Our verdict on The Player of Games: Iain M. Banks is still a master

The New Scientist Book Club has moved on from the dystopian future presented by Grace Chan in Every version of you in November to the utopian distant future imagined by Iain M. Banks in Game player for our December reading – and it was a real success among the participants.

The action takes place in the intergalactic civilization of the Culture. Game player follows the adventures and travails of Gurge, a game master who is forced to fight the barbaric Azad Empire at its own game. This complex and pervasive game, also known as Azad, is so important to the people of Azad that the winner becomes the emperor. Will Gurgeh be able to compete if he is just a beginner? What secrets do Azad and Culture hide? This is a brief overview of the participants' thoughts on the book, so answers to these questions and numerous spoilers will follow. Continue reading only if you've finished!

The first thing to say is that for many of us, this was not our first read: 36 percent of participants, including myself, said they had already read this particular Banks novel. Many of us are big fans of Banks and still mourn the fact that this wonderful writer has not published new novels – science fiction or literary. “Oh, I still miss Ian. I never read his last book.” Careersince after this there will be no place to read new ones. I think now is the time, I'm getting to the age where I may never read this!” writes Paul Oldroyd on our Facebook group. “It's the same here – I never finished Hydrogen Sonata!” adds Emma Weisblatt.

I think I've read most of Banks' books, although not for many years. Game player was one of my first, so given my terrible memory, I came to it fairly fresh. I found it an absolute pleasure – I'm sure there's a lot going on behind the scenes, but Banks creates an atmosphere of effortless brilliance for the reader. His touch is so light, so naturally funny. (I, for example, really liked the little detail of the “proto-intelligent Styglian counter,” an animal that counts everything it sees. It starts by counting people, of which there are 23. “Then it started counting pieces of furniture, after which it focused on legs.”)

But there is a lot to think about: from the nature of life in a utopia, where there are no problems left, to what it means to be a person in a universe where huge Minds are responsible for everything. And that's not to mention the joys of the plot – I nearly screamed on the page when Gurgeh succumbed to the temptation to cheat in a game of Mauhrin-Skel Strike and I was completely captivated by Azad's games. This was a real win for me and I'll be going back and re-reading lots of other Iain M. Banks books as gifts after Christmas.

One aspect of the book that I thought Banks did particularly well was the actual games that Gurge plays. It's not easy to invent a futuristic game and make it sound believable, and I felt he pulled it off by giving us enough details about Azad (and other games) to make them feel real without getting bogged down in the nitty-gritty details. This aspect definitely interested the participants. “Game [Azad] “It was a representation, an encapsulation if you will, of empire,” says Elaine Lee. “More generally, it was probably a critique of Cold War policies.”

Judith Lazell wasn't so sure: “I'm afraid I just took them at face value,” she says. Niall Leighton notes how deep the game idea in the book is. “And, just as important, this is a game in which Gurge is a pawn played by the narrator, in a game without rules, in which the end justifies the means, whose rounds last decades, whose moves we have to guess about just like in other games, and in which there may indeed be no goals.” Really!

A quick aside: when I spoke with Banks' friend and fellow science fiction writer Ken MacLeod, Ken proudly told me that he was, in fact, the one who came up with the book's final title. Banks wanted to call it Game player. I think Game player much better!

Now onto what we think of Gurg as a character. “Gurgeh wouldn't be a very good person if he hadn't been bought into by culture – he's a bit of a freak, a bit of a self-centered man. I hope he's learned something from his adventures,” Matthew Campbell says via email. I'm not sure we particularly like him – he is, after all, a disgruntled and arrogant cheater – but I definitely found myself rooting for him as the story progressed.

Steve Swan, however, was not so captivated by the story. He put the book aside “at the moment when [Gurgeh] beat up” – I guess that was when Maurin-Skel meets him on the way home. “Smart people, especially those who think like that, can make the biggest mistakes,” says Steve. “Gurge should have seen further [drone’s] a ploy, but his arrogance and personal desires got in the way. What's that old saying? – he made the bed and was forced to lie in it. No sympathy on my part, I’m afraid!” Steve felt that Gurgeh fell too easily into Morin-Skel's manipulations and this “caused the disbelief I had suspended to crumble.”

