was a prominent member of a group of British politicians and media figures who campaigned to have Prime Minister Tony Blair impeached following the 2003 invasion of Iraq. In protest he cut up his passport and posted it to 10 Downing Street. In an interview in Socialist Review he claimed he did this after he "abandoned the idea of crashing my Land Rover through the gates of Fife dockyard, after spotting the guys armed with machine guns." He related his concerns about the invasion of Iraq in his book Raw Spirit, and the principal protagonist (Alban McGill) in the novel The Steep Approach to Garbadale confronts another character with arguments in a similar vein.
Interviewed on Mark Lawson's BBC Four series, first broadcast in the UK on 14 November 2006, Banks explained why his novels are published under two different names. His parents wished to name him Iain Menzies Banks but his father made a mistake when registering the birth and he was officially registered as Iain Banks. Despite this he continued to use his unofficial middle name and it was as Iain M. Banks that he submitted The Wasp Factory for publication. However, his editor asked if he would mind dropping the 'M' as it appeared "too fussy". The editor was also concerned about possible confusion with Rosie M. Banks, a minor character in some of P.G. Wodehouse's Jeeves novels who is a romantic novelist. After his first three mainstream novels his publishers agreed to publish his first SF novel, Consider Phlebas. To distinguish between the mainstream and SF novels, Banks suggested the return of the 'M', although at one stage he considered John B. Macallan as his SF pseudonym, the name deriving from his favourite whiskies: Johnnie Walker Black Label and The Macallan single malt.
His latest book was a science fiction (SF) novel in the Culture series, called The Hydrogen Sonata, published in 2012.
Author Iain M. Banks revealed in April 2013 that he had late-stage cancer. He died the following June.
The Scottish writer posted a message on his official website saying his next novel The Quarry, due to be published later this year*, would be his last.
*The Quarry was published in June 2013.
Banks's father was an officer in the Admiralty and his mother was once a professional ice skater. Iain Banks was educated at the University of Stirling where he studied English Literature, Philosophy and Psychology. He moved to London and lived in the south of England until 1988 when he returned to Scotland, living in Edinburgh and then Fife.
Banks met his wife Annie in London, before the release of his first book. They married in Hawaii in 1992. However, he announced in early 2007 that, after 25 years together, they had separated. He lived most recently in North Queensferry, a town on the north side of the Firth of Forth near the Forth Bridge and the Forth Road Bridge.
As with his friend Ken MacLeod (another Scottish writer of technical and social science fiction) a strong awareness of left-wing history shows in his writings. The argument that an economy of abundance renders anarchy and adhocracy viable (or even inevitable) attracts many as an interesting potential experiment, were it ever to become testable. He was a signatory to the Declaration of Calton Hill, which calls for Scottish independence.
In late 2004, Banks was a prominent member of a group of British politicians and media figures who campaigned to have Prime Minister Tony Blair impeached following the 2003 invasion of Iraq. In protest he cut up his passport and posted it to 10 Downing Street. In an interview in Socialist Review he claimed he did this after he "abandoned the idea of crashing my Land Rover through the gates of Fife dockyard, after spotting the guys armed with machine guns." He related his concerns about the invasion of Iraq in his book Raw Spirit, and the principal protagonist (Alban McGill) in the novel The Steep Approach to Garbadale confronts another character with arguments in a similar vein.
Interviewed on Mark Lawson's BBC Four series, first broadcast in the UK on 14 November 2006, Banks explained why his novels are published under two different names. His parents wished to name him Iain Menzies Banks but his father made a mistake when registering the birth and he was officially registered as Iain Banks. Despite this he continued to use his unofficial middle name and it was as Iain M. Banks that he submitted The Wasp Factory for publication. However, his editor asked if he would mind dropping the 'M' as it appeared "too fussy". The editor was also concerned about possible confusion with Rosie M. Banks, a minor character in some of P.G. Wodehouse's Jeeves novels who is a romantic novelist. After his first three mainstream novels his publishers agreed to publish his first SF novel, Consider Phlebas. To distinguish between the mainstream and SF novels, Banks suggested the return of the 'M', although at one stage he considered John B. Macallan as his SF pseudonym, the name deriving from his favourite whiskies: Johnnie Walker Black Label and The Macallan single malt.
His latest book was a science fiction (SF) novel in the Culture series, called The Hydrogen Sonata, published in 2012.
Author Iain M. Banks revealed in April 2013 that he had late-stage cancer. He died the following June.
The Scottish writer posted a message on his official website saying his next novel The Quarry, due to be published later this year*, would be his last.
*The Quarry was published in June 2013.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 4,001 reviews
February 20, 2022
That´s Brave new world and 1984 on space opera steroids, one of the best allegories on human culture ever written, described from the point of view of an objective observer of a far higher developed civilization who visits the primitive, cruel, capitalistic, hierarchical bigots. Us in our past, current, and future manifestations of madness and more or less hidden dictatorship government styles.
This reread in 2 sittings blew me away so hard that I´m hardly able to do more than to suggest to freaking read this masterpiece as soon as possible. Immediately, go, quickly, forget the rest of the review, don´t waste your time with it, go, enjoy, and get wiser by the way. There's is nothing coming close to this out there.
Maybe best to start the amazing journey here
I had the luck to read this, probably his best novel, as one of the first out of Banks´ amazing universe and in contrast to the other, often very complex, eclectic, and multi-plotted novels it stays focused on the main premise to show us how freaking average and dull we are. I guess Banks did it on purpose, as a stylistic element, to say much with less, and because it might have seemed inappropriate and weird to mix present day history with the lighter space opera elements and humor of his other novels.
Owning everything
There are more or less direct in your face satires, comments, and criticism of how capital, ownership, and debt let a society degenerate to neofeudalism, the disadvantages of monogamy under a theocratic regime, slavery in the form of military service with punishments such as death penalty, sexual restrictions and sexism, selling talent and lifetime to the ones who can effort to buy it, the institutionalization of tradition to condition the population, prison system, slums, unfair fiscal and tax systems that make the rich richer and the poor poorer, total fixation on socioeconomic status manifesting in the behavior of each specific group, superficial trends, kings and gods emperors, controlled propaganda media, permanent warmongering, an extreme income gap, sedating the population with cheap booze, bread, and games, etc. It´s nothing more than an exact description of what most, even democratic countries, are moving and degenerating towards while doing as if the end of history has created a utopia for everyone.
Everything is the game aka the predatory behavior to rise to the top of a mountain of corpses by actively producing them.
To integrate "The game" as an element of selection in an authoritarian government is a marvelous plot vehicle, looking at you, Hunger Games, Battle Royale, The Long Walk, etc., but mixing it with higher, superior entities that could wipe the floor with the dictators while optimizing quantum gravity time dilation multiverse theoretical physics stuff with the other, (and doing whatever with as many hands, tentacles (I know what some of you are thinking now, shame on you!),... as they wish to have and create gripping devices by telekinetic manifesting them with gray/green goo nanotech in nanoseconds. nano nano nano) makes it both entertaining and insightful.
Show them who is boss and philosophy
Although it might be unrealistic that any evil despots might take the risk of participating in unfaked, unmanipulated competitions instead of letting the suppressed population kill each other in epic battles to keep them calm Roman emperor style. Except the tech is so highly advanced and secure and the probability of black swans so unlikely that they come down from their throne from time to time to slay their own people directly and under frenetic applause instead of conventionally killing them with secret police and incompetent agriculture politics to make Malthus happy. Another aspect is that the style the game is played depends on the cruelty and inhumanity of the culture participating in it and that it would be possible to play it in a cultivated, mind opened and friendly way with emancipated, enlightened citizens of a post scarcity society. Something no government really wants, so they prefer war and genocides.
Only Lem and Banks play in the same league
Just this moment I am realizing for the first time that Banks could be compared to Stanislaw Lem, another author that dived so marvelous and smooth into the depts and dirt of human nature. Of course, Lems´ complexity is unreached and the space opera focus makes the comparison difficult in some regard, but the authors' main intentions seem similar to me, especially because their dark sarcasm is unreached by all other titans of the genre.
Tropes show how literature is conceptualized and created and which mixture of elements makes works and genres unique:
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.ph...
This reread in 2 sittings blew me away so hard that I´m hardly able to do more than to suggest to freaking read this masterpiece as soon as possible. Immediately, go, quickly, forget the rest of the review, don´t waste your time with it, go, enjoy, and get wiser by the way. There's is nothing coming close to this out there.
Maybe best to start the amazing journey here
I had the luck to read this, probably his best novel, as one of the first out of Banks´ amazing universe and in contrast to the other, often very complex, eclectic, and multi-plotted novels it stays focused on the main premise to show us how freaking average and dull we are. I guess Banks did it on purpose, as a stylistic element, to say much with less, and because it might have seemed inappropriate and weird to mix present day history with the lighter space opera elements and humor of his other novels.
Owning everything
There are more or less direct in your face satires, comments, and criticism of how capital, ownership, and debt let a society degenerate to neofeudalism, the disadvantages of monogamy under a theocratic regime, slavery in the form of military service with punishments such as death penalty, sexual restrictions and sexism, selling talent and lifetime to the ones who can effort to buy it, the institutionalization of tradition to condition the population, prison system, slums, unfair fiscal and tax systems that make the rich richer and the poor poorer, total fixation on socioeconomic status manifesting in the behavior of each specific group, superficial trends, kings and gods emperors, controlled propaganda media, permanent warmongering, an extreme income gap, sedating the population with cheap booze, bread, and games, etc. It´s nothing more than an exact description of what most, even democratic countries, are moving and degenerating towards while doing as if the end of history has created a utopia for everyone.
Everything is the game aka the predatory behavior to rise to the top of a mountain of corpses by actively producing them.
To integrate "The game" as an element of selection in an authoritarian government is a marvelous plot vehicle, looking at you, Hunger Games, Battle Royale, The Long Walk, etc., but mixing it with higher, superior entities that could wipe the floor with the dictators while optimizing quantum gravity time dilation multiverse theoretical physics stuff with the other, (and doing whatever with as many hands, tentacles (I know what some of you are thinking now, shame on you!),... as they wish to have and create gripping devices by telekinetic manifesting them with gray/green goo nanotech in nanoseconds. nano nano nano) makes it both entertaining and insightful.
Show them who is boss and philosophy
Although it might be unrealistic that any evil despots might take the risk of participating in unfaked, unmanipulated competitions instead of letting the suppressed population kill each other in epic battles to keep them calm Roman emperor style. Except the tech is so highly advanced and secure and the probability of black swans so unlikely that they come down from their throne from time to time to slay their own people directly and under frenetic applause instead of conventionally killing them with secret police and incompetent agriculture politics to make Malthus happy. Another aspect is that the style the game is played depends on the cruelty and inhumanity of the culture participating in it and that it would be possible to play it in a cultivated, mind opened and friendly way with emancipated, enlightened citizens of a post scarcity society. Something no government really wants, so they prefer war and genocides.
Only Lem and Banks play in the same league
Just this moment I am realizing for the first time that Banks could be compared to Stanislaw Lem, another author that dived so marvelous and smooth into the depts and dirt of human nature. Of course, Lems´ complexity is unreached and the space opera focus makes the comparison difficult in some regard, but the authors' main intentions seem similar to me, especially because their dark sarcasm is unreached by all other titans of the genre.
Tropes show how literature is conceptualized and created and which mixture of elements makes works and genres unique:
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.ph...
July 16, 2015
UPDATED REVIEW, 2nd read in 2015:
even more ingenious the second time around.
The Player of Games is taken to the Empire of Azad to play the greatest of games. the game is Azad is the Empire of Azad is the U.S. and the U.K. and all such toxic empires. in a civilized culture, all empires must fall. the game is feints and surprises and moves within moves; the game is the past that must be broken on the wheel of the future. Banks brings all of his customary elegance, intelligence, humor, and angry frustration at the stupidity and short-sightedness of humanity. he understands the allure but still seethes at the very thought of brutality, let alone brutality as an ingrained governmental program or system. or as a way of life, for any so-called human. much like Banks, I am on the side of the AIs.
UGLY OLD REVIEW, 1st read in 2010:
even more ingenious the second time around.
The Player of Games is taken to the Empire of Azad to play the greatest of games. the game is Azad is the Empire of Azad is the U.S. and the U.K. and all such toxic empires. in a civilized culture, all empires must fall. the game is feints and surprises and moves within moves; the game is the past that must be broken on the wheel of the future. Banks brings all of his customary elegance, intelligence, humor, and angry frustration at the stupidity and short-sightedness of humanity. he understands the allure but still seethes at the very thought of brutality, let alone brutality as an ingrained governmental program or system. or as a way of life, for any so-called human. much like Banks, I am on the side of the AIs.
UGLY OLD REVIEW, 1st read in 2010:
February 25, 2012
Tis Official...Iain Banks can write his flesh cushion off. Okay, so for many of you that is not exactly breaking-news scrolling across the ticker, but I still thought it was worth repeating.
I had previously read and loved The Wasp Factory, Banks' classic first novel which was a fascinating glimpse into the psychology of a very disturbed young man in serious need of a hug. I also really enjoyed Consider Phlebas, which is the first of the Culture novels. With Banks having two big wins under his belt, I went into this second installment of the Culture series with fairly high expectations and that always makes me nervous and twitchy. It seems that whenever I go into a book hoping for mega, I more often than not crawl away from it feeling like....like um....kinda like uh....
Yeah...just like THAT!!!!
Well I'm a pleased as punch happy camper to report that there was no nut-crushing disappointment encountered during this read and Iain came through in fine fashion in this sophomore Culture novel.
BACKGROUND:
Briefly, the Culture is an extremely advanced, post-scarcity, inter-galactic, utopian civilization. It is a symbiotic union between humans and god-like AI machines, with the AIs performing the administrative and governing functions (i.e., basically ruling) while humans live a leisurely existence enjoying the benefits of UNLIMITED RESOURCES. There are no laws, little reason for internal conflict and force is rarely needed and used only when necessary to protect people from harm. It is basically a giant, all-expenses paid, never-ending vacation in the most amazing high-tech resort you can imagine where the citizens of the culture get to eat....drink....
sex it up....be pampered like royalty....and explore all manner of hedonistic entertainment.
In fact, because of the utopian nature of the Culture, everyone is pretty “kumbaya” and there is little to zero tension within the Culture itself. I know, I know…DUH!!
Therefore, the Culture novels mainly deal with either individuals outside of the Culture or with the Culture's efforts to expand its influence over a non-Culture society. Despite the many positive qualities of the Culture, they will definitely cut “ethical corners” and take a very “ends justify the means” approach to bringing other societies civilizations under their benevolent rule.
PLOT SUMMARY:
The Player of Games deals with just such a situation. The main character is Jernau Morat Gurgeh who is among the greatest “game players” in all of the Culture. Through his numerous bio-enhancements (another perk of the Culture), he has mastered 1000s and 1000s of games and can absorb and master new ones incredibly fast. Well, this is just the kind of skill that the Culture’s “Special Circumstances” needs at the moment. I would describe Special Circumstances (SC) as a cross between the CIA and the State Department because they both investigate and establish ties with other cultures in order to learn their customs so they can then determine how best to manipulate them into joining the Culture.
It is seriously sweet.
Well SC wants Gurgeh to employ his talents to learn a new game. There is a massive civilization called the Empire of Azad that derives its name from an incredibly complex game called…uh… Azad.
This game is central to the entire structure of the Empire's society and is so incredibly complex and nuanced that it takes a lifetime to be able to play. However, SC hopes that Gurgeh’s special aptitude will allow him to learn the game in just over two years (the travel time to the Empire).
That should be enough background and I will stop there so that I don’t spoil any of the central plot for you. Banks’ writing is top-notch and his imagination is exceptional as he provides a ton of details about life in and out of the Culture without allowing the pacing to get bogged down in a whole lot of exposition. He controls his story very well and you can be confidant that you are in capable hands.
This is space opera done very well by someone who has the writing chops to actually convey the wonder of his imagination to those of us who can only envy his talents.
4.0 to 4.5 stars. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!!
I had previously read and loved The Wasp Factory, Banks' classic first novel which was a fascinating glimpse into the psychology of a very disturbed young man in serious need of a hug. I also really enjoyed Consider Phlebas, which is the first of the Culture novels. With Banks having two big wins under his belt, I went into this second installment of the Culture series with fairly high expectations and that always makes me nervous and twitchy. It seems that whenever I go into a book hoping for mega, I more often than not crawl away from it feeling like....like um....kinda like uh....
Yeah...just like THAT!!!!
Well I'm a pleased as punch happy camper to report that there was no nut-crushing disappointment encountered during this read and Iain came through in fine fashion in this sophomore Culture novel.
BACKGROUND:
Briefly, the Culture is an extremely advanced, post-scarcity, inter-galactic, utopian civilization. It is a symbiotic union between humans and god-like AI machines, with the AIs performing the administrative and governing functions (i.e., basically ruling) while humans live a leisurely existence enjoying the benefits of UNLIMITED RESOURCES. There are no laws, little reason for internal conflict and force is rarely needed and used only when necessary to protect people from harm. It is basically a giant, all-expenses paid, never-ending vacation in the most amazing high-tech resort you can imagine where the citizens of the culture get to eat....drink....
sex it up....be pampered like royalty....and explore all manner of hedonistic entertainment.
