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Publication Date: 1988 (First Edition) Publisher: Macmillian 309 pages Summary A gifted game player from an advanced civilization must compete in a strategy game so complex it dictates the fate of an Empire. In a Nutshell Unique and deeply satisfying, The Player of Games is a novel of unparalleled appeal. Review Despite being a huge SF fan, I had somehow avoided reading Iain M. Banks for many years. I finally picked up Consider Phlebas, and thought it was a good enough space opera romp that I wanted to check further Culture novels. The Player of Games was my second Banks novel, and what an absolute delight it was. The Player of Games is part of Banks' Culture novel series. The Culture is an interstellar society where humans and AI coexist, and it is both amazingly advanced technologically, but also features a lot of social concepts that are extreme advances of our own society. The good thing about the Culture novels, though, is that they are rarely interconnected. They take place at varying points in the long history of the Culture, so they tend to have little causal connections. This means you can easily pick up The Player of Games and not worry about previous entries in the cycle. The main character of the novel is Jernau Gurgeh, one of the best players of strategy games in the entire Culture. He is not exactly a sympathetic protagonist. At the opening of the novel, he lives a jaded life, and is pretty complacent about his superior skills. Still, what he lacks in immediate likeability, he makes up for being a fascinating character, and a very belieable as a grandmaster game player. The first part of the novel sees Jernau deal with his every day life in the Culture. Banks has created something quite unique with the Culture, and The Player of Games is an excellent starting point to discover his world. Granted, the Culture is dramatically more advanced than our world in many social aspects, but Banks deftly avoids depicting it as a simple utopia. There are problems remaining in his society, despite the fact that everyone is pretty much free to do what they want, and there is no scarcity. As such, the first part of The Player of Games is an intriguing romp through a distant future where real characters - both AI and human - carry on with their lives and deal with difficulties. But fascinating as this may be, there are much greater things in store for Jernau. Through a series of unfortunate events, he gets recruited by the Culture's first contact division to travel to the Empire of Azad, where the ruling body of the empire is determined by a complex game of strategy. This game is also called Azad, reflecting the close ties that exist between the Empire's fate and the game itself. The Empire of Azad might be an interstellar empire, but their rules are customs are much closer to modern-day Earth in spirit. There is injustice here, and racism, and poverty, and cruelty. Jernau experiences them all, and his point of view from the post-scarcity mindset of the Culture is the novel's real shining moment. The Empire of Azad is both perfectly alien and uncomfortably close to our world, which makes Jernau's truly alien point of view all the more fascinating. The game of Azad itself is another crowning achievement of this novel. It's presented as a thoroughly complex game, including mutating pieces moving on multiple boards at once; yet Banks manages to clearly explain the game as Jernau and his opponents play it. The multiple contests he goes through, and their impact on Azad society, makes The Player of Games a novel you simply cannot put down until you read it through. Add to this a satisfying ending, and The Player of Games stands tall above pretty much the entire space opera genre. It's a complex novel, with an equally complex main character, and the clash of cultures it presents through the context of an immense strategy game is absolutely orginal, and very memorable. |
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