The second of his science fiction novels and the second I’ve read, The Player Of Games (1989) shows that Iain M. Banks started out with a full-blown creative masterwork in his future multi-species Galactic society known as the Culture. Reading Look to Windward didn’t make this obvious since it was written much later after he’d had several more novels in which to develop the concepts, though TPOG doesn’t detract from that one bit. No, this novel simply reinforces my belief that there was something strange and wonderful in the air on British campuses in the ’70s and ’80s to turn out writers like Banks, Charles Stross, Peter F. Hamilton and Ken Macleod; would that I’d gone over for a semester or year abroad during my university years.
This book covers a few years in the life of one of the greatest game players in the Culture, Jernau Morat Gurgeh, and you should understand that in this time no person has to work unless he, she or it (AI machines are citizens as well) wants to and can find an interesting position. Essentially, though, the machinery and some of the Minds are so advanced that there is little work to do except things like teaching and the occasional gathering of intelligence. Everyone else is free to be creative, contemplative or lazy. Gurgeh has honed his talents on games that are as far advanced beyond, say, chess as chess is beyond tic-tac-toe and has become famous for it throughout the worlds and Orbitals of the Culture and beyond.
Then one day he’s visited by a machine which works for Contact, the organization that manages external relations. Even though the Culture spans many thousands of star systems and even reaches into nearby galaxies it is not the only starfaring society. One other is called the Empire of Azad, controlling several systems but not nearly as technologically advanced. Its a harsh, feudal polity where advancement at nearly all levels–including the Emperor itself–is determined by one’s skill at the game of Azad. There are three genders of Azari and the one which humans lack dominates life in the way that white males did the Old South. The Contact machine asks Gurgeh to travel to Azad to take part in the big tournament held every six years to decide the highest levels of government; the winner becomes Emperor.
Somewhat reluctantly, as the trip to the Lesser Magellanic Cloud will takes more than two years even at the awesome speeds of the larget ships, the human agrees. The idea of an empire built around a game, escaping the boorish tenor of recent times and to avoid an embarassing secret being made public add up to assent. Almost all the travel time is required for him to become proficient in Azad and when he arrives has to deal with being treated like the Jamaican bobsled team a few Olympics ago. But Gurgeh is, after all, the Player of Games and the Culture is far more advanced than the Azadians so he is much more capable than his hosts expect.
Banks really puts the words on the page. He creates interesting characters, places and interactions which are not merely present day humans transposed to a technologically different era and includes small touches which polish the edges so well. I was at the library tonight but, though I couldn’t find another Culture novel, did pick up and Iain “no M” Banks business thriller called, well, The Business.
recommended
BillSaysThis 
