My experience with Iain M. Banks has been lukewarm. I liked but didn't love the first book in this series, Consider Phlebas, and I absolutely hated The Algebraist. I read The Player of Games because I am an artificial intelligence, post-scarcity junkie, and Banks is the kind of author who serves as my pusher.The Player of Games more than makes up for any disappointment I felt over Consider Phlebas. In this return to the Culture universe, Banks manages to craft a character and a story that are compelling, both on an emotional and on a philosophical level. Most of the book takes place in a society outside the Culture, but make no mistake: this is an indictment, in some ways, of the sneakiness with which the Culture disarms possible threats. Banks employs a subtle, double-edged wit to portray simultaneously both the utopian aspects of this society and how it might look to the aliens it encounters.But first, let's talk about the eponymous Jernah Morat Gurgeh. He plays games, almost any type of game, and he is probably the best player of games in the entire Culture. He's really rather an authority on it. Have achieved such a pinnacle, Gurgeh is bored out of his mind and spoiling for a challenge of some kind. After the additional push of some blackmail from a slightly crazy drone, Gurgeh allows himself to be enlisted by Contact, the division of the Culture that does exactly what the name implies, to play a game called Azad.Azad is the cornerstone of the Empire of Azad, a civilization in the Lesser Magellanic Cloud. Contact isn't quite sure what to do with the Empire—in fact, for an imperial power structure to survive the advent of space travel is very rare, or so we are told. This one seems to have survived because of the game after which it is named; almost every Azadian plays Azad, and one's performance determines one's status, vocation, etc. Oh, and the Azadians have three sexes: male, female, and what our limited vocabulary forces us to call "apex". The apices are dominant, having selectively bred the males and females for strength of arms and docility, respectively.Gurgeh gets parachuted into this game, and we are told that both sides expect him to lose rather quickly. Certainly, the Azadians have no desire to see Gurgeh advance into the higher levels of play: how would you feel if an alien showed up one day and beat you at the game around which your entire society revolves? Notably, the ultimate winner of Azad becomes the Emperor. When initially being briefed on the mission, Gurgeh asks the Contact representative if they expect him to become Emperor, and the representative essentially laughs. In that one respect, Contact tells Gurgeh the truth: they don't really expect him to become Emperor. That would be too simple. No, Contact is manipulating Gurgeh—and Banks is manipulating the reader—in a far deeper game.Central to The Player of Games is the conundrum that faces most visions of utopia: if there is no suffering, no challenge to one's livelihood, wouldn't life be stagnant and pointless? The vast AI resources of the Culture mean that no human has to do any work unless he or she wants to; everyone essentially has unlimited free time. Disease and death are uncommon. There is no money, and aside from the occasional crime of passion, there is little enough crime—mostly because there are no formal laws. The Culture is axiomatically uninhibited, and this problematic: when everything is permitted and nothing is forbidden, how can one grow by pushing the boundaries?Banks explores this question by juxtaposing Gurgeh against the Culture's emissary to the Empire of Azad, Shohobohaum Za. Za has not quite gone native, but he speaks about the Empire with a certain amount of admiration for the "rough-and-tumble" nature of life there. At first Gurgeh has no idea what Za means; he doesn't even really grasp the concept of an empire or ruling through coercion. He only begins to understand how different Azadian society is after he learns about it through the game (because, after all, the game is the society and the society is the game). Sometimes, influenced by the reaction of Gurgeh's companion drone, Flere Imsaho, I began to worry that Gurgeh was being seduced by the game Azad, that he was beginning to lust after power and victory a little too much. This comes to a head when Gurgeh becomes the subject of a Physical Challenge. Basically, if he loses he will be castrated; if he wins, his opponent, an apex, will have its reversible vagina and ovaries removed. Gurgeh could suffer the indignity, get extracted by his ship, and have the Culture's advanced medical technology restore his genitals. Yet he wants to win, wants to advance, even if it means causing, through his victory, his opponent to lose the ability to reproduce and become an outcast. Flere Imsaho takes Gurgeh on a little tour of the slums of the capital city and shows Gurgeh some scrambled channels that cater to the depraved sexual and violent needs of the empire's elite. All of this seems designed to remind us that even if some people, like Gurgeh, aren't creative enough to make their own fun in a post-scarcity society, it's infinitely better than the injustices visited upon the members of a society like the Empire of Azad.It turns out that the situation isn't so simple. I keep saying "we are told" in this review, because Contact tells Gurgeh one thing (or several things) and then actually intends another. He is certainly not naive of this fact; the duplicity of Contact is notorious among the Culture, and he knows he is being manipulated. He's just not sure exactly how or why. It only becomes obvious during the endgame, when Gurgeh faces off against incumbent Emperor Nicosar, what Contact intends. And just as Flere Imsaho's horror tour is supposed to wake us to the inequities of the Empire, Contact's real goals remind us that the Culture