The player of games

A well-constructed meditation on games, inequality and brutality, and utopia itself.

I read this 20+ years ago and remembered most of it – itself a measure of quality. It’s interesting that Banks suggests the Culture is only comprehensible by those outside it. Within the Culture docile, pampered beings exist worry-free lives like goldfish in a tank. The pacing and tone are masterful. What a writer!

This book probably needs to be understood in the context it was written. In 1988 the Soviet Union was still extant, and the U.S. and U.K. probably did (and certainly still does) resemble to Empire of Azad much more than the Culture. It’s quite a subversive work.

Even though it was a re-read I read this within 3 days. The story is very captivating. The second of the Culture novels we get a deep dive into it and then we get another deep dive into another alien culture which is quite imaginative. At the heart of this novel is the thrill of games. A lot of people can relate to that nowadays and yet, there aren't that many genre books focussed on that. Although this was written at the end of the 80s the use of they as a single pronoun wasn't yet a thing in literature and the view of gender presented in this book is quite binary (and also heteronormative). Even though gender relations and policy play a big role in Azad and are discussed in the novel. Well, you can't have it all, I guess. A must-read for all sci-fi fans.