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Liked It “This is the best I.M. Banks Culture book I have yet read. A Culture citizen and grandmaster of gaming is recruited by Special Circumstances to learn a game played by an alien race with three genders. But is it really a game he's playing? This is one of those books that I remember vividly after...” see full review » see other reviews » |
Didn’t Like It “Intriguing story told with a heavy hand. No subtlety here!” see full review » see other reviews » |
Newest Reviews
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“My first read in Banks' Culture books. The introduction to the universe was smooth enough. The main character was, while hardly likable, an entirely believable presence in the book. Sometimes I felt that Banks hid behind the character's mysterious nature, as his transformation throughout the book is not fully explained, but this does not detract from the pleasure of the story. Overall, a good read, if not competing for a spot amongst my favorites. Maybe more like 3.5 stars.”
John W wrote this review Monday, September 7 2009. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No“This is the best I.M. Banks Culture book I have yet read. A Culture citizen and grandmaster of gaming is recruited by Special Circumstances to learn a game played by an alien race with three genders. But is it really a game he's playing? This is one of those books that I remember vividly after many months.”
T.R.M. wrote this review Friday, September 4 2009. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No“Intriguing story told with a heavy hand. No subtlety here!”
Elena S wrote this review Thursday, May 28 2009. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No“one of my favourite Banks books
Graeme W wrote this review Sunday, April 19 2009. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
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“Fabulous book. My favourite Iain M Banks book.”
Celestial Willow wrote this review Saturday, April 11 2009. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
“Full of compelling ideas - look forward to the rest of The Culture stories.”
James McCormick wrote this review Friday, April 10 2009. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No“This book just rocks, my favorite overall Banks - culture based novel. ”
Scott W wrote this review Friday, March 6 2009. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
“My 2nd Culture novel. Liked it considerably more than _Consider Phlebas_ - mostly because I learned more about the Culture by reading it. The Empire of Azad does, of course, resemble our own "civilization" and this allows us to look at ourselves with some perspective. Bizarre species, fun games.”
muque and shylock tomes wrote this review Sunday, December 7 2008. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
“Jernau Morat Gurgeh is exactly what his chosen middle name, "morat" implies: he's a player of games, an expert in theory and practice known throughout Culture for his skill and expertise. In Iain M. Banks' _The Player of Games_, the reader explores Gurgeh's home civilization, Culture, and his place within it. Culture is an advanced civilization of humanoid beings and sentient drones and ships. Culture needs no money, no laws, no struggle; it's a utopia where citizens live long lives free from want and filled with intellectual promise. Soon, though, Gurgeh feels a sense of ennui; there's nothing new for him until Contact decides that he would be the perfect envoy to Azad, a civilization named for and based upon a single, complex, savage game. If Gurgeh decided to play Azad, it will introduce him to a type of savagery--a type of life--he's only read about in text books and a type of passion he never knew could exist for any type of game.”
ordovician wrote this review Sunday, November 2 2008. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
“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.
Daniel Roy wrote this review Saturday, July 26 2008. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
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.”