is not always sunshine and rainbows. Because when the Culture decides your society is not worthy, they do not destroy you. They do not attack you. They dismantle your society from within and let your own people do the rest. It's a little chilling, especially when, at the very end, Banks reveals exactly how intricately Contact manipulated Gurgeh into accepting the mission and achieving their goals. In this respect, The Player of Games continues the theme from Consider Phlebas, and Gurgeh even explicitly remarks upon it: in the Culture, individuals do not make much of a difference. Minds undertake the larger, galactic-level decisions, such as running Contact, because they vastly exceed humans in both intellectual capacity and longevity. Individual humans become, in one sense, pawns that the Minds manipulate in order to serve the larger needs of the Culture as a whole. What's so troubling is that it apparently works, because the Culture has been around for eleven thousand years. That kind of makes sense, because this impersonal, non-individualistic approach to decision-taking removes the ego that might otherwise corrupt a politician and his or her government. However, it goes against a lot of the thinking that pervades our contemporary society, and that makes the theme a bitter pill to swallow.Note that I'm not actually advocating for (or against) the Culture as an ideal vision of what we should strive for as our future. It's unrealistic, because it assumes human beings are nicer than they probably are. In real life, I doubt we can ever eliminate that criminal element (even if we do arrive at a point where we no longer need laws). Any new technology is immediately going to be seized upon for two purposes: to make money legitimately, and to commit crimes. Our future will almost certainly be a lot grittier than the society depicted in the Culture series. Nevertheless, I am enamoured of the Culture, what it represents, and the interesting philosophical implications of a human/machine symbiosis on a political level.So I enjoyed The Player of Games thematically, and I also liked the character of Jernau Morat Gurgeh. As a protagonist he might not be ideal, especially at first, because he whines about his dissatisfaction with being awesome. Yet that proves a useful starting point for Gurgeh to change and grow, mostly for the better. I really like that Banks enforces a certain level of ignorance when it comes to Gurgeh's knowledge of science and technology. A lot of science fiction novels focus on the characters who know exactly how all of their society's advanced technology works; some take it one step further and seem to assume that, in the future, everyone will understand quantum mechanics. Banks averts this:The Limiting Factor was tearing through something it called ultraspace with increasing acceleration.… He didn't even know what ultraspace was. Was it the same as hyperspace? At least he had heard of that….Even better, Gurgeh remembers this very close to the end of the book and asks Flere Imsaho what ultraspace is, but he doesn't really understand the explanation. Gurgeh is by no means unintelligent—he writes papers on game theory and has mastered in years a game that takes Azadians their entire lifetime to play well. So I enjoyed that Banks made a layperson the protagonist of a science-fiction novel and still managed to make the entire book work. It attests to a skill that seemed largely fallow in The Algebraist and did not quite shine enough in Consider Phlebas.With The Player of Games, I no longer feel lukewarm toward Banks or his Culture series. I am officially hooked.My reviews of the Culture series:← Consider Phlebas | Use of Weapons → (forthcoming)
"The story starts with a battle that is not a battle, and ends with a game that is not a game."In the post-scarcity society of the Culture, men and machines live with the opportunity to do anything or nothing, to travel the universe in the great Culture ships with their infinitely complex Minds, to revel in idleness, to choose any subject and pursue it with singleminded zeal. Jernau Gurgeh chose games. He spends his life leaning, playing, and above all, winning, games from all the varied societies now encompassed by the Culture. When a member of Contact's Special Circumstances approaches Gurgeh and asks him to try his hand at a dizzyingly intricate game called Azad, he is tempted. Azad is more than just a game: in a faraway empire, it is intertwined with every aspect of society: careers are made by it; people die and are mutilated because of it; emperors rise and rule by it:"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 set-up assumes that the game and life are the same thing, and such is the pervasive nature of the idea of the game within the society that just by believing it, they make it so."SC wants to recruit the Culture's most brilliant gameplayer to act as their representative to the empire, and unfortunately for Gurgeh, a moment of reckless stupidity leaves him with a forced hand. Gurgeh is now a pawn in the Culture's game, and the cards are stacked against him.I have a few friends who have been trying to get me into the Culture books for years. At least one adores these books as--no, more--passionately than I love the Discworld books, but I admit that until Player of Games, I didn't see the appeal.I do now.The Player of Games is a satisfyingly multi-layered story of wheels within wheels, games within games. Through Gurgeh's eyes, the world is something like an Escher drawing: reality may contain the game, but only the game's reflection shows a full view of reality. There are so many layers to the games within the story, and game and reality are inextricably linked.Outside of this central theme, the story is rich in complex and evocative details, from the society where a labyrinth is used as punishment to a planet