In fact, because of the utopian nature of the Culture, everyone is pretty “kumbaya” and there is little to zero tension within the Culture itself. I know, I know…DUH!!
Therefore, the Culture novels mainly deal with either individuals outside of the Culture or with the Culture's efforts to expand its influence over a non-Culture society. Despite the many positive qualities of the Culture, they will definitely cut “ethical corners” and take a very “ends justify the means” approach to bringing other societies civilizations under their benevolent rule.
PLOT SUMMARY:
The Player of Games deals with just such a situation. The main character is Jernau Morat Gurgeh who is among the greatest “game players” in all of the Culture. Through his numerous bio-enhancements (another perk of the Culture), he has mastered 1000s and 1000s of games and can absorb and master new ones incredibly fast. Well, this is just the kind of skill that the Culture’s “Special Circumstances” needs at the moment. I would describe Special Circumstances (SC) as a cross between the CIA and the State Department because they both investigate and establish ties with other cultures in order to learn their customs so they can then determine how best to manipulate them into joining the Culture.
It is seriously sweet.
Well SC wants Gurgeh to employ his talents to learn a new game. There is a massive civilization called the Empire of Azad that derives its name from an incredibly complex game called…uh… Azad.
This game is central to the entire structure of the Empire's society and is so incredibly complex and nuanced that it takes a lifetime to be able to play. However, SC hopes that Gurgeh’s special aptitude will allow him to learn the game in just over two years (the travel time to the Empire).
That should be enough background and I will stop there so that I don’t spoil any of the central plot for you. Banks’ writing is top-notch and his imagination is exceptional as he provides a ton of details about life in and out of the Culture without allowing the pacing to get bogged down in a whole lot of exposition. He controls his story very well and you can be confidant that you are in capable hands.
This is space opera done very well by someone who has the writing chops to actually convey the wonder of his imagination to those of us who can only envy his talents.
4.0 to 4.5 stars. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!!
November 21, 2025
Have you ever, after fresh and petty violence has been visited upon your person by the resident small minded hooligans of your local, backwater high school, stood in front of your bedroom mirror and watched as the cosmic microwave background radiation gently fizzing from your television, with its diminutive anisotropies having ballooned during the inflationary epoch to produce large scale inhomogeneities which resulted, through a tortuously complex confluence of events, in this subjective experience of humiliation and animal pain, penetrating into your bones and causing your silhouette to phosphoresce like europium-doped, strontium silicate-aluminate oxide powder and push against the total darkness of the room/moment like the screeching hull of a deep sea submersible under approximately 15,750 psi, with your spectral image sapped of all color save for the vivid welt on your hand which marks the impact which shattered the silvered Pangaea and shot your tenebrous image through with fractal tectonics, leaving your face a mess of coastal irregularities, and causing the blood running from your dilated nostrils to proliferate in sharp, impossibly angled, tributaries, collectively cresting the embankment of your split lip and falling away into nothingness, and all the while Celtic Frost is playing in the background, with the lyrics:
Frozen is heaven and frozen is hell
And I am dying in this living human shell
I am a dying God, coming into human flesh.
I am a dying God, coming into human flesh.
I am a dying God, coming into human flesh.
And in that moment you saw the scale of the suffering, on which the entire system is built, bloom with infinite levels of granularity, like a conceptual fission, and the r-process is underway as the neutron flux swings wildly into the exponential, causing concepts to scatter like grapeshot and render higher order clusters of meaning unstable, inducing them, in turn, to belch subatomic invectives in a great chain of sinister self similarity, across all levels of strife: the first replicators trying to withstand environmental shocks in order to cohere long enough for stable information transfer, microscopic life forms occupying protein synthesis pathways until their hosts deform and burst with viral particles, prokaryotic microorganisms being cooked inside feverish bodies, plants scrambling to outstrip their nearest rivals by growing higher and spreading their roots further, trophic levels delineating nutritional relationships between organisms, nature’s food pyramid of consumption and waste, transferring energy through digestion and defecation, tool using primates pruning the biosphere with increasing adroitness, rampant coalitionary violence scourging the earth, technology in the service of annihilations more total, sentients dying of hunger amongst abundance, dying of cold while adjacent to warmth, of thirst where the concern for hydration is so unequally distributed that luck dictates whether it will ever register in the mind of a citizen as a biological imperative, succumbing to curable diseases inside a web of perverse incentives, dehumanizing ideologies out competing memes for tolerance through big tech algorithms, rarefied intellects pursuing more ingenious high frequency speculation in lieu of existential risk prophylaxis, Ordovician-Silurian. Late Devonian, Permian-Triassic, Triassic-Jurassic, Cretaceous-Paleocene, Extinction, a senseless pummeling because you wanted to paint your nails instead of play baseball with the other boys, your blood boiling and your canines unsheathed in atavistic rage as you become just another adrenalized marionette hellbent on articulating the language of fight or flight, and you hear your dad quietly call your name and you spin and shout:
“Strange! that you should not have suspected years ago--centuries, ages, eons, ago!--for you have existed, companionless, through all the eternities. Strange, indeed, that you should not have suspected that your universe and its contents were only dreams, visions, fiction! Strange, because they are so frankly and hysterically insane--like all dreams: a God who could make good children as easily as bad, yet preferred to make bad ones; who could have made every one of them happy, yet never made a single happy one; who made them prize their bitter life, yet stingily cut it short; who gave his angels eternal happiness unearned, yet required his other children to earn it; who gave his angels painless lives, yet cursed his other children with biting miseries and maladies of mind and body; who mouths justice and invented hell--mouths mercy and invented hell--mouths Golden Rules, and forgiveness multiplied by seventy times seven, and invented hell; who mouths morals to other people and has none himself; who frowns upon crimes, yet commits them all; who created man without invitation, then tries to shuffle the responsibility for man's acts upon man, instead of honorably placing it where it belongs, upon himself; and finally, with altogether divine obtuseness, invites this poor, abused slave to worship him!”
To which he replies, “Dinner is ready, sweetie.” And you say, “Oh. Be right there, dad.” Wipe your nose and teeter down the steps with the cadence of the recently concussed, all the while thinking that the teeth of this sharp incongruity between the placid surface of communal harmony and the sacrificial machine which disenfranchises, consumes, and destroys is asphyxiating you like a felid throat clamp with the stench of fresh death on its muzzle, thinking that, to be both aware of the hideous schism between these two realities, and the depths of one's impotence to seriously alter it, and not shudder, to hear a call so loud and not heed it, to see the multilevel game with its nested, inscrutable rules, predicated on death and suffering on a scope and scale which would embarrass even the most ambitious of psychopaths, and not scream yourself comatose, is to have your soul fatally impugned?
Then you are perhaps uniquely positioned to appreciate how Jernau Morat Gurgeh, (a man who so thoroughly trounces all the competition that The Culture has to offer him across its myriad games that he has to load himself into a sentient star ship and slingshot himself across hyperspace in order to participate in the holy grail of all games, one which an entire alien species has constructed its society around, the complexity of which aims to represent reality to such a degree that a player’s own political and philosophical outlook can be expressed in play, so that rival ideologies are essentially tested in the game before the winners can apply them in reality. A game, which the protagonist eventually discovers, embodies the incumbent preferences of the social elite, reinforcing and reiterating the pre-existing gender and caste inclinations of the Empire, putting the lie to the fairness which is generally perceived to govern the outcome of the tournament and thus the shape of Azadian society.), an indolent, but brilliant game-theory obsessive, who has been coddled by the peaceful, egalitarian ways of The Culture, reacts when he glimpses the workings of the Azadian political apparatus, with all its rampant inequalities, xenophobia, and casual/commercial sadism, which precipitates an existential exegesis in him across many fronts, ranging from linguistic relativity, to the impossibility of remaining apolitical. Here we see the aloof maestro of all structured forms of play extrapolate games beyond mere abstract diversion and reflect on how his obsessions have informed his conduct.
This is Banks hitting his stride. Using the lens of an alien civilization (no effort is made, or subtlety employed, to cloak this satire of modern earth society) to display his primary vision of humanity to great effect, illustrating its decadence and numberless contradictions. Distinguishing itself from his first outing in Consider Phlebas by containing a smaller cast of characters who are better realized, with a plot that’s considerably tighter, and allegories more clearly delivered.
Frozen is heaven and frozen is hell
And I am dying in this living human shell
I am a dying God, coming into human flesh.
I am a dying God, coming into human flesh.
I am a dying God, coming into human flesh.
And in that moment you saw the scale of the suffering, on which the entire system is built, bloom with infinite levels of granularity, like a conceptual fission, and the r-process is underway as the neutron flux swings wildly into the exponential, causing concepts to scatter like grapeshot and render higher order clusters of meaning unstable, inducing them, in turn, to belch subatomic invectives in a great chain of sinister self similarity, across all levels of strife: the first replicators trying to withstand environmental shocks in order to cohere long enough for stable information transfer, microscopic life forms occupying protein synthesis pathways until their hosts deform and burst with viral particles, prokaryotic microorganisms being cooked inside feverish bodies, plants scrambling to outstrip their nearest rivals by growing higher and spreading their roots further, trophic levels delineating nutritional relationships between organisms, nature’s food pyramid of consumption and waste, transferring energy through digestion and defecation, tool using primates pruning the biosphere with increasing adroitness, rampant coalitionary violence scourging the earth, technology in the service of annihilations more total, sentients dying of hunger amongst abundance, dying of cold while adjacent to warmth, of thirst where the concern for hydration is so unequally distributed that luck dictates whether it will ever register in the mind of a citizen as a biological imperative, succumbing to curable diseases inside a web of perverse incentives, dehumanizing ideologies out competing memes for tolerance through big tech algorithms, rarefied intellects pursuing more ingenious high frequency speculation in lieu of existential risk prophylaxis, Ordovician-Silurian. Late Devonian, Permian-Triassic, Triassic-Jurassic, Cretaceous-Paleocene, Extinction, a senseless pummeling because you wanted to paint your nails instead of play baseball with the other boys, your blood boiling and your canines unsheathed in atavistic rage as you become just another adrenalized marionette hellbent on articulating the language of fight or flight, and you hear your dad quietly call your name and you spin and shout:
“Strange! that you should not have suspected years ago--centuries, ages, eons, ago!--for you have existed, companionless, through all the eternities. Strange, indeed, that you should not have suspected that your universe and its contents were only dreams, visions, fiction! Strange, because they are so frankly and hysterically insane--like all dreams: a God who could make good children as easily as bad, yet preferred to make bad ones; who could have made every one of them happy, yet never made a single happy one; who made them prize their bitter life, yet stingily cut it short; who gave his angels eternal happiness unearned, yet required his other children to earn it; who gave his angels painless lives, yet cursed his other children with biting miseries and maladies of mind and body; who mouths justice and invented hell--mouths mercy and invented hell--mouths Golden Rules, and forgiveness multiplied by seventy times seven, and invented hell; who mouths morals to other people and has none himself; who frowns upon crimes, yet commits them all; who created man without invitation, then tries to shuffle the responsibility for man's acts upon man, instead of honorably placing it where it belongs, upon himself; and finally, with altogether divine obtuseness, invites this poor, abused slave to worship him!”
To which he replies, “Dinner is ready, sweetie.” And you say, “Oh. Be right there, dad.” Wipe your nose and teeter down the steps with the cadence of the recently concussed, all the while thinking that the teeth of this sharp incongruity between the placid surface of communal harmony and the sacrificial machine which disenfranchises, consumes, and destroys is asphyxiating you like a felid throat clamp with the stench of fresh death on its muzzle, thinking that, to be both aware of the hideous schism between these two realities, and the depths of one's impotence to seriously alter it, and not shudder, to hear a call so loud and not heed it, to see the multilevel game with its nested, inscrutable rules, predicated on death and suffering on a scope and scale which would embarrass even the most ambitious of psychopaths, and not scream yourself comatose, is to have your soul fatally impugned?
Then you are perhaps uniquely positioned to appreciate how Jernau Morat Gurgeh, (a man who so thoroughly trounces all the competition that The Culture has to offer him across its myriad games that he has to load himself into a sentient star ship and slingshot himself across hyperspace in order to participate in the holy grail of all games, one which an entire alien species has constructed its society around, the complexity of which aims to represent reality to such a degree that a player’s own political and philosophical outlook can be expressed in play, so that rival ideologies are essentially tested in the game before the winners can apply them in reality. A game, which the protagonist eventually discovers, embodies the incumbent preferences of the social elite, reinforcing and reiterating the pre-existing gender and caste inclinations of the Empire, putting the lie to the fairness which is generally perceived to govern the outcome of the tournament and thus the shape of Azadian society.), an indolent, but brilliant game-theory obsessive, who has been coddled by the peaceful, egalitarian ways of The Culture, reacts when he glimpses the workings of the Azadian political apparatus, with all its rampant inequalities, xenophobia, and casual/commercial sadism, which precipitates an existential exegesis in him across many fronts, ranging from linguistic relativity, to the impossibility of remaining apolitical. Here we see the aloof maestro of all structured forms of play extrapolate games beyond mere abstract diversion and reflect on how his obsessions have informed his conduct.
This is Banks hitting his stride. Using the lens of an alien civilization (no effort is made, or subtlety employed, to cloak this satire of modern earth society) to display his primary vision of humanity to great effect, illustrating its decadence and numberless contradictions. Distinguishing itself from his first outing in Consider Phlebas by containing a smaller cast of characters who are better realized, with a plot that’s considerably tighter, and allegories more clearly delivered.
February 29, 2024
Watch my video review by clicking here.
A decent read but suffered from a constant feeling of blandness and nothing really captivating at any point.
A decent read but suffered from a constant feeling of blandness and nothing really captivating at any point.
September 23, 2014
In 1938, Yasunari Kawabata, a future Nobel Prize winner, was assigned by the Mainichi newspaper to cover a Go match between Honinbo Shusai, the top player, and his challenger Kitani Minoru. Go has an importance in Japanese culture that is hard for a Westerner to understand, and was one of the four traditional arts that a Samurai had to excel in. The match was very even until Kitani played an unexpected move just before an adjournment; its only purpose was to force a response, giving him extra time to think about his next play. This is completely standard practice in chess, but, although permitted by the rules of Go, was contrary to the complicated etiquette of the game.
The rest of this review is available elsewhere (the location cannot be given for Goodreads policy reasons)
The rest of this review is available elsewhere (the location cannot be given for Goodreads policy reasons)
June 11, 2011
This was my first book in Iain M. Banks sprawling Culture series. I have been reading a lot of sci-fi and fantasy lately, because for some reason that's all that sounds interesting to me, but I have to admit it is very annoying knowing that every book I pick up is the first in a _______. Usually that blank is "trilogy," except when it isn't (or it really isn't). And while there may be lots and lots of Culture books, they are all standalone stories with a beginning and an end. You can read one published in 1987 and one published in 2010 and it won't make a difference. This is very soothing to my nerves.
So anyway, the Culture. I wanted to read this series because of a Goodreads review I came across for Excession which noted that half the book is smartass back-and-forth between two sentient artificial intelligences. I love stories about wiseacre supercomputers; in my book, HAL 9000 is the hero of 2001: A Space Odyssey and all the humans just get in the way of the computer in The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. My favorite episode of Futurama is the one where the ship (voiced by Signouney Weaver, natch) falls for Fry ("You're just jealous! Nobody loves you because you're tiny and made of meat!").
The Culture is a society ruled by these machines, which instead of going the violent Skynet route...
has decided that hey, humans aren't so bad after all.
In the Culture, the machines take care of everything; no human goes hungry, disease and famine are a thing of the past. Sci-fi nerds call this a post-scarcity society, but basically it means that people don't have to actually do anything to survive. They don't even need to work, because no one needs money in a society with no wants. So basically because you are still going to need to do something with your existence, the human citizens of the Culture devote themselves to creative pursuits like art or repeatedly undergoing sex changes or, like Gurgeh, playing games.
Gurgeh is, in fact, the best Player of Games in the entire Culture. Board games, we're talking. Not sports. For this he is super-famous anyway, and frequently hosts parties, writes papers and speaks at symposiums. This would be like if the nerds who play Magic: The Gathering were as idolized as Magic: The Johnson. But Gurgeh is so good at all the existing games that he jumps at the chance to travel to a newly-discovered alien society known as The Empire (subtle!) and play the game known as Azad, which is so complex and revered that it has come to form the basis of the Empire's power structure. Meaning it would probably piss some people off if a foreigner came by and casually won, thus destroying the foundation of their entire society and such (symbolism that I totally missed is revealed in Manny's review).
That's a pretty good setup right there, I think. I like stories about games (the obvious parallel is, of course, Ender's Game), and this is a good one, even though Banks doesn't really explain Azad to us (this is just as well; it takes Gurgeh over a year of dedicated study to begin to understand the rules; reading them would be confusing/boring/underwhelming/all three). We don't have any idea what is going on, but the loosely sketched matches still make for exciting reading, as do the sometimes heavy-handed comparisons between the refined politeness of the Culture and the raw barbarism of the Empire, as well as the musings on the morality of state-building, i.e. intervening in a less advanced society because you know better, i.e. the Prime Directive Paradigm).
