What I said then:
The second book in his Culture sci-fi series, about a 'game' so complicated and vast that it consumes its players entire lives.
What I say now:
I read the first of Banks' set of novels about The Culture (a massive alliance of organic and AI civilisations, so advanced that they've created a post-scarcity world in which anybody can have anything, at any time, and never works a day in their life) a few years ago and liked it quite a lot. So here I am for a second go round, and The Player of Games didn't disappoint.
The thing I most appreciate about Banks' sci-fi writing is the perfect tone: they're page-turners, but they're smart. They contain interesting ideas, but never sacrifice the plot to those ideas. A lot of sci-fi disappears up its own arse trying to explain everything, and a lot of it is just fantasy in space, with science so inexplicable that it's basically magic. Banks manages very nicely to tread the line down the middle, and for that more than anything else, I'm a fan.
In The Player of Games, Gurgeh, one of The Culture's most brilliant (human) minds has devoted his life to games, and game theory. He is a born adept, picking up the rules, strategies and subtleties of any world's games as naturally as breathing. Basically, if Earth joined The Culture, Gurgeh would be the best chess player in history half an hour later. When The Culture discovers a (by their standards) barbaric empire called Azad whose power structure is based on a sprawling, incredibly complicated game (also called Azad), they send Gurgeh in to play. At stake is Azad's future and, as he moves through the tournament that will end with the winner crowned emperor, Gurgeh's life.
Gurgeh's story takes a while to get going: fully a third of the book is taken up with his time on his home orbital (kind of a man-made inverse planet) before he ever even leaves for Azad. In retrospect, it felt like much too long, and his relationships with a couple of drones weren't so interesting that I needed a hundred pages of them. Once we hit Azad, whose society Banks sketches with elegance (and some wonderful oddball flourishes) things start to pick up.
My main criticism from that point on would be that we never come to understand the game of Azad like we do the place. Given how much time Gurgeh spends playing, Banks remains pretty vague about how exactly the game works. I'm not unsympathetic: having made absolutely clear to us that Azad is the most complicated game anyone's ever seen, it would be impossible to actually follow through and invent the most complicated game anyone's ever seen. Still, a little more detail would have been nice. As Gurgeh is learning the game, we discover that some of the pieces are biological life-forms themselves, altering the way they're played based on the player's mood ... which is kind of a cool idea, but which is barely mentioned again.
The closer Gurgeh gets to the pointy end of the great tournament, the more the tension really ratchets up (certain political facets within Azad simply cannot allow a stranger to beat them at their own game), and I read the last hundred pages in a single setting.
Ultimately The Player of Games is a rollicking good read, and it's pitched right at the perfect level of intelligence that I'm looking for in a page-turner. It's never so philosophically minded that it becomes hard work, but it's also never dumbed down enough that I feel guilty about enjoying it. It really was just a blast.
Cheers, JC.
currently reading: Dracula by Bram Stoker
books to go: 71
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