whose ecosystem depends upon an eternal wall of flame that travels over it, a visual depiction of destruction and rebirth. Throughout the narrative, the Azadians attempt to redefine truth, action, and intent. There are also plenty of moments of pure fun. For Gurgeh, the first shock of Azad culture is gender. Within the Culture, gender is an unimportant, easily modifiable aspect of the self, and its triviality is reflected in Marain, the Culture language:"Naturally, there are ways of specifying a person's sex in Marain, but they're not used in everyday conversation; in the archetypal language-as-moral-weapon-and-proud-of-it, the message is that it's brains that matter, kids; gonads are hardly worth making a distinction over."In contrast, Azad has three genders: male, female, and the dominant "apex" gender, whose reversible vagina transfers sperm from male to female. In a culture where status--and pronouns-- are defined by gender, the standard Azadian gambling penalty of castration takes on a whole new meaning. If the stakes are so high, what can be the appeal of the game? Within the Culture, Gurgeh values the game as a way to "find the measure of himself," but he is discontented in a game with so little risk. As his friend explains,"You enjoy your life in the Culture, but it can't provide you with sufficient threats; the true gambler needs the excitement of potential loss, even ruin, to feel wholly alive."In Azad, however, both winning and losing can have devastating real-world consequences, either to oneself or the other player. It creates a zero-sum society, for in a world where everything is part of the game, there is no place for mercy.Azad creates a world in which victory, ownership, and dominance are everything; to a member of the egalitarian Culture, every aspect of Azadian life looks like slavery. Competition creates a world where nothing can ever be enough. Just as the pleasure of winning is inextricably tied to causing other to lose, Azadian society ties even sexual gratification to the abasement of others. Although our culture more closely resembles Azad, Gurgeh's Culture eyes provide an sympathetic viewpoint. Despite his strategic prowess, Gurgeh is an innocent; in real-life situations, he has all the street-smarts of a stoned deer on a highway. Gurgeh's fascination with the game far surpasses a simple desire for victory; he sees it as a beautiful, intricate system of unpredictable patterns.For Gurgeh to win Azad, he must understand Azad. Yet there isn't much of a step between understanding someone and becoming them. Banks highlights this change via the use of language:"When Culture people didn't speak Marain for a long time and did speak another language, they were liable to change; they acted differently, they started to think in the other language."In the case of Azad, thinking in the native language means thinking in terms of sharply-defined genders, in terms of hunting and stalking, winning and losing, possession and humiliation. In one of my favourite quotes in the book, Banks talks about how conquering changes the conqueror:"The barbarians invade, and are taken over. Not always; some empires dissolve and cease, but many absorb; many take the barbarians in and end up conquering them. They make them live like the people they set out to take over. The architecture of the system channels them, beguiles them, seduces and transforms them, demanding from them what they could not before have given but slowly grow to offer. The empire survives, the barbarians survive, but the empire is no more and the barbarians are nowhere to be found."I've always had some hardcore issues with the Culture--even the arrogant sense of superiority in their name, the singularity of that article, puts my teeth on edge. At least from the outside, they strike me as self-satisfied, decadent, culturally imperialistic, meddlesome, and self-righteous. Who are they to act as arbiters of justice? The Culture is willing to do truly terrible things, to let the ends justify the means--but they prefer not to get their hands dirty. But, as Player of Games asks, who are they to let the atrocities happen when they have the power to stop them? I live in the U.S., a country that, despite all evidence to the contrary, still generally views itself as the city upon a hill, the policemen of the world. We've seen how well meddling with other countries tends to go, we've seen how we have worn our arrogance as armour and treated "different" and "barbaric" as synonymous, but if there really are intrinsic rights, then there are intrinsic wrongs. How can we sit there idly and let indisputable evil happen?One of the hardest aspects of reading this book was realising that I don't believe that a Culture is possible. I want to believe in a world that strives for egalitarianism, where, as Gurgeh tries to explain:"No, life is not fair. Not intrinsically [...] It's something we can try to make it, though, [...] A goal we can aim for. You can choose to do so, or not. We have."I don't believe we will ever reach a post-scarcity future where laws are few and ordered anarchy rules. I don't believe we can ever get to a point where we give up the idea of possession and ownership and debt. I don't believe we can ever create a world where there is a set of universally agreed-upon, irrefutable, objective rules; where breaking those laws does not require the drama of courts and juries, where all disputes end with a unanimous decision, where a "no" is always taken as "no" and retribution and revenge are not even considered. I don't believe in a future where the Culture could exist.I wish I did.But as Banks says:"We are what we do, not what we think." Excerpted from my review on BookLikes, which contains additional spoilers, quotes, and comments that I was too lazy to copy over. Plus, I figure that this review is long enough already.