But what really made the book fun for me were the trappings of the Culture itself. The idea of a post-scarcity society is really interesting to me, and Banks has fashioned a good one, with a lot of fun examples of the ways humanity (so to speak) has dealt with its status as a largely extraneous life form in the grand scheme of galaxy-spanning sentient worldships. The AIs themselves are collectively my favorite characters, from the massive spaceships, so big they are controlled by robotic hive minds, to the small drones that follow humans around and make fun of them. And swear. I imagined them like this, but sassier:
I always liked that movie. I bet if I watched it again I would discover it really isn't very good, Jessica Tandy aside (Tandy power!).
Despite my series-stress, I am definitely going to read more Culture novels.
Facebook 30 Day Book Challenge Day 5: Book you wish you could live in.
So anyway, the Culture. I wanted to read this series because of a Goodreads review I came across for Excession which noted that half the book is smartass back-and-forth between two sentient artificial intelligences. I love stories about wiseacre supercomputers; in my book, HAL 9000 is the hero of 2001: A Space Odyssey and all the humans just get in the way of the computer in The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. My favorite episode of Futurama is the one where the ship (voiced by Signouney Weaver, natch) falls for Fry ("You're just jealous! Nobody loves you because you're tiny and made of meat!").
The Culture is a society ruled by these machines, which instead of going the violent Skynet route...
has decided that hey, humans aren't so bad after all.
In the Culture, the machines take care of everything; no human goes hungry, disease and famine are a thing of the past. Sci-fi nerds call this a post-scarcity society, but basically it means that people don't have to actually do anything to survive. They don't even need to work, because no one needs money in a society with no wants. So basically because you are still going to need to do something with your existence, the human citizens of the Culture devote themselves to creative pursuits like art or repeatedly undergoing sex changes or, like Gurgeh, playing games.
Gurgeh is, in fact, the best Player of Games in the entire Culture. Board games, we're talking. Not sports. For this he is super-famous anyway, and frequently hosts parties, writes papers and speaks at symposiums. This would be like if the nerds who play Magic: The Gathering were as idolized as Magic: The Johnson. But Gurgeh is so good at all the existing games that he jumps at the chance to travel to a newly-discovered alien society known as The Empire (subtle!) and play the game known as Azad, which is so complex and revered that it has come to form the basis of the Empire's power structure. Meaning it would probably piss some people off if a foreigner came by and casually won, thus destroying the foundation of their entire society and such (symbolism that I totally missed is revealed in Manny's review).
That's a pretty good setup right there, I think. I like stories about games (the obvious parallel is, of course, Ender's Game), and this is a good one, even though Banks doesn't really explain Azad to us (this is just as well; it takes Gurgeh over a year of dedicated study to begin to understand the rules; reading them would be confusing/boring/underwhelming/all three). We don't have any idea what is going on, but the loosely sketched matches still make for exciting reading, as do the sometimes heavy-handed comparisons between the refined politeness of the Culture and the raw barbarism of the Empire, as well as the musings on the morality of state-building, i.e. intervening in a less advanced society because you know better, i.e. the Prime Directive Paradigm).
But what really made the book fun for me were the trappings of the Culture itself. The idea of a post-scarcity society is really interesting to me, and Banks has fashioned a good one, with a lot of fun examples of the ways humanity (so to speak) has dealt with its status as a largely extraneous life form in the grand scheme of galaxy-spanning sentient worldships. The AIs themselves are collectively my favorite characters, from the massive spaceships, so big they are controlled by robotic hive minds, to the small drones that follow humans around and make fun of them. And swear. I imagined them like this, but sassier:
I always liked that movie. I bet if I watched it again I would discover it really isn't very good, Jessica Tandy aside (Tandy power!).
Despite my series-stress, I am definitely going to read more Culture novels.
Facebook 30 Day Book Challenge Day 5: Book you wish you could live in.
August 15, 2015
My third Culture book, a series of epic space opera about a post-scarcity human society in the far future. If you are not familiar with this series you may want to read this Wikipedia entry first and come back (or not, as you prefer). I love Consider Phlebas but I followed that up with fan favorite Use of Weapons and it nearly put me off the entire series. I don't want to go into why I do not like that book, if you are curious you can always find my review. Still, I love Consider Phlebas so much Use of Weapons could not completely eradicate the goodwill I still have for Mr. Banks and the Culture series. The Player of Games then is the book that will make or break the rest of series for me.
Make it is.
The Player of Games is complex, intelligent yet easy enough to follow, none of that mucking about with multiple timelines or switching to and fro between "the present" and flashbacks in some weird reverse order sequence. The story simply revolves around a single protagonist Jernau Gurgeh, possibly The Culture's greatest games players. That is saying something given how important games are to the indolent citizens of The Culture who are supplied with every material thing they can possibly want. Gurgeh is approached by the "Special Circumstances", the Culture's secret service / black ops type organisation to take part in an "Azad" game tournament at The Azad Empire, a rival civilization just a few light years away. This game is so important that it is the cornerstone of The Azad Empire. The winner is elevated to the Emperor status. As to why the Special Circumstances want Gurgeh to take part in this tournament you will have to find out for yourself by reading the book. You can thank me later.
The most fascinating feature of this book for me is the Azad game, it seems like a hyper-chess game with various card games and philosophy thrown in. Its is so complex it makes Quidditch look like Snakes & Ladders. Though the author does not describe the game in so much detail that it would be playable if you had the mega-board, the pieces, the cards and other things to hand, the description is done so well that you can imagine such a game existing. As with the other Culture books I have read Banks has populated the novel with quite a few well developed characters, though most of them tend to be AI or wee robots ("droids"). The central character Jernau Gurgeh is complex and interesting though not particularly likable, a typical trait of Banks' protagonists it seems. Still, at least he is not a tough-as-nails anti-hero, which is getting a bit old for me, his extreme focus and obsession makes him quite vivid. I also love the humorous moments interspersed throughout the book, these are mainly based around an indignant droid in a clunky disguise. The grand finale which takes place on a planet regularly burned by a perpetual wave of fire is wonderfully exciting though little plot twist at the end is not particularly surprising. Iain Banks' prose style is as literary as ever and is a pleasure to read.
This book has made me re-commit myself to reading The Culture series, I look forward to reading many more volumes.
Make it is.
The Player of Games is complex, intelligent yet easy enough to follow, none of that mucking about with multiple timelines or switching to and fro between "the present" and flashbacks in some weird reverse order sequence. The story simply revolves around a single protagonist Jernau Gurgeh, possibly The Culture's greatest games players. That is saying something given how important games are to the indolent citizens of The Culture who are supplied with every material thing they can possibly want. Gurgeh is approached by the "Special Circumstances", the Culture's secret service / black ops type organisation to take part in an "Azad" game tournament at The Azad Empire, a rival civilization just a few light years away. This game is so important that it is the cornerstone of The Azad Empire. The winner is elevated to the Emperor status. As to why the Special Circumstances want Gurgeh to take part in this tournament you will have to find out for yourself by reading the book. You can thank me later.
The most fascinating feature of this book for me is the Azad game, it seems like a hyper-chess game with various card games and philosophy thrown in. Its is so complex it makes Quidditch look like Snakes & Ladders. Though the author does not describe the game in so much detail that it would be playable if you had the mega-board, the pieces, the cards and other things to hand, the description is done so well that you can imagine such a game existing. As with the other Culture books I have read Banks has populated the novel with quite a few well developed characters, though most of them tend to be AI or wee robots ("droids"). The central character Jernau Gurgeh is complex and interesting though not particularly likable, a typical trait of Banks' protagonists it seems. Still, at least he is not a tough-as-nails anti-hero, which is getting a bit old for me, his extreme focus and obsession makes him quite vivid. I also love the humorous moments interspersed throughout the book, these are mainly based around an indignant droid in a clunky disguise. The grand finale which takes place on a planet regularly burned by a perpetual wave of fire is wonderfully exciting though little plot twist at the end is not particularly surprising. Iain Banks' prose style is as literary as ever and is a pleasure to read.
This book has made me re-commit myself to reading The Culture series, I look forward to reading many more volumes.
June 1, 2010
If I had to pick a favorite of Iain Banks...well, I haven't read them all yet, and anyway I couldn't pick, because each one I read becomes a favorite for a different reason. This one is a fascinating study of a complex character, set in an insanely well-drawn world. If you're a gamer you will definitely appreciate this book on another level, so pick it up!
April 3, 2019
Sorry to say but it didn’t really work for me. My main issue being that storyline only became interesting in the last 30% of the book.
I appreciate intelligent prose, the humour and interesting world (at least on Culture’s side). I also liked the ending, hence 2 stars.
The list of the things I didn’t like is unfortunately longer:
Two thirds of this book is really slow. Nothing really happens – no danger, no conflict, no intrigue or mystery, nothing to hook you in and keep turning pages.
Descriptions – there are a lot of (often lengthy) descriptions of landscape, sunset, interior, ship compartment etc. that are irrelevant to the story. On top of already slow plot…
Main character – is not exactly likeable. Arrogant, selfish, almost wilfully ignorant of what is happening around him, worried about winning his games more than about people. I couldn’t care less about his reputation or whether he wins or loses. Normally I’m all for the grey characters – but un-relatable character in combination with un-engaging plot – leaves no drive to the story.
Main subject – games - who would have thought it could be boring. The games in this book are not simulations. They are more complex version of chess and card games. There is no explanation of how they work but plenty of descriptions. Now playing a game yourself is exciting, but imagine watching a chess match or a snooker without even understanding the rules (ZZZzzzz… Snore… Huh. What?!).
I appreciate intelligent prose, the humour and interesting world (at least on Culture’s side). I also liked the ending, hence 2 stars.
The list of the things I didn’t like is unfortunately longer:
Two thirds of this book is really slow. Nothing really happens – no danger, no conflict, no intrigue or mystery, nothing to hook you in and keep turning pages.
Descriptions – there are a lot of (often lengthy) descriptions of landscape, sunset, interior, ship compartment etc. that are irrelevant to the story. On top of already slow plot…
Main character – is not exactly likeable. Arrogant, selfish, almost wilfully ignorant of what is happening around him, worried about winning his games more than about people. I couldn’t care less about his reputation or whether he wins or loses. Normally I’m all for the grey characters – but un-relatable character in combination with un-engaging plot – leaves no drive to the story.
Main subject – games - who would have thought it could be boring. The games in this book are not simulations. They are more complex version of chess and card games. There is no explanation of how they work but plenty of descriptions. Now playing a game yourself is exciting, but imagine watching a chess match or a snooker without even understanding the rules (ZZZzzzz… Snore… Huh. What?!).
January 23, 2019
This was the second Culture novel I'd read, after Consider Phlebas. I’m trying to read them in order. Well, publication order in any case.
So I’ll come right out and say it: if you are a fan of Space Opera you should be reading the Culture novels. They vary a lot, stylistically and thematically, but they’re all pretty damn cool and very, very clever. Banks managed to juggle sense of wonder elements with intrigue almost effortlessly. Not to mention some gnarly political commentary.
I read somewhere, someplace, sometime, that people have likened The Player Of Games to Ender's Game, but I'm not sure I agree. There is a 'game' element in both books, obviously (even the titles suggest that), but that was where the similarities ended for me. I have also learned (possibly from this same vague, indeterminate source) that there are those who look down their noses at Consider Phlebas, stating that The Player Of Games is by far the better of the two, and that you might as well start your Culture journey right here.
Who can tell? This kind of thing is too darn relative, but I will say that Consider Phlebas was (for me) more fun to read. And, in fact, I’ve rated it higher than Player Of Games. So there. I’ve said it. It can’t be unsaid.
They’re actually two very different beasts. I just warmed better to the protagonist in Phlebas, possibly because I perceived The Game Player to be somewhat aloof and detached. No doubt an important aspect of his identity, so it isn’t really a criticism.
Nitpicking aside (how the hell did I get onto that tangent?), this is still a great book. Because less-than-optimal Banks is still better than most stuff out there, and this is Banks in fairly-close-to-optimal mode. The Player Of Games introduces us to one Jernau Morat Gurgeh. He plays games. He's very, very good at it too. We’re not talking about chess or checkers, or even your favourite RPG, MMORPG, FPS or LARP (or any other of a million other acronyms), but complicated and lengthy affairs from a variety of different (spacefaring) cultures. Fascinating, albeit complex, stuff all round. Gurgeh is therefore known as ‘The Game Player’.
All is well, until he is invited to a (very) distant empire to play the game of Azad. At first glance this doesn't seem like so big a deal, but it soon becomes apparent that Azad and Empire politics are intertwined and inseparable to a disturbing degree. Without giving the game away (so to speak), I will only say that Gurgeh at last seems to have bitten off more than he can chew. On second thought, contrary to my statement above, this is possibly where the Ender comparisons originated…. The whole “playing for keeps” thing. But Mum’s the word!
That is more or less the gist of it. Don’t worry, it’s much more exciting than I’m making it sound. Being Banks, it’s a lot of fun. There is a lot of intrigue and maneuvering, and the game sequences are proficiently portrayed. Why not five stars? Well, it doesn’t have the same sprawling feel that Phlebas had (which is something I appreciate in my Sy-Fy). This one is more contained, more hush-hush, more conniving.
At this stage it seems safe to say that the Culture books are stand-alone, so there is no pressing need to read Consider Phlebas before this. But you might as well, because this is the good stuff when it comes to big league Space Opera.
Recommended.
update
As of 2018 there appears to be a TV series in development, for Consider Phlebas specifically. One can hope they don’t muck it up, and if they manage to get it right, one can hope they expand it to include the other Culture novels (such as this one) as well.
So I’ll come right out and say it: if you are a fan of Space Opera you should be reading the Culture novels. They vary a lot, stylistically and thematically, but they’re all pretty damn cool and very, very clever. Banks managed to juggle sense of wonder elements with intrigue almost effortlessly. Not to mention some gnarly political commentary.
I read somewhere, someplace, sometime, that people have likened The Player Of Games to Ender's Game, but I'm not sure I agree. There is a 'game' element in both books, obviously (even the titles suggest that), but that was where the similarities ended for me. I have also learned (possibly from this same vague, indeterminate source) that there are those who look down their noses at Consider Phlebas, stating that The Player Of Games is by far the better of the two, and that you might as well start your Culture journey right here.
Who can tell? This kind of thing is too darn relative, but I will say that Consider Phlebas was (for me) more fun to read. And, in fact, I’ve rated it higher than Player Of Games. So there. I’ve said it. It can’t be unsaid.
They’re actually two very different beasts. I just warmed better to the protagonist in Phlebas, possibly because I perceived The Game Player to be somewhat aloof and detached. No doubt an important aspect of his identity, so it isn’t really a criticism.
Nitpicking aside (how the hell did I get onto that tangent?), this is still a great book. Because less-than-optimal Banks is still better than most stuff out there, and this is Banks in fairly-close-to-optimal mode. The Player Of Games introduces us to one Jernau Morat Gurgeh. He plays games. He's very, very good at it too. We’re not talking about chess or checkers, or even your favourite RPG, MMORPG, FPS or LARP (or any other of a million other acronyms), but complicated and lengthy affairs from a variety of different (spacefaring) cultures. Fascinating, albeit complex, stuff all round. Gurgeh is therefore known as ‘The Game Player’.
All is well, until he is invited to a (very) distant empire to play the game of Azad. At first glance this doesn't seem like so big a deal, but it soon becomes apparent that Azad and Empire politics are intertwined and inseparable to a disturbing degree. Without giving the game away (so to speak), I will only say that Gurgeh at last seems to have bitten off more than he can chew. On second thought, contrary to my statement above, this is possibly where the Ender comparisons originated…. The whole “playing for keeps” thing. But Mum’s the word!
That is more or less the gist of it. Don’t worry, it’s much more exciting than I’m making it sound. Being Banks, it’s a lot of fun. There is a lot of intrigue and maneuvering, and the game sequences are proficiently portrayed. Why not five stars? Well, it doesn’t have the same sprawling feel that Phlebas had (which is something I appreciate in my Sy-Fy). This one is more contained, more hush-hush, more conniving.
At this stage it seems safe to say that the Culture books are stand-alone, so there is no pressing need to read Consider Phlebas before this. But you might as well, because this is the good stuff when it comes to big league Space Opera.
Recommended.
update
As of 2018 there appears to be a TV series in development, for Consider Phlebas specifically. One can hope they don’t muck it up, and if they manage to get it right, one can hope they expand it to include the other Culture novels (such as this one) as well.
October 6, 2015
Starting my second read today, for a group read with a great group of people.... and I've finished my second read.
I'm much more impressed with the novel on the reread than I was the first time, so I've bumped my stars up from 4 to 5, and I don't think I'm being generous at all. It deserved it.
My main problem with either reading was that I just didn't quite care with the whole overt premise of a game player. I'm a game player, myself, but reading about games that are completely foreign and strange with rules only obliquely intersecting any that I've ever known strikes me as pointless and strange. It strikes as much interest in me as, say, reading a novel about Hockey or American Football. My boredom is so palpable that even my dog can smell it on me.