Niall has a different take on why Gurge makes the fateful decision to cheat. “The way I read the passage was that Maurin-Skel interfered with his mind with his effectors. It wasn't his free will. It was the drone influencing him to the point where he thought he made the decision himself,” Niall says. “Special circumstances manipulate him from beginning to end. For me, Gurgeh is not the main player. He is being played.” While I think this is generally true, I saw Gurge's betrayal as a very human response to temptation rather than just another manipulation… but I'll have to look at that section again as it's an interesting suggestion.

Although Paul Jonas did not find Gurgeh's gameplay to be “as interesting as the mercenary role in Consider Phlebasa or Use of weapons“, he did think the drone setup was “plausible and enticing enough for the ultimate 'athlete.'” “It's all part of the hero avoiding the call to adventure for a while. After all, why did Gurgeh give up all his safety and comfort without the slightest push?

Our science fiction columnist Emily H. Wilson wrote: overturned Game player as a good way to get to know the work of Iain M. Banks, and after this re-read, I definitely agree. We are gradually introduced to the Culture universe, not with a huge dump of exposition, but with small details about drones, ships, orbitals and the like.

We are slowly beginning to understand that this is a post-scarcity civilization where (almost) anything is possible. I liked Gurgeh's conversation on this topic with Khamin, an elder of Azad. Hamin cannot understand why there is almost no crime in the Culture and almost nothing is prohibited – and he is told about spanking drones that are used in cases of murder. What is he doing? “Follows you and makes sure you never do it again,” says Gurge. Is that all, asks Khamin? “What more do you want? Social death, Hamin; you don't get invited to too many parties.”

Paul Jonas already had an idea of ​​the utopian worlds of Culture when he picked up Game player. “[It] very subtly builds this world again, following Gurge, his boredom and lack of problems. Anyone who wants to have such a house on a rainy mountain can have it. The drones are presented as individuals and Ai in their own right. We are reintroduced to Contact, the Culture service that manages contacts with other civilizations and is also its military and intelligence service,” Paul says. – How great it is to call it “Contact” and not the Ministry of Defense or War! So humanitarian. So utopian. But like Adam Roberts speaksIt’s difficult to write utopias because they become boring, just as Gurgeh got bored with life. The task of the Culture is to spread its utopianism to other cultures, in effect subtly intervening in their societies.”

Some of our members are delving into what it means to live in a utopia. “Gurge is a maverick living in a maverick utopia where the collective work is mostly done by minds, drones, and sentient spaceships,” Paul muses. “Gurgeh never seems to work on other people’s teams.”

Niall notes that Gurgeh may be “odious” but is a product of his anarchist society, and Banks intends to explore “the boundary between individualist anarchism and collectivist anarchism.”

“Gurgeh is clearly an individualist, and I reject individualist anarchist philosophy in part because it is an excuse for behavior like Gurgeh,” says Niall. “One of the problems of the Culture is that there is nothing to attract its people. It is also static, which doesn't help, and the consequence is predictable boredom. It is perhaps worth noting that this book was written before Octavia Butler brought the importance of change in the utopia to the forefront of her thoughts, but it has been thought about at least since the time of H. G. Wells.”

For Matthew Campbell, only Azad's cultural ambassador, Shohobokhaum Za, seems to be “really alive and enjoying life.” “On the contrary, Gurgeh and the Azadians are each stuck in their own little world, each in their own way,” he says. “The confrontation between [Azadian emperor] Nicosar and Gurgeh sum it up at the end (and presciently echo today's political debates – sorry, not sorry if you're a MAGA conservative) – a man angrily passionate about his empire, but only looking at it from a very narrow, selfish point of view and knowing it's all doomed; the other, having no clearly expressed convictions at all, unable to organize the defense of his utopia, he never had to think about it.”

We can still say a lot about culture and Game playerand if you want to continue the discussion, join the participants on Facebook.

In the meantime, it's time to move on to our first read of 2026: January's book club pick and 2025 Arthur C. Clarke Science Fiction Award winner, Sierra Greer. Annie Bot. It is told from the perspective of Annie, a sex robot. She belongs to a not-so-nice person and this novel does go to some dark places. But as Clark Prize jury chairman Andrew Butler said when announcing her award, winit is a “finely focused first-person account of a robot designed to be the perfect companion who struggles to become free.” You can try the taster with extract from the opening here and piece Sierra Greer on what it was like to write here from the point of view of a sex robot. Here's Emily H. Wilson review – she really liked it.

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