What do You think about The Player Of Games (1997)?
I have wanted to read one of the Culture novels by Iain M. Banks for quite a while and one that sounded particularly interesting to me was The Player of Games. Unfortunately, that particular title was difficult to find in the U.S. -- until it was reprinted here a couple of months ago. I am very glad it was since this is definitely one of the better novels I have read this year, containing layers and depth without ever becoming too dry or a chore to read.Complete Review:http://fantasycafe.blogspot.com/2008/...
—Kristen
Full Review at Tenacious Reader: http://www.tenaciousreader.com/2015/0...Gurgeh is the ultimate player of games on his planet. He lives in The Culture, in which humans and technology have come together to offer what sounds like a type of utopian society. People generally don’t have to work, as technology handles everything for them. There seems to be no crime, and when there is it is punishable by having a companion droid tag along with you forever as punishment. Now I did wonder, after you get one of these, what prevents you from committing more crimes? Evidently it makes you a social pariah, which in this society is viewed as worse than death. What then? What do they have to lose? This was one minor nitpick I couldn’t help but think about. Perhaps that was addressed in the book somehow and I just missed it. But regardless, the point is that in this society, people do what they want to do, they don’t need law enforcement because people just regulate themselves. They are provided with everything they need, so there are no “crimes of necessity”, people don’t need to steel to feed their starving family, because they are well provided for. Pretty much it’s Utopian Communism. In space.Gurgeh’s success at the games brings him a somewhat mysterious opportunity to play a game called Azad in the Empire of Azad. An offer he just can’t refuse, despite years of commitment (it takes him two years just to get there) and a complete lack of knowledge about how to play the game. Oh yes, and the complete possibility of death. There may have been some less than ethical persuasion involved in getting him to go along as well, but I’ll let you read about that yourself. Initially the only thing he really knows about the game is that social standing is completely determined by a person’s ability to play a game. It’s like tennis ladder for life, where the game is Azad. Going to the Empire highlights the differences in these two societies. It brings up weaknesses and strengths of both, though I have to admit, there seemed to be more benefits to living in The Culture than in the Empire.Gurgeh was in some ways not entirely likable, but at the same time, a character I enjoyed reading. And the more of the book I read, the more I liked Gurgeh. The story was interesting and I’m glad I selected this one as a Backlist choice. And wether I believe The Culture is possible or not, I would love to live there, at least for a while.
—Lisa
This is the second Culture novel I've read, after Consider Phlebas. Some reviewers have likened The Player Of Games to Ender's Game(Orson Scott Card), 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. Many people have also been harsh in their criticism of Consider Phlebas, stating that The Player Of Games is by far the better of the two. Well, perhaps, but I will say that Phlebas was more fun to read, I also warmed better to the protagonist in Phlebas, whereas the Game Player of The Player Of Games didn't quite fascinate me as much as I'd hoped.However, it is still a great book and certainly worth a look. As far as the series is concerned, the Culture books are rather more interesting than a lot of other Space Operas out there. So, The Player Of Games. The book introduces us to one Jernau Morat Gurgeh. He plays games. He's very, very good at it too. The games themselves are interesting, too. Not quite chess or checkers, but complicated and lengthy affairs from different(spacefaring) cultures. 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. There is a lot of intrigue and maneuvering in this novel, and the game sequences are well written. Also, this novel is for 'adults only'.It seems the Culture books are stand-alone, so there is no need to read Consider Phlebas before this. Some would advise against it. If you're into intelligent space opera and some very big ideas, read this (and the other Culture novels).
—Dirk Grobbelaar