And then, there's the other side of this book, the one that reads like a jousting tournament, full of heavily laden knights with shifting alliances and champions for opposing kingdoms. That part is quite exciting. It only gets better because it's set in the Culture, the ultimate let's-all-get-along mega-spanning galactic anti-empire filled with all types of aliens and machine minds living with (pretty much) no coercion, unless, of course, a bit of finesse is "Really" required.
And that's where we come into the story, and we get to play and be a piece on the board at the same time, feeling all the ups and downs, the close-calls, the frustration, the elation and the triumph. Often all in a single night, oft repeated, but never dull, and this is true for me even though, as I said, the idea revolves around a freaking game with which I have no real stake.
Well, that's true, I guess, until later, but by then the stakes take on a completely different flavor, and the fall of galactic civilizations are at stake. (Well, one is at stake, anyway. If you're reading this for the first time, I'll let you discover which one I'm talking about.)
I paid closer attention to the descriptions of settings and people, this time, and was pleasantly surprised to see how they matched pace with the games this time, especially the one with the Big Guy on the Flaming Planet. And of course, no author can beat the wonderful names of the Culture Ships.
I am glad I read this a second time. I actually forced myself to really try and imagine the game, or at least make up some heavy approximation of it, and in the end it became just another worldbuilding exercise. A lot of us readers like to fill in the blanks and use our imaginations to build a living and breathing world out of the hints and implications of authors, and I think I failed to do that last time. I focused on the world and enjoyed that plenty, but then I forgot to focus on the game. If you don't read this novel with the explicit intent to get into the game, itself, rather than just the interesting characters, then you're missing out on more than half the novel.
That might turn some people off, just as it threatened to turn me off, but I feel better for sticking with it. The novel became really quite awesome by the end, and not just a clever plot.
If you're really interested in what I wrote a few years ago about the novel then, here's what I threw together:
"The novel is surprisingly deep for a character to start out so shallow. A very different novel from the first Culture novel and a much more direct plot-line with just as much of a great touch when it comes to the ebb and flow of the story. Very amusing satire that is only given a light touch, thank goodness, and used primarily to raise the tension. All in all, great writing, even if I won't put the novel among my top 100, but definitely a good read."
I'm much more impressed with the novel on the reread than I was the first time, so I've bumped my stars up from 4 to 5, and I don't think I'm being generous at all. It deserved it.
My main problem with either reading was that I just didn't quite care with the whole overt premise of a game player. I'm a game player, myself, but reading about games that are completely foreign and strange with rules only obliquely intersecting any that I've ever known strikes me as pointless and strange. It strikes as much interest in me as, say, reading a novel about Hockey or American Football. My boredom is so palpable that even my dog can smell it on me.
And then, there's the other side of this book, the one that reads like a jousting tournament, full of heavily laden knights with shifting alliances and champions for opposing kingdoms. That part is quite exciting. It only gets better because it's set in the Culture, the ultimate let's-all-get-along mega-spanning galactic anti-empire filled with all types of aliens and machine minds living with (pretty much) no coercion, unless, of course, a bit of finesse is "Really" required.
And that's where we come into the story, and we get to play and be a piece on the board at the same time, feeling all the ups and downs, the close-calls, the frustration, the elation and the triumph. Often all in a single night, oft repeated, but never dull, and this is true for me even though, as I said, the idea revolves around a freaking game with which I have no real stake.
Well, that's true, I guess, until later, but by then the stakes take on a completely different flavor, and the fall of galactic civilizations are at stake. (Well, one is at stake, anyway. If you're reading this for the first time, I'll let you discover which one I'm talking about.)
I paid closer attention to the descriptions of settings and people, this time, and was pleasantly surprised to see how they matched pace with the games this time, especially the one with the Big Guy on the Flaming Planet. And of course, no author can beat the wonderful names of the Culture Ships.
I am glad I read this a second time. I actually forced myself to really try and imagine the game, or at least make up some heavy approximation of it, and in the end it became just another worldbuilding exercise. A lot of us readers like to fill in the blanks and use our imaginations to build a living and breathing world out of the hints and implications of authors, and I think I failed to do that last time. I focused on the world and enjoyed that plenty, but then I forgot to focus on the game. If you don't read this novel with the explicit intent to get into the game, itself, rather than just the interesting characters, then you're missing out on more than half the novel.
That might turn some people off, just as it threatened to turn me off, but I feel better for sticking with it. The novel became really quite awesome by the end, and not just a clever plot.
If you're really interested in what I wrote a few years ago about the novel then, here's what I threw together:
"The novel is surprisingly deep for a character to start out so shallow. A very different novel from the first Culture novel and a much more direct plot-line with just as much of a great touch when it comes to the ebb and flow of the story. Very amusing satire that is only given a light touch, thank goodness, and used primarily to raise the tension. All in all, great writing, even if I won't put the novel among my top 100, but definitely a good read."
June 20, 2025
"Azad produceva, semplicemente, un desiderio insaziabile di altre vittorie, altro potere, altro territorio, altro dominio..."
Ho voluto dare una seconda opportunità al ciclo della Cultura di Banks dopo aver letto il primo deludente romanzo.
La lettura è stata una sorpresa del tutto inaspettata che ha riacceso la curiosità. Totalmente.
Banks cambia marcia e ricomincia da questo "L'Impero di Azad" ambientando la storia 700 anni dopo gli eventi narrati in "Pensa a Fleba".
Mantiene gli elementi solo accennati nel precedente: la Cultura, una società avanzata oltre ogni immaginazione in simbiosi perfetta con le macchine, profonde modifiche genetiche che permettono miracoli, viaggi a velocità di curvatura e megastrutture abitative lunghe chilometri.
Menti artificiali che gestiscono ogni aspetto della vita mentre l'umanità ne gode i piaceri.
L'ambientazione è originale e affascinante. Ma è solo il contorno.
Il protagonista della storia è Jernau Gurgeh, un esperto giocatore di giochi di strategia di ogni tipo e famoso in tutta la Cultura per la sua estrema abilità. Uno dei migliori.
Ed è proprio grazie a questa sua dote che verrà contattato per svolgere una missione in un luogo molto distante dalla Cultura: L'impero di Azad.
Grande enfasi viene data alla rappresentazione delle differenze sociali che lo scostante protagonista si troverà di fronte durante la sua missione, alieno in terra aliena.
Il Gioco e il piacere della sfida che supera quello della vittoria. La completa simbiosi che permuta il giocatore e permette di raggiungere l'estasi.
Strabiliante.
---------------------------
"Azad simply produced an insatiable desire for more victories, more power, more territory, more dominion..."
I wanted to give Banks' Culture cycle a second chance after reading the first disappointing novel.
Reading it was a completely unexpected surprise that rekindled curiosity. Totally.
Banks changes gear and starts again from this "The Empire of Azad" setting the story 700 years after the events narrated in "Consider Phleba".
It maintains the elements only hinted at in the previous one: the Culture, a society advanced beyond imagination in perfect symbiosis with machines, profound genetic modifications that allow miracles, warp-speed travel and kilometer-long mega-housing structures.
Artificial minds that manage every aspect of life while humanity enjoys its pleasures.
The setting is original and fascinating. But it is only the outline.
The protagonist of the story is Jernau Gurgeh, an expert player of strategy games of all kinds and famous throughout the Culture for his extreme skill. One of the best.
And it is precisely thanks to this gift that he will be contacted to carry out a mission in a place very distant from the Culture: The Empire of Azad.
Great emphasis is given to the representation of the social differences that the aloof protagonist will face during his mission, an alien in an alien land.
The Game and the pleasure of the challenge that surpasses that of victory. The complete symbiosis that permutes the player and allows him to reach ecstasy.
Amazing.
Ho voluto dare una seconda opportunità al ciclo della Cultura di Banks dopo aver letto il primo deludente romanzo.
La lettura è stata una sorpresa del tutto inaspettata che ha riacceso la curiosità. Totalmente.
Banks cambia marcia e ricomincia da questo "L'Impero di Azad" ambientando la storia 700 anni dopo gli eventi narrati in "Pensa a Fleba".
Mantiene gli elementi solo accennati nel precedente: la Cultura, una società avanzata oltre ogni immaginazione in simbiosi perfetta con le macchine, profonde modifiche genetiche che permettono miracoli, viaggi a velocità di curvatura e megastrutture abitative lunghe chilometri.
Menti artificiali che gestiscono ogni aspetto della vita mentre l'umanità ne gode i piaceri.
L'ambientazione è originale e affascinante. Ma è solo il contorno.
Il protagonista della storia è Jernau Gurgeh, un esperto giocatore di giochi di strategia di ogni tipo e famoso in tutta la Cultura per la sua estrema abilità. Uno dei migliori.
Ed è proprio grazie a questa sua dote che verrà contattato per svolgere una missione in un luogo molto distante dalla Cultura: L'impero di Azad.
Grande enfasi viene data alla rappresentazione delle differenze sociali che lo scostante protagonista si troverà di fronte durante la sua missione, alieno in terra aliena.
Il Gioco e il piacere della sfida che supera quello della vittoria. La completa simbiosi che permuta il giocatore e permette di raggiungere l'estasi.
Strabiliante.
---------------------------
"Azad simply produced an insatiable desire for more victories, more power, more territory, more dominion..."
I wanted to give Banks' Culture cycle a second chance after reading the first disappointing novel.
Reading it was a completely unexpected surprise that rekindled curiosity. Totally.
Banks changes gear and starts again from this "The Empire of Azad" setting the story 700 years after the events narrated in "Consider Phleba".
It maintains the elements only hinted at in the previous one: the Culture, a society advanced beyond imagination in perfect symbiosis with machines, profound genetic modifications that allow miracles, warp-speed travel and kilometer-long mega-housing structures.
Artificial minds that manage every aspect of life while humanity enjoys its pleasures.
The setting is original and fascinating. But it is only the outline.
The protagonist of the story is Jernau Gurgeh, an expert player of strategy games of all kinds and famous throughout the Culture for his extreme skill. One of the best.
And it is precisely thanks to this gift that he will be contacted to carry out a mission in a place very distant from the Culture: The Empire of Azad.
Great emphasis is given to the representation of the social differences that the aloof protagonist will face during his mission, an alien in an alien land.
The Game and the pleasure of the challenge that surpasses that of victory. The complete symbiosis that permutes the player and allows him to reach ecstasy.
Amazing.
July 19, 2007
Use of Weapons was far superior, in plot and characterization. Player of Games offered no surprises especially if you have read other Culture novels. The plot twist is reminiscent of Ender's Game, and is alluded to in the very first sentence. The central game is never described, and therefore too vague of a concept to care about. Any exposition about the human condition, racism, and sexism were poorly entwined into the book, and did not fit naturally into the plot.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
February 15, 2024
While not as strong as Consider Phlebas for me it's ending makes it so damn close though.
I thoroughly enjoy these vignettes Banks presents us as a potential, often horrific, future of human(oid) species.
I thoroughly enjoy these vignettes Banks presents us as a potential, often horrific, future of human(oid) species.
November 15, 2012
My first Banks experience. It was OK. Some cool concepts, writing wasn't awful, the left-wing space utopia was fun, the plot had some twists. But but but.
Banks, though he seems like a cosmopolitan guy who's aware of the tropes he's using and their limitations, still commits the basic sin that makes so much science fiction so much less enjoyable to me than it could be. The sin: blandness. Blandness of writing, characterization, worldbuilding, humor -- everything. The problem, and it's not one with an easy or obvious solution, is how do you present an alien world -- with alien biology, technology, culture -- to a reader without being unintelligible or repulsive? I know of two ways to handle this well. The first is to just ditch the idea of true alienness entirely, make the characters basically human, and focus on making them as vividly and enjoyably human as possible, subordinating all superficially alien traits to that goal. A lot of comedic or light-hearted SF takes this path, and in that context it's hard to object to. (Zaphod Beeblebrox, Karkat Vantas, and the Doctor are basically just people -- but what people they are!) The second approach is to truly recreate the experience of being suddenly immersed in another culture. This necessarily involves all sorts of deliberate confusion, including linguistic confusion -- a culture other than one's own (esp. one at a different level of technological development from one's own) is going to mentally carve apart nature at places one is not used to, and that has to be reflected in the way the text uses its own terminology.
The best exemplar of this second approach I've encountered is John Clute's Appleseed, a dizzying linguistic assault that leaves the reader wondering, almost once per paragraph, things like: "is there a difference between 'flesh sapients' and 'flesh sophonts'?" or "what the hell is a 'breakfast head"?" or "wait, have the 'Caduceus wars' ever been mentioned before?" I read Appleseed a few months ago, and was unsure how to feel about it -- I enjoyed it but by the end I was getting tired of not knowing what Clute was going on about. But in retrospect, I think that's simply the way it had to be -- Clute was trying to depict a situation so truly alien that it shouldn't have been comprehensible after a mere 400 pages of contact.
Where was I? The Player of Games. Don't want to go on and on about this because the point is very simple. Banks doesn't take either of the two paths I just described. Like a lot of science fiction, he's at the low point in the middle: his characters are alien enough that they're not allow to talk in the terms used by Banks' own (20th century western) culture, but Banks can't bring himself to create a different set of terms, as that would risk Clute-style incomprehensibility. As a result, everything has a bland, schematic quality. The dialogue all feels kind of abstract and perfunctory, lacking the clutter of real (or even of conventionally-fictional) speech. The humor, lacking any bank of shared references, is weightless and generic. There are machine intelligences in Banks' world, but they do not differ in any interesting way from people, and the imperialist aliens encountered by the book's protagonist -- despite having three sexes and basing their entire society around an elaborate board game -- ultimately seem indistinguishable from a generic earth empire. The science fiction elements feel like stage clothing; the scenes about aliens and drones would not be meaningfully different if they were just about people, and the scenes about alien board games would not be meaningfully different if they were about chess.
That alien empire is a particularly telling example. Here is how the empire's use of that board game is initially presented to us:
The game of Azad is used not so much to determine which person will rule, but which tendency within the empire's ruling class will have the upper hand, which branch of economic theory will be followed, which creeds will be recognized within the religious apparat, and which political policies will be followed. . . . The idea, you see, is that Azad is so complex, so subtle, so flexible and so demanding that it is as precise and comprehensive a model of life as it is possible to construct. Whoever succeeds at the game succeeds in life; the same qualities are required in each to ensure dominance.
Sounds fascinating, doesn't it? But when we actually meet the aliens, there is no indication that the game pervades their thinking about anything but the game itself. They use it to determine who rules, but their speech and thinking about everything outside the game does not seem noticeably colored by the game itself (whose structure is, perhaps wisely, left mostly to the reader's imagination). The same thing goes for their three sexes. The third "apex" sex dominates over males and females, but Banks decides to refer to the apices using male pronouns to make things easier to read for humans from patriarchal societies, and as a result the differences between apices and males is indistinguishable from the difference between male aristocrats and male grunts in a human society. Everything that makes the empire interesting also creates the potential for confusion and distance on the reader's part, and Banks is so committed to being understood -- to "storytelling" in the sense of just getting the plot points across -- that he can't allow those interesting features to persist.
(Of course, one interpretation is that the empire is a satire of modern earth society, and that Azad and the three sexes are just there to distract us so we don't realize we're looking at ourselves in a mirror. But if it's a satire, its substance comes down to "we're obsessed with power and judge people according to arbitrary standards." Which is . . . true, I guess, but it's so broad and obvious a critique that I don't think it justifies the ruse.)
I've heard that many of the other Culture books have more alienness in them than this one, so I still intend to read some of the others at some point. For now, I prefer too much alienness to too little, and Clute to Banks.
Banks, though he seems like a cosmopolitan guy who's aware of the tropes he's using and their limitations, still commits the basic sin that makes so much science fiction so much less enjoyable to me than it could be. The sin: blandness. Blandness of writing, characterization, worldbuilding, humor -- everything. The problem, and it's not one with an easy or obvious solution, is how do you present an alien world -- with alien biology, technology, culture -- to a reader without being unintelligible or repulsive? I know of two ways to handle this well. The first is to just ditch the idea of true alienness entirely, make the characters basically human, and focus on making them as vividly and enjoyably human as possible, subordinating all superficially alien traits to that goal. A lot of comedic or light-hearted SF takes this path, and in that context it's hard to object to. (Zaphod Beeblebrox, Karkat Vantas, and the Doctor are basically just people -- but what people they are!) The second approach is to truly recreate the experience of being suddenly immersed in another culture. This necessarily involves all sorts of deliberate confusion, including linguistic confusion -- a culture other than one's own (esp. one at a different level of technological development from one's own) is going to mentally carve apart nature at places one is not used to, and that has to be reflected in the way the text uses its own terminology.
The best exemplar of this second approach I've encountered is John Clute's Appleseed, a dizzying linguistic assault that leaves the reader wondering, almost once per paragraph, things like: "is there a difference between 'flesh sapients' and 'flesh sophonts'?" or "what the hell is a 'breakfast head"?" or "wait, have the 'Caduceus wars' ever been mentioned before?" I read Appleseed a few months ago, and was unsure how to feel about it -- I enjoyed it but by the end I was getting tired of not knowing what Clute was going on about. But in retrospect, I think that's simply the way it had to be -- Clute was trying to depict a situation so truly alien that it shouldn't have been comprehensible after a mere 400 pages of contact.
Where was I? The Player of Games. Don't want to go on and on about this because the point is very simple. Banks doesn't take either of the two paths I just described. Like a lot of science fiction, he's at the low point in the middle: his characters are alien enough that they're not allow to talk in the terms used by Banks' own (20th century western) culture, but Banks can't bring himself to create a different set of terms, as that would risk Clute-style incomprehensibility. As a result, everything has a bland, schematic quality. The dialogue all feels kind of abstract and perfunctory, lacking the clutter of real (or even of conventionally-fictional) speech. The humor, lacking any bank of shared references, is weightless and generic. There are machine intelligences in Banks' world, but they do not differ in any interesting way from people, and the imperialist aliens encountered by the book's protagonist -- despite having three sexes and basing their entire society around an elaborate board game -- ultimately seem indistinguishable from a generic earth empire. The science fiction elements feel like stage clothing; the scenes about aliens and drones would not be meaningfully different if they were just about people, and the scenes about alien board games would not be meaningfully different if they were about chess.
That alien empire is a particularly telling example. Here is how the empire's use of that board game is initially presented to us:
The game of Azad is used not so much to determine which person will rule, but which tendency within the empire's ruling class will have the upper hand, which branch of economic theory will be followed, which creeds will be recognized within the religious apparat, and which political policies will be followed. . . . The idea, you see, is that Azad is so complex, so subtle, so flexible and so demanding that it is as precise and comprehensive a model of life as it is possible to construct. Whoever succeeds at the game succeeds in life; the same qualities are required in each to ensure dominance.
Sounds fascinating, doesn't it? But when we actually meet the aliens, there is no indication that the game pervades their thinking about anything but the game itself. They use it to determine who rules, but their speech and thinking about everything outside the game does not seem noticeably colored by the game itself (whose structure is, perhaps wisely, left mostly to the reader's imagination). The same thing goes for their three sexes. The third "apex" sex dominates over males and females, but Banks decides to refer to the apices using male pronouns to make things easier to read for humans from patriarchal societies, and as a result the differences between apices and males is indistinguishable from the difference between male aristocrats and male grunts in a human society. Everything that makes the empire interesting also creates the potential for confusion and distance on the reader's part, and Banks is so committed to being understood -- to "storytelling" in the sense of just getting the plot points across -- that he can't allow those interesting features to persist.
(Of course, one interpretation is that the empire is a satire of modern earth society, and that Azad and the three sexes are just there to distract us so we don't realize we're looking at ourselves in a mirror. But if it's a satire, its substance comes down to "we're obsessed with power and judge people according to arbitrary standards." Which is . . . true, I guess, but it's so broad and obvious a critique that I don't think it justifies the ruse.)
I've heard that many of the other Culture books have more alienness in them than this one, so I still intend to read some of the others at some point. For now, I prefer too much alienness to too little, and Clute to Banks.
August 7, 2023
Jernau Morat Gurgeh is a master “Player of Games.” In fact, he is so masterful, that he is becoming jaded and cynical. His success allows him to live an idyllic existence surrounded by friends and admirers. Like a mountain climber who has crested Everest, what’s left? Cue a series of events that will lead him to a hidden empire – The Empire of Azad. This entire culture is built around a game – a game so complex that the winner becomes the emperor.
I greatly enjoyed this novel mostly due to its fresh, unique storyline. I guess the only thing that comes close in my reading history was “Ender’s Game.” You can feel the clarity of plot that Banks had in his mind when he wrote this and that makes it an accessible and engrossing tale. In addition, the Culture universe is complex and sophisticated, filled with cool space megastructure, amazing ships, and interesting AI self-aware minds and drones. This is my second read in the Culture universe and it’s a fun place to explore.
As to downsides, my primary disappointment was with the Empire of Azad itself. I liked the ambiguity of ‘Consider Phlebas,’ where it was often difficult to determine who to root for. In that tale the main character saw flaws in both the Idirans and the Culture and that led to subtleties and a realistic texture. In this book, while there are still flaws in the Culture’s approach, once the underbelly of the Empire of Azad is revealed, there is no longer any doubt of who to favor and that weakens that plot in my opinion. At that moment, you know how the book must end. I also felt like Gurgeh accepted some plot points way too easily, which went against his earlier-established character and values. Unfortunately, I can’t explain this deeply without revealing spoilers. None of this ruined the novel, but ultimately, it lessened the ending greatly in my opinion.
Four puzzle-pieced stars for this wildly imaginative, energetically paced, and intellectually constructed space opera entry into the Culture universe. You’ll want to break out your Risk Shadow Forces board game (or any sci-fi related complex strategy game) after you’ve read the last word.
I greatly enjoyed this novel mostly due to its fresh, unique storyline. I guess the only thing that comes close in my reading history was “Ender’s Game.” You can feel the clarity of plot that Banks had in his mind when he wrote this and that makes it an accessible and engrossing tale. In addition, the Culture universe is complex and sophisticated, filled with cool space megastructure, amazing ships, and interesting AI self-aware minds and drones. This is my second read in the Culture universe and it’s a fun place to explore.
As to downsides, my primary disappointment was with the Empire of Azad itself. I liked the ambiguity of ‘Consider Phlebas,’ where it was often difficult to determine who to root for. In that tale the main character saw flaws in both the Idirans and the Culture and that led to subtleties and a realistic texture. In this book, while there are still flaws in the Culture’s approach, once the underbelly of the Empire of Azad is revealed, there is no longer any doubt of who to favor and that weakens that plot in my opinion. At that moment, you know how the book must end. I also felt like Gurgeh accepted some plot points way too easily, which went against his earlier-established character and values. Unfortunately, I can’t explain this deeply without revealing spoilers. None of this ruined the novel, but ultimately, it lessened the ending greatly in my opinion.
Four puzzle-pieced stars for this wildly imaginative, energetically paced, and intellectually constructed space opera entry into the Culture universe. You’ll want to break out your Risk Shadow Forces board game (or any sci-fi related complex strategy game) after you’ve read the last word.
June 14, 2022
Banks' second foray into the Culture established him as a major talent for good reasons and this book stands the test of time very well (still hard to believe this came out over 30 years ago). While ostensibly a story about a champion gamer from the Culture recruited to play a new game in foreign empire by Special Circumstances, the 'intelligence' wing of the amorphous culture, the underlying and for me more interesting story concerns the juxtaposition of Culture's society and the Imperial Azad and with it, the light cast on our own society.
Gurgeh, our lead, is from the Culture and is a game master; not of one specific game, but games in general. In a society of trillions, encompassing who knows how many species and societies, you can imagine the wealth of games devised over the years. Given that the culture is a 'post-scarcity' society, where people can do what ever they want with their abundant free time, games and game fests attract no small number of players. Still, Gurgeh is a little bored with life and looking for a new challenge and a friendly (if a bit obnoxious) drone suggests Gurgeh get in touch with 'Contact', the group in Culture that deals with new alien societies. After some arm twisting, Gurgeh embarks on a journey to Azad to play their famous game, an amazingly complex game of many 'boards' that the aliens study and play for a lifetime. The winners of the game assume the role of leaders in their empire, and indeed, the Emperor is decided by the winner of the 'grand game' every 6 years.
Gurgeh is a product of the Culture and as such rather naive in the ways of the Empire, which is based on power, money and status. There is no money in the Culture and indeed, little power or such; status is based solely on accomplishments, and Gurgeh has some as a master gamer, having written numerous papers and books on game theory as well as playing so many games masterfully. Hence, his is in almost shock when he encounters Azad society.
After he arrives he attends a ball given by the Emperor:
The first part of this tale is a little slow as it introduces Gurgeh and the gaming culture in Culture, but it moves quite nicely once he arrives for the great game of Azad. Banks does not even attempt to flesh out the rules; doing so would really take way too much time and space. Instead, he has Gurgeh explore the society of Azad, with all its warts, its grinding poverty on the (many) fringes, the notion of owning someone with the power to compel them to do things; basically the major aspects of a society based on wealth and power.
Great speculative fiction usually induces the reader to look at their own world in a different way. Banks, while telling a story of a complex game integral to the Azad society, lays that society bare and the similarities to modern society are subtly laid out in fits and starts. Also, on this latest reread, it is pretty easy to discern the influences of Jack Vance on the world building. Great stuff1 4.5 starts, rounding up!
Gurgeh, our lead, is from the Culture and is a game master; not of one specific game, but games in general. In a society of trillions, encompassing who knows how many species and societies, you can imagine the wealth of games devised over the years. Given that the culture is a 'post-scarcity' society, where people can do what ever they want with their abundant free time, games and game fests attract no small number of players. Still, Gurgeh is a little bored with life and looking for a new challenge and a friendly (if a bit obnoxious) drone suggests Gurgeh get in touch with 'Contact', the group in Culture that deals with new alien societies. After some arm twisting, Gurgeh embarks on a journey to Azad to play their famous game, an amazingly complex game of many 'boards' that the aliens study and play for a lifetime. The winners of the game assume the role of leaders in their empire, and indeed, the Emperor is decided by the winner of the 'grand game' every 6 years.
Gurgeh is a product of the Culture and as such rather naive in the ways of the Empire, which is based on power, money and status. There is no money in the Culture and indeed, little power or such; status is based solely on accomplishments, and Gurgeh has some as a master gamer, having written numerous papers and books on game theory as well as playing so many games masterfully. Hence, his is in almost shock when he encounters Azad society.
He learned more about the Empire itself, its history and politics, philosophy and religion, its beliefs and mores, and its mixtures of subspecies and sexes.
It seemed to him to be an unbearably vivid tangle of contradictions; at the same time pathologically violent and lugubriously sentimental, startlingly barbaric and surprisingly sophisticated, fabulously rich and grindingly poor (but also, undeniably, unequivocally fascinating).
After he arrives he attends a ball given by the Emperor:
Every few meters along the walls, and on both sides of every doorway, gaudily-uniformed males stood stock still, their trousered legs slightly apart, gloved hands clasped behind their rod-straight backs, their gaze fixed firmly on the high, painted ceilings.
"What are they standing their for?" Gurgeh whispered to the drone in Eachic, low enough so that Pequil couldn't hear.
"Show," the machine said.
Gurgeh thought about this. "Show?"
"Yes; to show that the Emperor is rich and important enough to have hundreds of flunkeys standing around doing nothing."
"Doesn't everybody know that already?"
The drone didn't answer for a moment. Then it sighed. "You haven't really cracked the psychology of wealth and power yet, have you, Jernau Gurgeh?"
The first part of this tale is a little slow as it introduces Gurgeh and the gaming culture in Culture, but it moves quite nicely once he arrives for the great game of Azad. Banks does not even attempt to flesh out the rules; doing so would really take way too much time and space. Instead, he has Gurgeh explore the society of Azad, with all its warts, its grinding poverty on the (many) fringes, the notion of owning someone with the power to compel them to do things; basically the major aspects of a society based on wealth and power.
Great speculative fiction usually induces the reader to look at their own world in a different way. Banks, while telling a story of a complex game integral to the Azad society, lays that society bare and the similarities to modern society are subtly laid out in fits and starts. Also, on this latest reread, it is pretty easy to discern the influences of Jack Vance on the world building. Great stuff1 4.5 starts, rounding up!
July 27, 2023
'The Player of Games' by Iain M. Banks is a wonderful novel! I am so pleased by it! Awesome multi-layered story! This novel is the second in the Culture series. It is stand-alone, but I think to fully understand the world-building of the author, readers should begin with Consider Phlebas.
I liked the character Mawhrun-Skel from the beginning. Just saying. A true player!
I thought Jernau Morat Gurgeh, our hero, a shallow snob at the start of the book. He is a bored dilettante, his chosen passion beginning to clink off-key in its siren song. Gurgeh, the top board-game player in the Culture, was ripe for an adventure. If one was offered him, it would definitely intrigue him enough to briefly amuse him thinking about it in the overly-familiar comforts of living within the advanced-technology cocoon of the Culture. Still, Gurgeh, although a little discontented at having almost reached the pinnacle of the rewards of his hobby, is reluctant to lose what he has. To push him out of the soft gentle cocoon, he would definitely need a kick in the posterior.
Mawhrun-Skel, a sentient drone, provides the kick. Or, as it seemed to me, as a putative cousin of Dante's Virgil, Mawhrun-Skel, an inside-out tongue-in-cheek deus ex machina, lifts a field suspiciously shaped like a shoe. Banks is a funny guy.
Gurgeh becomes a reluctant ambassador of sorts for the Culture. Special Circumstances, a secretive department which is part of Contact, the diplomat service in the government of the Culture, asks Gurgeh to learn a game played by an imperial empire discovered in another galaxy. The empire on the planet Aë is harsh and militaristic, ruled by a cruel aristocratic leadership (it is very familiar to me, seemingly very like some Earth countries). Besides competing for power within their own hierarchy, they spend a lot of their time destroying nearby civilizations on other planets.
But the empire has an odd way within its government to determine its leaders - a game called Azad. Azad is as institutionalized as its religion. Whoever wins the game, played over many weeks, becomes Emperor. Azad is tremendously complicated. Gurgeh is fascinated by it when the game is explained to him! He is not impressed by the Culture helper, a library drone, Trebel Flere-Imsaho Ephandra Lorgin Estral, that is assigned by the Culture to advise him about the game and the crude violent civilization of the planet Aë.
It takes Gurgeh two years to learn the game Azad. That is also how long it takes for the General Systems Vehicle (GSV), Little Rascal, to travel to Aë at hyperspace speeds.
Gurgeh grows into his full powers as a board player. He is not happy after the safety blanket technology of the Culture is stripped from his body, though, to match the the tech and bodies of the people of Aë. He not only endures several attempts on his life and other dangers once he is living on Aë, he sees poverty and physical abuse (again, there is a certain similarity of these scenarios which mirror the civilizations here on Earth!) for the first time in his life. But does any of his involvement as an alien guest in a civilization hostile to civilized mores have a purpose beyond acquiring knowledge of a nationally important game? Is Culture playing him as a pawn in a triple-layered board game?
Oh! I have to stop! American football is on the TV! I wonder what players will be injured and taken down today? Oh, oh! Does that player have blood on his face? They are bringing out a stretcher! Hit playback, would you, gentle reader? I don’t really think football is symbolic of Who We Americans Truly Are, as Banks might believe so. It’s just a game. Right? Right?
I liked the character Mawhrun-Skel from the beginning. Just saying. A true player!
I thought Jernau Morat Gurgeh, our hero, a shallow snob at the start of the book. He is a bored dilettante, his chosen passion beginning to clink off-key in its siren song. Gurgeh, the top board-game player in the Culture, was ripe for an adventure. If one was offered him, it would definitely intrigue him enough to briefly amuse him thinking about it in the overly-familiar comforts of living within the advanced-technology cocoon of the Culture. Still, Gurgeh, although a little discontented at having almost reached the pinnacle of the rewards of his hobby, is reluctant to lose what he has. To push him out of the soft gentle cocoon, he would definitely need a kick in the posterior.
Mawhrun-Skel, a sentient drone, provides the kick. Or, as it seemed to me, as a putative cousin of Dante's Virgil, Mawhrun-Skel, an inside-out tongue-in-cheek deus ex machina, lifts a field suspiciously shaped like a shoe. Banks is a funny guy.
Gurgeh becomes a reluctant ambassador of sorts for the Culture. Special Circumstances, a secretive department which is part of Contact, the diplomat service in the government of the Culture, asks Gurgeh to learn a game played by an imperial empire discovered in another galaxy. The empire on the planet Aë is harsh and militaristic, ruled by a cruel aristocratic leadership (it is very familiar to me, seemingly very like some Earth countries). Besides competing for power within their own hierarchy, they spend a lot of their time destroying nearby civilizations on other planets.
But the empire has an odd way within its government to determine its leaders - a game called Azad. Azad is as institutionalized as its religion. Whoever wins the game, played over many weeks, becomes Emperor. Azad is tremendously complicated. Gurgeh is fascinated by it when the game is explained to him! He is not impressed by the Culture helper, a library drone, Trebel Flere-Imsaho Ephandra Lorgin Estral, that is assigned by the Culture to advise him about the game and the crude violent civilization of the planet Aë.
It takes Gurgeh two years to learn the game Azad. That is also how long it takes for the General Systems Vehicle (GSV), Little Rascal, to travel to Aë at hyperspace speeds.
Gurgeh grows into his full powers as a board player. He is not happy after the safety blanket technology of the Culture is stripped from his body, though, to match the the tech and bodies of the people of Aë. He not only endures several attempts on his life and other dangers once he is living on Aë, he sees poverty and physical abuse (again, there is a certain similarity of these scenarios which mirror the civilizations here on Earth!) for the first time in his life. But does any of his involvement as an alien guest in a civilization hostile to civilized mores have a purpose beyond acquiring knowledge of a nationally important game? Is Culture playing him as a pawn in a triple-layered board game?
Oh! I have to stop! American football is on the TV! I wonder what players will be injured and taken down today? Oh, oh! Does that player have blood on his face? They are bringing out a stretcher! Hit playback, would you, gentle reader? I don’t really think football is symbolic of Who We Americans Truly Are, as Banks might believe so. It’s just a game. Right? Right?
June 9, 2018
Sometimes an author writes a novel so great that while you're reading it you realise you're holding not only a kickass book, but the promise of many more amazing stories to come.
The Player of Games is one of those novels - the sort of book that gives you that rare, sweet premonition of a future filled with tens of hours of pure reading pleasure.
This novel is the second book in Iain M. Banks' Culture series and while Consider Phlebas kicked off Banks' famous universe it is The Player of Games that marks its entry into the illustrious ranks of the all-time greatest science fiction scenarios.
This is a novel of riotous and fascinating imagination.
Protagonist Jernau Gurgeh is a citizen of the post-scarcity, AI/human civilisation known as The Culture. Across a vast society of ringworlds, planets and moon-sized starships The Culture is a utopia whose people are free to pursue whatever interest or obsession takes their fancy. Sport, learning, sex, whatever - you can push the limits to your heart's (and other organs'!) content.
Gurgeh has used this freedom to become an obsessive who spends his life playing and mastering all forms of games. He's known for it, and regarded highly for it. It's fair to say that playing games is central to who he is. This innocuous hobby has, however, drawn the eyes of some of The Culture's shadier citizens.
For the culture, as friendly and utopian as it is, likes to meddle in the fates of more barbarous civilisations via its covert-ops division, Special Circumstances. SC has taken an interest in Gurgeh and by taking advantage of his obsession with winning they are able to blackmail him into agreeing to complete a job for them.
Gurgeh is pressed into travelling to a faraway empire, a society somewhat less utopian than The Culture that uses a series of games - where the stakes can be life and death - to determine who will be their next leader. Gurgeh is to enter these games as a Culture observer, under the close protection of his Special Circumstances AI drone, but of course, his role may be a little bigger than he anticipates...
I won't divulge any more as I would hate to spoil your reading fun, and what fun you'll have! Bank's wit, so rare in an SF writer and liable to make you laugh aloud, is evident here, along with his gift for pulse-racing action sequences, allied to an enviable skill at building completely plausible and immersive worlds.
This is a fantastic novel that had me daydreaming about the Culture for weeks. Read it, and prepare to lock yourself in a room with the brilliant series of books that came after it. Seriously, if you love SF, and you haven't read The Player of Games stop what you're doing, ignore your friends and family and get thee to a bookstore.
My only regret with having read the entire Culture series is that, like an idiot, I greedily gobbled them up too quickly, saving none to be savored later.
With Banks' passing the Culture series is prematurely over. This is a terrible loss, but in my opinion, we're very, very lucky to have what he had time to write.
The Player of Games is one of those novels - the sort of book that gives you that rare, sweet premonition of a future filled with tens of hours of pure reading pleasure.
This novel is the second book in Iain M. Banks' Culture series and while Consider Phlebas kicked off Banks' famous universe it is The Player of Games that marks its entry into the illustrious ranks of the all-time greatest science fiction scenarios.
This is a novel of riotous and fascinating imagination.
Protagonist Jernau Gurgeh is a citizen of the post-scarcity, AI/human civilisation known as The Culture. Across a vast society of ringworlds, planets and moon-sized starships The Culture is a utopia whose people are free to pursue whatever interest or obsession takes their fancy. Sport, learning, sex, whatever - you can push the limits to your heart's (and other organs'!) content.
Gurgeh has used this freedom to become an obsessive who spends his life playing and mastering all forms of games. He's known for it, and regarded highly for it. It's fair to say that playing games is central to who he is. This innocuous hobby has, however, drawn the eyes of some of The Culture's shadier citizens.
For the culture, as friendly and utopian as it is, likes to meddle in the fates of more barbarous civilisations via its covert-ops division, Special Circumstances. SC has taken an interest in Gurgeh and by taking advantage of his obsession with winning they are able to blackmail him into agreeing to complete a job for them.
Gurgeh is pressed into travelling to a faraway empire, a society somewhat less utopian than The Culture that uses a series of games - where the stakes can be life and death - to determine who will be their next leader. Gurgeh is to enter these games as a Culture observer, under the close protection of his Special Circumstances AI drone, but of course, his role may be a little bigger than he anticipates...
I won't divulge any more as I would hate to spoil your reading fun, and what fun you'll have! Bank's wit, so rare in an SF writer and liable to make you laugh aloud, is evident here, along with his gift for pulse-racing action sequences, allied to an enviable skill at building completely plausible and immersive worlds.
This is a fantastic novel that had me daydreaming about the Culture for weeks. Read it, and prepare to lock yourself in a room with the brilliant series of books that came after it. Seriously, if you love SF, and you haven't read The Player of Games stop what you're doing, ignore your friends and family and get thee to a bookstore.
My only regret with having read the entire Culture series is that, like an idiot, I greedily gobbled them up too quickly, saving none to be savored later.
With Banks' passing the Culture series is prematurely over. This is a terrible loss, but in my opinion, we're very, very lucky to have what he had time to write.
March 28, 2014
Well played Mr Banks. Well played.
I'm struggling to find the words to express my awe in the wake of finishing this book. I feel much as I'd imagine a wizened game player would watching true masters dance across the board. Unable to do so myself, but completely transfixed by the beauty and depth of their movements.
I don't think I can recommend this highly enough. It isn't necessary to have read Consider Phlebas which is the first book in the Culture series. I've read half of it and had to stop to read a book club book and haven't pick it up since though I'm not sure why. Kim really enjoyed this one and suggested I add it to my challenge. I'm so so glad I did!
It started out a bit slowly, but it wasn't in any way dull or boring. We learn a lot about the Culture and how those who are born within it live. It's a fascinating society. Highly technologically advanced, they live in a nearly utopian world where each citizen is free to do whatever they find most enjoyable.
The Empire by contrast is not as advanced nor as accommodating. It's a brutal place where people have little in the way of rights and the Emperor rules supreme. Interestingly they choose their ruler by means of a highly complex and competitive game called Azad.
I couldn't help but draw parallels between the planet Ea and Earth. Of course this was the worst possible parts of Earth and humanity, but it was in my head from near the beginning. You learn more about Ea as the book progresses that makes your blood run cold and I wished I hadn't made that connection in my mind early in the novel. I don't know if it was intentional on the part of Iain M. Banks but it resonated deeply in me.
The game theory aspect was fascinating. It's always been a subject that I find interesting and it was put to such good use here. (This next bit is a spoiler since it only comes out near the end, but I don't think it ruins any part of the story at all. I'm marking it anyway for those who are completely spoiler averse.)
Besides being brilliant it's also just a really fun ride.
I'm really looking forward to reading more in the Culture series. I'll be thinking about this one for months yet!
I'm struggling to find the words to express my awe in the wake of finishing this book. I feel much as I'd imagine a wizened game player would watching true masters dance across the board. Unable to do so myself, but completely transfixed by the beauty and depth of their movements.
I don't think I can recommend this highly enough. It isn't necessary to have read Consider Phlebas which is the first book in the Culture series. I've read half of it and had to stop to read a book club book and haven't pick it up since though I'm not sure why. Kim really enjoyed this one and suggested I add it to my challenge. I'm so so glad I did!
It started out a bit slowly, but it wasn't in any way dull or boring. We learn a lot about the Culture and how those who are born within it live. It's a fascinating society. Highly technologically advanced, they live in a nearly utopian world where each citizen is free to do whatever they find most enjoyable.
The Empire by contrast is not as advanced nor as accommodating. It's a brutal place where people have little in the way of rights and the Emperor rules supreme. Interestingly they choose their ruler by means of a highly complex and competitive game called Azad.
I couldn't help but draw parallels between the planet Ea and Earth. Of course this was the worst possible parts of Earth and humanity, but it was in my head from near the beginning. You learn more about Ea as the book progresses that makes your blood run cold and I wished I hadn't made that connection in my mind early in the novel. I don't know if it was intentional on the part of Iain M. Banks but it resonated deeply in me.
The game theory aspect was fascinating. It's always been a subject that I find interesting and it was put to such good use here. (This next bit is a spoiler since it only comes out near the end, but I don't think it ruins any part of the story at all. I'm marking it anyway for those who are completely spoiler averse.)
Besides being brilliant it's also just a really fun ride.
I'm really looking forward to reading more in the Culture series. I'll be thinking about this one for months yet!
August 24, 2014
The last time I read "serious" sci-fi I was twelve years old. I was a bit obsessed with robots, so I bought Asimov's I, Robot collection and dove in. Even at that age, I could sense that something was off. It wasn't the robots -- Asimov writes great robots. In fact, Asimov is so good at writing robots that it seemed like he had applied the same formula to people. Everyone (or at least all the good people) were logical, unemotional, rational, and cold. Reading the stories was like watching a visualisation of a gas in a volume: each character was like a little molecule of logic, bouncing off other molecules to release tiny whisps of Plotium, the rarest of all sci fi elements. Disappointed, I gave up on the genre for a long time. Coming back to it with this book by Iain M. Banks, I soon remembered why I left.
The plot can be covered fairly briefly: the Player of Games is a story about a man named Gurgeh, who is the first sci-fi man to be named after the noise of cat sick. Gurgeh is a brilliant game player. I mean this literally: he plays board games exceptionally well. Alas, one day, Gurgeh makes a mistake -- if only he could play upon human emotions as well as he could play the board! The mistake means that Gurgeh is obliged to play the most complicated board game ever, against aliens whose very civilisation is based upon it. As the games progress, we realise that not just honour is at stake: Gurgeh represents a civilisation of peaceful expansion; the aliens are barbaric and thirsty for war. Whose culture will prevail?
Stop yawning. The fate of the galaxy is at stake.
Gurgeh lives alone in his house in seclusion, being brilliant in various private ways. People sometimes visit him for entertainment or sex, but then they politely leave again after a few days. When people are visiting, Gurgeh's house takes care of the catering and cleaning up, so all Gurgeh has to do is be witty and/or skilled and/or seductive. You can imagine that a life of brilliance, quietude, pampering, relationships maintained by others, and no-strings-attached sex would appeal to a certain type of reader. In fact the whole novel is epic wish-fulfilment of the highest order, as what may be the single greatest game player in the Universe overcomes his own doubts about himself and comes into his own. I hadn't, however, realised that I was going to be reading escapist fiction, so the repeated references to Gurgeh's perfect, ubernerd, life-of-the-mind existence were a little jarring.
Rather like the stereotypical nerd, the book talks a lot about sex but doesn't actually have much sex, and it's always discussed in a rather disinterested, clinical context. Strewn throughout the book are passages about sex, alien sex, and sexual politics, all of which Banks somehow manages to make boring. The passages on alien sex, in particular, sound like a textbook for a kid's health class in a particularly conservative country: "The vagina turns inside-out to implant the fertilized egg in the third sex, on the right, which has a womb."
In fact, the particular aliens Gurgeh visits don't want to have sex with him and think he's kind of disgusting. This would be funnier, except that Gurgeh, predictably enough, decides that he didn't want to have sex with them anyway.
The sexual politics of the novel is also extremely tedious. Early on in the book Gurgeh is talking to a woman, Yay, who visited for the evening but refused to have sex with him. He asks her why. '"I feel you want to ... take me," Yay said, "like a piece, like an area. To be had; to be ... possessed." Suddenly she looked very puzzled. "There's something very ... I don't know; primitive, perhaps, about you, Gurgeh."'
I'm not sure what Banks was trying to do here, but this is classic romance-novel stuff: frail woman thrown into confusion by pure, raw, unadulterated gender role. It later transpires that changing gender and homosexual sex are completely normal in Gurgeh's civilisation, but Gurgeh has never done either of these things, making him a weirdo -- but a sexy, raw, "primitive" weirdo. In any case, this geek wish-fulfillment stuff is very strange to encounter in a sci fi book.
Gurgeh is also kind of a jerk. He ignores people he doesn't like, or actively brushes them away. Gurgeh's civilisation treats conscious machines as equivalent to people, and they certainly act like people, yet it's clear that Gurgeh considers the machines beneath him. Banks seems to go out of his way to establish Gurgeh as irascible and discriminatory. In one baffling scene a drone is trying to discuss an assignment with Gurgeh while Gurgeh actively flicks crumbs from his dinner at it in a remarkably petulant display of passive aggression. Yet at no point is the reader invited to sympathise with Gurgeh's negative aspects -- he's just the main character, he's kind of horrible, that's all there is to it.
The book is hampered by bad writing. The plot is spurred by a transgression of Gurgeh's which leads to an eyebrow-raising blackmailing scene in which all the pieces are there but never seem to come together: there's a paragraph, for example, where the blackmailer explains that he would be happy to reveal the transgression simply for its entertainment value, and then, immediately afterwards, somehow convinces Gurgeh that he wouldn't reveal anything if Gurgeh would just do his bidding. That's followed by a long passage in which Gurgeh mopes that he would never be forgiven, complete with imaginary visualised scenes of social embarrassment, which seem acutely hollow given the kind of man we have established Gurgeh to be. There is a lot of rubbing of beards, which is the universal sci fi action for distracted thought (it's an action which is, of course, accessible only to males, but that is not a problem for traditional sci fi). Gurgeh is a big rubber of beards -- fourteen times, actually, over the course of the book (thanks, Kindle search). It got so repetitive that I started to feel sorry for his chin. The ship Gurgeh travels on is constantly referred to as "the old warship" in the same sense that a thug in a different book would be constantly referred to as "the big man", i.e., lazily. Ocassionally Gurgeh will take a woman back to the old warship, and fuck her in it.
The plot drags. Gurgeh is forced to play a complicated game against aliens, who, it turns out, are rather dreadful. In a hair-raising twist, the reader is invited eventually to discover that the values Gurgeh condemns in the aliens are disturbingly similar to the values that we humans have here on Earth in the present day. Nothing significant is made of this revelation that wouldn't also fit in, say, a weekend newspaper opinion column. There are some half-hearted references to the idea that one's language shapes one's thoughts, but, again, only in ways which are both heavy-handed and cursory (for example: Gurgeh starts speaking in his native language, rather than the inferior language of the aliens, and immediately has an epiphany about how to win his current game). Problems of exposition crop up in several places. There are several long passages in which Gurgeh attempts to explain his civilisation's values to the aliens, apparently because this is the only way that Banks could find to explain Gurgeh's civilisation's values to his readers. In writing about the universe's most complicated game, Banks also has the problem that he needs to write about playing the game without getting bogged down in the rules. Consequently, there are several passages of the form "Gurgeh knew that he was missing something [...] In a flash of inspiration, Gurgeh realised what he was missing". Gameplay without the gameplay, in other words, and, for the reader, all of the frustration of game-playing, but none of the fun.
Frustration is a good summary of the whole book. Banks is aware enough of the genre's tropes to mock them (the names of the spaceships are great), but yet he doesn't manage to escape them. The result is stereotypical SF: one-dimensional characters, great ideas, and bad writing.
The plot can be covered fairly briefly: the Player of Games is a story about a man named Gurgeh, who is the first sci-fi man to be named after the noise of cat sick. Gurgeh is a brilliant game player. I mean this literally: he plays board games exceptionally well. Alas, one day, Gurgeh makes a mistake -- if only he could play upon human emotions as well as he could play the board! The mistake means that Gurgeh is obliged to play the most complicated board game ever, against aliens whose very civilisation is based upon it. As the games progress, we realise that not just honour is at stake: Gurgeh represents a civilisation of peaceful expansion; the aliens are barbaric and thirsty for war. Whose culture will prevail?
Stop yawning. The fate of the galaxy is at stake.
Gurgeh lives alone in his house in seclusion, being brilliant in various private ways. People sometimes visit him for entertainment or sex, but then they politely leave again after a few days. When people are visiting, Gurgeh's house takes care of the catering and cleaning up, so all Gurgeh has to do is be witty and/or skilled and/or seductive. You can imagine that a life of brilliance, quietude, pampering, relationships maintained by others, and no-strings-attached sex would appeal to a certain type of reader. In fact the whole novel is epic wish-fulfilment of the highest order, as what may be the single greatest game player in the Universe overcomes his own doubts about himself and comes into his own. I hadn't, however, realised that I was going to be reading escapist fiction, so the repeated references to Gurgeh's perfect, ubernerd, life-of-the-mind existence were a little jarring.
Rather like the stereotypical nerd, the book talks a lot about sex but doesn't actually have much sex, and it's always discussed in a rather disinterested, clinical context. Strewn throughout the book are passages about sex, alien sex, and sexual politics, all of which Banks somehow manages to make boring. The passages on alien sex, in particular, sound like a textbook for a kid's health class in a particularly conservative country: "The vagina turns inside-out to implant the fertilized egg in the third sex, on the right, which has a womb."
In fact, the particular aliens Gurgeh visits don't want to have sex with him and think he's kind of disgusting. This would be funnier, except that Gurgeh, predictably enough, decides that he didn't want to have sex with them anyway.
The sexual politics of the novel is also extremely tedious. Early on in the book Gurgeh is talking to a woman, Yay, who visited for the evening but refused to have sex with him. He asks her why. '"I feel you want to ... take me," Yay said, "like a piece, like an area. To be had; to be ... possessed." Suddenly she looked very puzzled. "There's something very ... I don't know; primitive, perhaps, about you, Gurgeh."'
I'm not sure what Banks was trying to do here, but this is classic romance-novel stuff: frail woman thrown into confusion by pure, raw, unadulterated gender role. It later transpires that changing gender and homosexual sex are completely normal in Gurgeh's civilisation, but Gurgeh has never done either of these things, making him a weirdo -- but a sexy, raw, "primitive" weirdo. In any case, this geek wish-fulfillment stuff is very strange to encounter in a sci fi book.
Gurgeh is also kind of a jerk. He ignores people he doesn't like, or actively brushes them away. Gurgeh's civilisation treats conscious machines as equivalent to people, and they certainly act like people, yet it's clear that Gurgeh considers the machines beneath him. Banks seems to go out of his way to establish Gurgeh as irascible and discriminatory. In one baffling scene a drone is trying to discuss an assignment with Gurgeh while Gurgeh actively flicks crumbs from his dinner at it in a remarkably petulant display of passive aggression. Yet at no point is the reader invited to sympathise with Gurgeh's negative aspects -- he's just the main character, he's kind of horrible, that's all there is to it.
The book is hampered by bad writing. The plot is spurred by a transgression of Gurgeh's which leads to an eyebrow-raising blackmailing scene in which all the pieces are there but never seem to come together: there's a paragraph, for example, where the blackmailer explains that he would be happy to reveal the transgression simply for its entertainment value, and then, immediately afterwards, somehow convinces Gurgeh that he wouldn't reveal anything if Gurgeh would just do his bidding. That's followed by a long passage in which Gurgeh mopes that he would never be forgiven, complete with imaginary visualised scenes of social embarrassment, which seem acutely hollow given the kind of man we have established Gurgeh to be. There is a lot of rubbing of beards, which is the universal sci fi action for distracted thought (it's an action which is, of course, accessible only to males, but that is not a problem for traditional sci fi). Gurgeh is a big rubber of beards -- fourteen times, actually, over the course of the book (thanks, Kindle search). It got so repetitive that I started to feel sorry for his chin. The ship Gurgeh travels on is constantly referred to as "the old warship" in the same sense that a thug in a different book would be constantly referred to as "the big man", i.e., lazily. Ocassionally Gurgeh will take a woman back to the old warship, and fuck her in it.
The plot drags. Gurgeh is forced to play a complicated game against aliens, who, it turns out, are rather dreadful. In a hair-raising twist, the reader is invited eventually to discover that the values Gurgeh condemns in the aliens are disturbingly similar to the values that we humans have here on Earth in the present day. Nothing significant is made of this revelation that wouldn't also fit in, say, a weekend newspaper opinion column. There are some half-hearted references to the idea that one's language shapes one's thoughts, but, again, only in ways which are both heavy-handed and cursory (for example: Gurgeh starts speaking in his native language, rather than the inferior language of the aliens, and immediately has an epiphany about how to win his current game). Problems of exposition crop up in several places. There are several long passages in which Gurgeh attempts to explain his civilisation's values to the aliens, apparently because this is the only way that Banks could find to explain Gurgeh's civilisation's values to his readers. In writing about the universe's most complicated game, Banks also has the problem that he needs to write about playing the game without getting bogged down in the rules. Consequently, there are several passages of the form "Gurgeh knew that he was missing something [...] In a flash of inspiration, Gurgeh realised what he was missing". Gameplay without the gameplay, in other words, and, for the reader, all of the frustration of game-playing, but none of the fun.
Frustration is a good summary of the whole book. Banks is aware enough of the genre's tropes to mock them (the names of the spaceships are great), but yet he doesn't manage to escape them. The result is stereotypical SF: one-dimensional characters, great ideas, and bad writing.
January 6, 2022
-Juegos dentro de juegos y multitud de temas tratados bajo el barniz de ciencia ficción.-
Género. Ciencia ficción.
Lo que nos cuenta. Gurgeh es un jugador profesional de todos los juegos conocidos dentro del sector espacial de la Cultura y en los que suele ser vencedor. Es en esos momentos cuando realmente se siente bien, para sentirse después vacío cuando no juega, por lo que cree que ser parte de Contacto, el área de inteligencia política de la Cultura que trabaja con otras civilizaciones para “moldear” las relaciones, podría ser bueno para él. Al ser visitado por una destacada IA del departamento de Circunstancias Especiales de Contacto, la reunión deja abierta la posibilidad de su colaboración (o no) con el departamento respecto a algún tipo de juego. Durante una partida de Acabado que va a ganar, pero ante la posibilidad de conseguir una Red Completa, configuración victoriosa de juego que nadie ha conseguido antes en la Cultura, Gurgeh acepta la ayuda de la peculiar IA Mawhrin-Skel para hacer trampas y conseguir la configuración, pero además de no conseguirlo sí logrará que Mawhrin-Skel use esa información, entre otras, para chantajear a Gurgeh y que haga presión para que la IA pueda volver al servicio activo en Contacto, de donde fue apartada hace ya tiempo. Segundo libro de la serie La Cultura, pero de trama totalmente independiente como ocurre en todos sus volúmenes.
¿Quiere saber más de este libro, sin spoilers? Visite:
https://librosdeolethros.blogspot.com...
Género. Ciencia ficción.
Lo que nos cuenta. Gurgeh es un jugador profesional de todos los juegos conocidos dentro del sector espacial de la Cultura y en los que suele ser vencedor. Es en esos momentos cuando realmente se siente bien, para sentirse después vacío cuando no juega, por lo que cree que ser parte de Contacto, el área de inteligencia política de la Cultura que trabaja con otras civilizaciones para “moldear” las relaciones, podría ser bueno para él. Al ser visitado por una destacada IA del departamento de Circunstancias Especiales de Contacto, la reunión deja abierta la posibilidad de su colaboración (o no) con el departamento respecto a algún tipo de juego. Durante una partida de Acabado que va a ganar, pero ante la posibilidad de conseguir una Red Completa, configuración victoriosa de juego que nadie ha conseguido antes en la Cultura, Gurgeh acepta la ayuda de la peculiar IA Mawhrin-Skel para hacer trampas y conseguir la configuración, pero además de no conseguirlo sí logrará que Mawhrin-Skel use esa información, entre otras, para chantajear a Gurgeh y que haga presión para que la IA pueda volver al servicio activo en Contacto, de donde fue apartada hace ya tiempo. Segundo libro de la serie La Cultura, pero de trama totalmente independiente como ocurre en todos sus volúmenes.
¿Quiere saber más de este libro, sin spoilers? Visite:
https://librosdeolethros.blogspot.com...
May 19, 2014
This is the second Culture book I've read. The first was Excession, which was decidedly not the book to start with. I couldn't make heads nor tails of it. Of course, the second one I ended up picking up wasn't the first book in the series either, but at least it was the second. And much more accessible. Whew!
Note: The rest of this review has been withdrawn due to the changes in Goodreads policy and enforcement. You can read why I came to this decision here.
In the meantime, you can read the entire review at Smorgasbook
Note: The rest of this review has been withdrawn due to the changes in Goodreads policy and enforcement. You can read why I came to this decision here.
In the meantime, you can read the entire review at Smorgasbook
May 27, 2024
I had the same feeling about this one as for Consider Phlebas, that I should have read it years ago. It has an 80's vibe which I couldn't shake off; in my opinion it didn't age well.
Two things resonated with me though: one is Flere-Imsaho (btw, where did he come up with such odd and long names from, does anyone know?) which is the salt and pepper of the story. I loved the little drone, such a marvelous character!
The other thing is the allegory towards contemporary societies - the Emipre of Azad I couldn't help but seen it as a sort of Planet of the Apes combined with today's Russia, and its demented emperor as Putin. From this point of view the novel is ageless.
Culture as a civilation is a wonder, but some of its technologies - better said, the lack of - is striking
Anyway, I did enjoy its originality, the Culture, the universe they created, even the idea of the game
But I won't be continuing with the rest of the Culture books.
Two things resonated with me though: one is Flere-Imsaho (btw, where did he come up with such odd and long names from, does anyone know?) which is the salt and pepper of the story. I loved the little drone, such a marvelous character!
The other thing is the allegory towards contemporary societies - the Emipre of Azad I couldn't help but seen it as a sort of Planet of the Apes combined with today's Russia, and its demented emperor as Putin. From this point of view the novel is ageless.
Culture as a civilation is a wonder, but some of its technologies - better said, the lack of - is striking
Anyway, I did enjoy its originality, the Culture, the universe they created, even the idea of the game
But I won't be continuing with the rest of the Culture books.
October 9, 2013
A very satisfying read for me and a worthwhile homage to a modern master of science fiction whom we lost this year. I enjoyed his first foray in this genre, “Consider Phlebas”, many years ago, so it is fitting that I plug a big gap in my reading history by taking on this 1988 landmark set in the same fictional scenario of a far-future society called the Culture.
In the Culture, all basic human needs are taken care of through technology, there is no war or crime, and its peoples are free to party, pursue the arts, take up useless hobbies, or apply themselves to building the next artificial world. If they are bored with their sex life, they can change their gender. Our hero, Gurgeh, has become a highly respected master of game playing, living for the next success in a tournament or the acclaim of his next academic paper on game theory. He is basically a neutral, non-judgmental character by which the reader gets to experience an interesting contrast between utopian and dystopian societies.
Among Gurgeh’s best friends are robots (“drones”), whose level of artificial intelligence has led to their achievement of full personhood status. Bank’s does a great job in making them seem more human than real people, especially in their emotional aspects. One ancient drone has a perspective on reality and the human enterprise which appeals to him, and another recent immigrant, Mawhrin-Skel, engages his empathy over its frustration at being booted out of the service devoted to exploring alien cultures, “Contact”. This latter friend recognizes what drives Gurgeh:
Oh, it’s all so wonderful on the Culture, isn’t it, Gurgeh; nobody starves and nobody dies of disease or natural disasters and nobody and nothing’s exploited, but there’s still luck and heartache and joy, there’s still chance and advantage and disadvantage.
But life in paradise inevitably becomes boring, and as a reader we become starved for an interesting plot development. Gurgeh hears of a secret distant empire, Azad, which is effectively founded on a game used to winnow out who succeeds in their society, and a Contact agent drone easily persuades him to travel a couple of years to join their tournament in what he is told is an ambassadorial initiative. He can’t resist the prospect of playing a game (also called Azad) where the stakes are so high .
It turns out, these aliens have a society with all the ills of our current human civilization, including wars of domination, political corruption, the cruel hierarchy of the haves and have-nots, violent crime, pornography, etc. It becomes hard to recognize them as aliens, save for the quirk of having three genders. Gurgeh is so concentrated on succeeding at the game of Azad, it takes him a while to truly become disgusted with these folk. With a bit more advancement in technology, the Azadians could become quite a dangerous scourge in the galaxy. How can an idealistic, egalitarian society like Culture deal with such a throwback to dog-eat-dog life without playing their own game of forceful domination? Late in the game Gurgeh comes to understand he is a pawn in the clash between cultures.
There are plenty of other writers who push the envelope further in areas of space colonization, impact alien cultures on human sensibilities, and use of technology in the service of hopeful utopias. Yet Banks excels with these subjects by taking a less thrilling or splashy route, one that puts you personally in the picture through a self-centered anti-hero. It may not have the philosophical depth of Le Guin’s contrast of socialist and capitalistic worlds in “The Dispossessed”, but it is still a worthy classic exploration of what human qualities might be lost when risk and death are conquered and what aspects might be retained in robots we create or aliens we might encounter.
In closing, I would like to share a couple of examples where the prose occasionally takes flight. In the following, Banks nicely captures some of how game playing infects Gurgeh's way of looking at the world:
As happened every now and again, everything he saw around him seemed to be part of the game; the way people stood like pieces, grouped according to who could take or affect whom; the way the pattern on the marquee was like a simple grid area on the board, and the poles like planted power-sources waiting to replenish some exhausted minor piece and supporting a crux-point in the game; the way people and police stood like the suddenly closed jaws of some nightmarish pincer-movement… all was the game, everything was seen in its light, translated into the combative imagery of its language, evaluated in the context its structure imposed upon the mind.
In this example, Gurgeh's robot assistant tries to educate him about the Azadians by showing him examples of their cruel pornography:
The man’s eyes glittered in the screen-light, unused photons reflecting from the halo of iris. The pupils widened at first, then shrank, became pinpoints. The drone waited for the wide, staring eyes to fill with moisture, for the tiny muscles around the eyes to flinch and the eyelids to close and the man to shake his head and turn away, but nothing of the sort happened. The screen held his gaze, as though the infinitesimal pressure of light it spent upon the room had somehow reversed, and so sucked the watching man forward, to hold him, teetering before the fall, fixed and steady and pointed at the flickering surface like some long-stilled moon.
In the Culture, all basic human needs are taken care of through technology, there is no war or crime, and its peoples are free to party, pursue the arts, take up useless hobbies, or apply themselves to building the next artificial world. If they are bored with their sex life, they can change their gender. Our hero, Gurgeh, has become a highly respected master of game playing, living for the next success in a tournament or the acclaim of his next academic paper on game theory. He is basically a neutral, non-judgmental character by which the reader gets to experience an interesting contrast between utopian and dystopian societies.
Among Gurgeh’s best friends are robots (“drones”), whose level of artificial intelligence has led to their achievement of full personhood status. Bank’s does a great job in making them seem more human than real people, especially in their emotional aspects. One ancient drone has a perspective on reality and the human enterprise which appeals to him, and another recent immigrant, Mawhrin-Skel, engages his empathy over its frustration at being booted out of the service devoted to exploring alien cultures, “Contact”. This latter friend recognizes what drives Gurgeh:
Oh, it’s all so wonderful on the Culture, isn’t it, Gurgeh; nobody starves and nobody dies of disease or natural disasters and nobody and nothing’s exploited, but there’s still luck and heartache and joy, there’s still chance and advantage and disadvantage.
But life in paradise inevitably becomes boring, and as a reader we become starved for an interesting plot development. Gurgeh hears of a secret distant empire, Azad, which is effectively founded on a game used to winnow out who succeeds in their society, and a Contact agent drone easily persuades him to travel a couple of years to join their tournament in what he is told is an ambassadorial initiative. He can’t resist the prospect of playing a game (also called Azad) where the stakes are so high .
It turns out, these aliens have a society with all the ills of our current human civilization, including wars of domination, political corruption, the cruel hierarchy of the haves and have-nots, violent crime, pornography, etc. It becomes hard to recognize them as aliens, save for the quirk of having three genders. Gurgeh is so concentrated on succeeding at the game of Azad, it takes him a while to truly become disgusted with these folk. With a bit more advancement in technology, the Azadians could become quite a dangerous scourge in the galaxy. How can an idealistic, egalitarian society like Culture deal with such a throwback to dog-eat-dog life without playing their own game of forceful domination? Late in the game Gurgeh comes to understand he is a pawn in the clash between cultures.
There are plenty of other writers who push the envelope further in areas of space colonization, impact alien cultures on human sensibilities, and use of technology in the service of hopeful utopias. Yet Banks excels with these subjects by taking a less thrilling or splashy route, one that puts you personally in the picture through a self-centered anti-hero. It may not have the philosophical depth of Le Guin’s contrast of socialist and capitalistic worlds in “The Dispossessed”, but it is still a worthy classic exploration of what human qualities might be lost when risk and death are conquered and what aspects might be retained in robots we create or aliens we might encounter.
In closing, I would like to share a couple of examples where the prose occasionally takes flight. In the following, Banks nicely captures some of how game playing infects Gurgeh's way of looking at the world:
As happened every now and again, everything he saw around him seemed to be part of the game; the way people stood like pieces, grouped according to who could take or affect whom; the way the pattern on the marquee was like a simple grid area on the board, and the poles like planted power-sources waiting to replenish some exhausted minor piece and supporting a crux-point in the game; the way people and police stood like the suddenly closed jaws of some nightmarish pincer-movement… all was the game, everything was seen in its light, translated into the combative imagery of its language, evaluated in the context its structure imposed upon the mind.
In this example, Gurgeh's robot assistant tries to educate him about the Azadians by showing him examples of their cruel pornography:
The man’s eyes glittered in the screen-light, unused photons reflecting from the halo of iris. The pupils widened at first, then shrank, became pinpoints. The drone waited for the wide, staring eyes to fill with moisture, for the tiny muscles around the eyes to flinch and the eyelids to close and the man to shake his head and turn away, but nothing of the sort happened. The screen held his gaze, as though the infinitesimal pressure of light it spent upon the room had somehow reversed, and so sucked the watching man forward, to hold him, teetering before the fall, fixed and steady and pointed at the flickering surface like some long-stilled moon.
June 13, 2015
The Player of Games: A game so complex it mirrors the society around it
Originally posted at Fantasy Literature
The Player of Games (1988) is the second published book in the well-known Culture series featuring the post-scarcity utopian machine-human galactic empire known as the Culture. Once again Iain M. Banks adroitly chooses to focus on the interactions of the Culture with a non-Culture society, this time the more primitive empire of Azad. The Azadian society is centered around an incredibly complex game called Azad, and every six years it holds a tournament that begins with 12,000 players, with the winner becoming the Emperor. The idea is that anyone brilliant enough to master the game and defeat all rivals is worthy to run the Empire as well.
Jernau Gurgeh is one of the Culture’s greatest games players, and this is saying something in a sprawling galactic empire where most of its citizens are devoted to pursuing their hobbies and entertainment. Of course, being so good and facing few difficulties in life, Gurgeh feels a bit unsatisfied. When he is presented with the opportunity to play in a game with more complexity and layers than anything he has ever played before, he is immediately drawn to the idea. However, it takes a little old-fashioned blackmail to push him into action, and I found this a bit implausible since he is supposedly a strategic genius. He really walks right into a trap that anyone should be able to recognize. But his desire to find a new challenge apparently overrides his better judgment.
The remainder of The Player of Games is devoted to Gurgeh’s playing in the Azad tournament, which is a massive media event in the Azad society, something like the Olympics, FIFA World Cup, United States presidential election, and Superbowl all wrapped up in one. We see how the Azadian press initially considers Gurgeh an oddity, and not much of a threat. However, as he steadily dispatches stronger opponents and evolves his style of gameplay for each round, the Azadians become increasingly hostile to him doing excessively well in their sacred sport.
I felt there was a strong parallel to foreign sumo wrestlers here in Japan, who have enjoyed great success, especially three Hawaiian wrestlers in the 1990s (Konishiki, Musashimaru, and Akebono; the latter two reached the highest rank of Yokozuna, which automatically makes them social icons). Initially people thought it was quant that gaijin were attempting Japan’s ancient national sport, which first came about as part of Shinto religious ceremonies. Therefore many Japanese became alarmed when the Hawaiian wrestlers started winning too much, and the first of them, Konishiki, was never promoted to Yokozuna partly because he was foreign, if you are the suspicious sort.
Fast forward two decades, and the two most dominant Yokozuna in recent years have both been from Mongolia: Asashoryu and Hakuho. Hakuho in particular is so tough to beat that the audience sometimes celebrates more when he loses since it’s so rare (and the way they celebrate this is by throwing their futon cushions down onto the wrestling mound, which is fairly demonstrative in an otherwise well-behaved society). So you can definitely sense when a culture is feeling threatened by foreigners intruding on its national sport, even if it doesn’t want to admit it.
The Player of Games reaches its climax when Gurgeh reaches the final round of the game to face off directly with the reigning Emperor, who by definition is their greatest player. At this point Gurgeh is purely focused on the game itself, and doesn’t seem to be overly worried about what might happen if he actually wins. Would he become the next Azadian Emperor? He isn’t at all interested in such an outcome, but cannot resist the allure of beating the most formidable opponent the Azadians can field. Of course he also hasn’t really thought about why the Culture might be willing to involve himself with such an important event. Again, I was a bit surprised that someone so incredibly sophisticated at game play wouldn’t be interested in the larger game being played between the Culture and Azad. There are implications of the game that do not become clear until the end, and a game player like himself should be thinking many moves ahead.
The book is well-paced and engrossing, despite it being almost completely centered on just a few characters and locations. It could easily be a stage play without much adjustment. And unlike the previous Culture novel Consider Phlebas, there are no large-scale battles or extended action sequences, because the game itself is the big attraction. And Banks does a good job of keeping each round different and interesting. I had the feeling that he felt obligated to use more traditional space opera tropes in Consider Phlebas (even if it was partly in order to subvert them), but got this out of his system and felt freer to explore the decadent side of the Culture in The Player of Games. It’s a finely-crafted book and a good entry point into the Culture universe.
Originally posted at Fantasy Literature
The Player of Games (1988) is the second published book in the well-known Culture series featuring the post-scarcity utopian machine-human galactic empire known as the Culture. Once again Iain M. Banks adroitly chooses to focus on the interactions of the Culture with a non-Culture society, this time the more primitive empire of Azad. The Azadian society is centered around an incredibly complex game called Azad, and every six years it holds a tournament that begins with 12,000 players, with the winner becoming the Emperor. The idea is that anyone brilliant enough to master the game and defeat all rivals is worthy to run the Empire as well.
Jernau Gurgeh is one of the Culture’s greatest games players, and this is saying something in a sprawling galactic empire where most of its citizens are devoted to pursuing their hobbies and entertainment. Of course, being so good and facing few difficulties in life, Gurgeh feels a bit unsatisfied. When he is presented with the opportunity to play in a game with more complexity and layers than anything he has ever played before, he is immediately drawn to the idea. However, it takes a little old-fashioned blackmail to push him into action, and I found this a bit implausible since he is supposedly a strategic genius. He really walks right into a trap that anyone should be able to recognize. But his desire to find a new challenge apparently overrides his better judgment.
The remainder of The Player of Games is devoted to Gurgeh’s playing in the Azad tournament, which is a massive media event in the Azad society, something like the Olympics, FIFA World Cup, United States presidential election, and Superbowl all wrapped up in one. We see how the Azadian press initially considers Gurgeh an oddity, and not much of a threat. However, as he steadily dispatches stronger opponents and evolves his style of gameplay for each round, the Azadians become increasingly hostile to him doing excessively well in their sacred sport.
I felt there was a strong parallel to foreign sumo wrestlers here in Japan, who have enjoyed great success, especially three Hawaiian wrestlers in the 1990s (Konishiki, Musashimaru, and Akebono; the latter two reached the highest rank of Yokozuna, which automatically makes them social icons). Initially people thought it was quant that gaijin were attempting Japan’s ancient national sport, which first came about as part of Shinto religious ceremonies. Therefore many Japanese became alarmed when the Hawaiian wrestlers started winning too much, and the first of them, Konishiki, was never promoted to Yokozuna partly because he was foreign, if you are the suspicious sort.
Fast forward two decades, and the two most dominant Yokozuna in recent years have both been from Mongolia: Asashoryu and Hakuho. Hakuho in particular is so tough to beat that the audience sometimes celebrates more when he loses since it’s so rare (and the way they celebrate this is by throwing their futon cushions down onto the wrestling mound, which is fairly demonstrative in an otherwise well-behaved society). So you can definitely sense when a culture is feeling threatened by foreigners intruding on its national sport, even if it doesn’t want to admit it.
The Player of Games reaches its climax when Gurgeh reaches the final round of the game to face off directly with the reigning Emperor, who by definition is their greatest player. At this point Gurgeh is purely focused on the game itself, and doesn’t seem to be overly worried about what might happen if he actually wins. Would he become the next Azadian Emperor? He isn’t at all interested in such an outcome, but cannot resist the allure of beating the most formidable opponent the Azadians can field. Of course he also hasn’t really thought about why the Culture might be willing to involve himself with such an important event. Again, I was a bit surprised that someone so incredibly sophisticated at game play wouldn’t be interested in the larger game being played between the Culture and Azad. There are implications of the game that do not become clear until the end, and a game player like himself should be thinking many moves ahead.
The book is well-paced and engrossing, despite it being almost completely centered on just a few characters and locations. It could easily be a stage play without much adjustment. And unlike the previous Culture novel Consider Phlebas, there are no large-scale battles or extended action sequences, because the game itself is the big attraction. And Banks does a good job of keeping each round different and interesting. I had the feeling that he felt obligated to use more traditional space opera tropes in Consider Phlebas (even if it was partly in order to subvert them), but got this out of his system and felt freer to explore the decadent side of the Culture in The Player of Games. It’s a finely-crafted book and a good entry point into the Culture universe.
December 30, 2025
2025 reread
I think I last read this in 2017. This is the second book of the Culture series. I am currently half-way through this series and hope to finish it in 2026. This is my favorite book in the series so far. Jernau Morat Gurgeh is a famous Culture game player. He travels to the primitive Empire of Azad to play a game that is interwoven through their society and deals with literal life and death terms. I find Gurgeh to be a wonderful character. I sort of like the annoying AI that accompanies him. I find the weird planet and how it works to be so interesting. I listened to this one on audiobook. I loved it just as much this time around. I do think I will listen to this again at some point in the future.
************************
Ahoy there mateys! Several years ago, I was lamenting that there were no standalones that were somehow intertwined in one universe or world. Me brain is usually a sieve and lots of time in-between books in trilogies and such means that I lose details and sometimes have to start the series over. I wanted the effect of extreme world building with a tied-up story in each book. The First Mate suggested the Culture “series” in which every book is set in the same universe but all can be read as standalones and in any order. And sci-fi to boot. Arrrr! So I began with the novel consider phlebas which was Bank’s first Culture novel. Have read it twice now and loved it even more the second time. So eventually I bought this book which was Bank’s second written Culture Novel and the First Mate’s favorite.
I loved this book and the world Banks has set up so very much. The game player in this book is named Jernau Morat Gurgeh. He is considered one of the best game players in the galaxy. Through a series of circumstances, he is recruited/forced to play a top secret high-stakes game in another star system, Azad. However the “game” he is playing is anything but just for fun. The planet’s society, politics, religion, and very existence hinge of the outcome of the conclusion of the tournament.
What I found fascinating about this novel is that the tone is extremely different from the other Culture novel that I read. That one was full of action and multiple settings and a dare-devil protagonist. In this one, Gurgeh is a thinker and philosopher of games. He likes his routine and current lifestyle. He is an unwilling game participant at first but becomes engrossed as he gets more and more involved in the life and game of Azad. Yet the background of the Culture makes this book as compelling as the first novel in spite or maybe because of these differences.
I am not a huge game theory fan so the game itself did not always have me focus. But what certainly did were the politics and interactions of the characters. The Culture world has a “humanoid/machine symbiotic society.” Yet Azad is more primitive. I loved Gurgeh and his attitude of almost nonchalance towards everyone else. The game is the only thing for him.
I also loved his robot friend, Chamlis, who is crazy old and lovable for a machine. Gurgeh’s machine ambassador, Flere-Imsaho was also a hoot. He spends his free time bird watching and the remainder of the time trying to keep Gurgeh from making political and social blunders. He also has to hide what he is and he made me laugh with his complaints. I love the spaceship, Limiting Factor. Basically all the machines in this novel have fantastic and distinct personalities. They were nice contrasts to Gurgeh’s own personality.
There is no major way to explain the plot any further due to its complexity. This book was a fast read and I think the writing is superb. Needless to say I recommend the two culture novels I have read so far and I certainly shall be reading more in the series.
Apparently there are 10 books in total. Only 8 to go. But I shall take me time with them to savor the Culture flavor.
Side note: Apparently Mr. Banks passed away in 2013 from cancer. Boo-hiss! Cancer sucks. But I am grateful he left behind a whole world for me to explore.
https://thecaptainsquartersblog.wordp...
I think I last read this in 2017. This is the second book of the Culture series. I am currently half-way through this series and hope to finish it in 2026. This is my favorite book in the series so far. Jernau Morat Gurgeh is a famous Culture game player. He travels to the primitive Empire of Azad to play a game that is interwoven through their society and deals with literal life and death terms. I find Gurgeh to be a wonderful character. I sort of like the annoying AI that accompanies him. I find the weird planet and how it works to be so interesting. I listened to this one on audiobook. I loved it just as much this time around. I do think I will listen to this again at some point in the future.
************************
Ahoy there mateys! Several years ago, I was lamenting that there were no standalones that were somehow intertwined in one universe or world. Me brain is usually a sieve and lots of time in-between books in trilogies and such means that I lose details and sometimes have to start the series over. I wanted the effect of extreme world building with a tied-up story in each book. The First Mate suggested the Culture “series” in which every book is set in the same universe but all can be read as standalones and in any order. And sci-fi to boot. Arrrr! So I began with the novel consider phlebas which was Bank’s first Culture novel. Have read it twice now and loved it even more the second time. So eventually I bought this book which was Bank’s second written Culture Novel and the First Mate’s favorite.
I loved this book and the world Banks has set up so very much. The game player in this book is named Jernau Morat Gurgeh. He is considered one of the best game players in the galaxy. Through a series of circumstances, he is recruited/forced to play a top secret high-stakes game in another star system, Azad. However the “game” he is playing is anything but just for fun. The planet’s society, politics, religion, and very existence hinge of the outcome of the conclusion of the tournament.
What I found fascinating about this novel is that the tone is extremely different from the other Culture novel that I read. That one was full of action and multiple settings and a dare-devil protagonist. In this one, Gurgeh is a thinker and philosopher of games. He likes his routine and current lifestyle. He is an unwilling game participant at first but becomes engrossed as he gets more and more involved in the life and game of Azad. Yet the background of the Culture makes this book as compelling as the first novel in spite or maybe because of these differences.
I am not a huge game theory fan so the game itself did not always have me focus. But what certainly did were the politics and interactions of the characters. The Culture world has a “humanoid/machine symbiotic society.” Yet Azad is more primitive. I loved Gurgeh and his attitude of almost nonchalance towards everyone else. The game is the only thing for him.
I also loved his robot friend, Chamlis, who is crazy old and lovable for a machine. Gurgeh’s machine ambassador, Flere-Imsaho was also a hoot. He spends his free time bird watching and the remainder of the time trying to keep Gurgeh from making political and social blunders. He also has to hide what he is and he made me laugh with his complaints. I love the spaceship, Limiting Factor. Basically all the machines in this novel have fantastic and distinct personalities. They were nice contrasts to Gurgeh’s own personality.
There is no major way to explain the plot any further due to its complexity. This book was a fast read and I think the writing is superb. Needless to say I recommend the two culture novels I have read so far and I certainly shall be reading more in the series.
Apparently there are 10 books in total. Only 8 to go. But I shall take me time with them to savor the Culture flavor.
Side note: Apparently Mr. Banks passed away in 2013 from cancer. Boo-hiss! Cancer sucks. But I am grateful he left behind a whole world for me to explore.
https://thecaptainsquartersblog.wordp...
May 2, 2020
“you cannot choose not to have the politics you do; they are not some separate set of entities somehow detachable from the rest of your being; they are a function of your existence.”
the premise of this sci-fi story could not be simpler, and yet at the end of this book i felt like a certified observationalist of the art of layer peeling. onions, anyone?
anyway, in a post-scarcity, semi-pacifistic society, jernau gurgeh spends most of his days playing games and writing papers about gaming strategies. if anything, you could call him a game theorist, and a famous one at that, too.
slightly dissatisfied with life, he gets roped into playing the most complex, dangerous game he’s ever played -- the game of the empire of azad, of which the outcome completely shapes the empire’s legislation, politics, education, and social hierarchy.
what follows is a complete and utter clashing of cultures and mindsets as gurgeh, accompanied by two very snarky AIs, tries to fully discern what azad is while working his way up the game’s leaderboards.
on a surface level, this book is very enjoyable in watching the protagonist train and beat all these intricate rounds of games. gurgeh is a single-minded, obsessed sort of protagonist who isn’t exactly the nicest, but you can still root for him. his banter with the drone who accompanies him, flere-imasho, is often hilarious.
even though banks never explains the rules of azad (which even if he did would probably be counterproductive considering how complex it’d need to be), every round gurgeh plays has you on the edge of your seat. the characters he plays against are varied and interesting, giving away glimpses of empire society that informs gurgeh about how they might play.
and that brings us to the layers: this entire book is a beautiful mix of allegory and commentary on our own society.
because you see, gurgeh comes from a society in which humanity has a long-standing symbiotic relationship with artificially intelligent machines, who can provide anything that people desire. most citizens of the Culture, as it’s called, are free to pursue whatever they wish. their bodies adapt to the planets or places they live in, they can change sexes at will, and even regrow limbs.
whereas the empire is what the Culture considers barbaric: one based on old, archaic rules revolving around ownership, power, domination -- while the most powerful classes in society constantly break the rules and manipulate the system to stay in power.
understanding the game of azad is understanding the culture of azad, which is very difficult for someone like gurgeh who, despite being an amazing strategist, is painfully naive when it comes to concepts such as blackmail, manipulation, and backstabbing politics. those things simply don’t exist in his world.
and there’s so many clever little things in this book that draw painful comparisons with human society, but i really don’t want to spoil them because it’s just so much fun to pick up on them while you’re reading.
all i can really say is that this is the kind of sci-fi that puts the progressive nature back into it. i mean, the lowkey mocking of arbitrary gender roles, take-downs of eugenics, and how survival of the fittest makes no sense when the playing field isn’t level -- not something i’d necessarily expect from a 1988 novel about playing games.
i’ll keep my criticisms brief: as mentioned, the protagonist is a bit of a shit at times, even if his friends and companions provide plenty of banter and humor. the pace is probably the worst offender: it can get downright sluggish, especially in the first third of the book, because it takes an awfully long time for gurgeh to get to azad.
but all things taken together, this is a great sci-fi read that works well as a standalone.
✎ 4.0 stars.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 4,001 reviews