Our verdict on The Player of Games: Iain M. Banks remains to be a grasp

The New Scientist Book Club moved from the dystopian near-future imagined by Grace Chan in Every Version of You in November to the utopian far-future imagined by Iain M. Banks in The Player of Games for our December learn – and it’s been fairly the hit with members.

Set within the intergalactic civilisation of the Culture, The Player of Games follows the adventures and travails of Gurgeh, a grasp sport participant who’s inveigled into taking over the barbaric Empire of Azad at its personal sport. Also referred to as Azad, this advanced and all-pervasive sport is so vital to the individuals of Azad that the winner turns into emperor. Can Gurgeh presumably compete, when he’s solely a newbie? What are the secrets and techniques that Azad and the Culture are hiding? This is a wrap-up of members’ ideas on the guide, so the solutions to those questions, and a number of spoilers, will comply with. Read on provided that you’re executed!

The very first thing to say is that this wasn’t a primary learn for many people: 36 per cent of members, together with me, mentioned they’d already learn this explicit Banks novel. And a lot of us are massive followers of Banks, and are nonetheless mourning the truth that there aren’t any new novels – sci-fi or literary – to return from this excellent author. “Oh, I still miss Iain. I’ve never read his last book, The Quarry, as after that there will be no new ones to read. I guess it’s about time now, I’m getting to the age where I might never read it!” writes Paul Oldroyd on our Facebook group. “Same here – I’ve never finished The Hydrogen Sonata!” provides Emma Weisblatt.

I believe I’ve learn most of Banks’s books, though not for years. The Player of Games was one in all my first, so, given my horrible reminiscence, I got here to it pretty recent. I discovered it an absolute delight – I’m certain there may be heaps happening behind the scenes, however Banks provides the air of easy brilliance to the reader. His contact is so mild, so naturally humorous. (I adored, for instance, the small element of the “proto-sentient Styglian enumerator”, an animal that counts every thing it sees. It begins by counting individuals, of which there are 23. “Then it began counting articles of furniture, after which it concentrated on legs.”)

But there may be additionally a lot to consider, from the character of life in a utopia the place there aren’t any challenges left, to what it means to be a human in a universe the place huge Minds take cost of every thing. And that’s to not point out the fun of the plot – I used to be nearly shouting on the web page when Gurgeh was tempted into dishonest on the sport of Stricken by Mawhrin-Skel, and I used to be totally swept up within the Azad video games. This was an actual win for me, and I’m going to return and reread a lot of different Iain M. Banks as a post-Christmas deal with.

One side of the guide that I assumed Banks dealt with significantly effectively was the precise video games Gurgeh performs. It’s not straightforward to invent a futuristic sport and have it ring true, and I felt he nailed this, giving us sufficient particulars about Azad (and different video games) for them to look actual, however not getting slowed down within the nitty-gritty. This was positively a facet that additionally members. “The game [Azad] was a representation, an encapsulation if you will, of the empire,” says Elaine Li. “More generally it was probably a critique of Cold War politics.”

Judith Lazell wasn’t so certain – “I just took them at face value, I’m afraid,” she says. Niall Leighton factors out fairly how deep this concept of game-playing goes within the guide. “And then, not least, is the game in which Gurgeh is a pawn being played by the narrator, in a game with no rules, in which ends justify the means, whose rounds last decades, whose moves we are left to guess at just as much as we are in the other games, and in which there may indeed be no ends.” Indeed!

A small apart: after I spoke to Banks’s buddy and fellow sci-fi author Ken MacLeod, Ken instructed me proudly that it was really him who got here up with the guide’s remaining title. Banks had needed to name it The Game Player. I believe The Player of Games is a lot better!

Now, to what we considered Gurgeh as a personality. “Gurgeh would not be a very nice person if he had not been bought up in the culture – he’s a bit of a creep, a bit self-obsessed. I hope he learned something from his adventures,” says Matthew Campbell by e mail. I’m unsure we’re meant to love him, significantly – he’s a disaffected, conceited cheat, in spite of everything – however I positively discovered myself rooting for him because the story progressed.

Steve Swan, nevertheless, wasn’t as grabbed by the narrative. He put the guide apart “at the point [Gurgeh] was being roughed up” – I’m assuming this was when Mawhrin-Skel meets him on his method house. “Clever people, especially those who think they are, can make the biggest mistakes,” says Steve. “Gurgeh should have seen past the [drone’s] ruse, but his arrogance and personal desires got in the way. What’s that old saying? – he made his bed and had to lay in it. No sympathy from me I am afraid!” Steve felt that Gurgeh fell for Mawhrin-Skel’s manipulation too simply, and it “caused the disbelief I had set aside to crumble”.

Niall has a unique tackle why Gurgeh makes his fateful determination to cheat. “The way I read this passage was that his mind was being tampered with by Mawhrin-Skel using its effectors. It wasn’t his free will. It was the drone influencing him to the point where he could think he’d made the decision himself,” says Niall. “He’s manipulated by Special Circumstances from start to finish. To me, Gurgeh is not the titular player. He’s being played.” While I believe that’s positively true general, I noticed Gurgeh’s dishonest as a really human response to temptation, somewhat than one other manipulation… however I’m going to have to take a look at this part once more, because it’s an attention-grabbing supposition.

While Paul Jonas didn’t discover Gurgeh the sport participant “as engaging as the mercenary role in Consider Phlebas or Use of Weapons”, he did suppose the set-up with the drone was “fairly credible and tempting for a top ‘sportsman’”. “It’s all part of the hero avoiding the call to adventure for a while. After all, why would Gurgeh throw up all his security and comfort without a little nudge?”

Our sci-fi columnist Emily H. Wilson had tipped The Player of Games as a great way into the work of Iain M. Banks, and after this reread I positively agree. We’re step by step launched to the universe of the Culture, not with an enormous dump of exposition, however with small particulars about drones and Ships and Orbitals and the like.

We get to slowly perceive that it is a post-scarcity civilisation the place (nearly) something goes. I cherished Gurgeh’s dialog with Hamin, an Azadian elder, on this subject. Hamin can’t perceive why there may be nearly no crime, and nearly nothing is forbidden, within the Culture – and he’s instructed about slap-drones, that are employed within the occasion of a homicide. What does it do? “Follows you around and makes sure you never do it again,” says Gurgeh. Is that every one, asks Hamin? “What more do you want? Social death, Hamin; you don’t get invited to too many parties.”

Paul Jonas already had an thought of the utopian worlds of the Culture when he picked up The Player of Games. “[It] builds that world again very subtly by following Gurgeh and his boredom and lack of challenge. Anyone who wants a house like his on a rainy mountain can have one. The drones are introduced just as personalities and Ai’s in their own right. We are re introduced to ‘Contact’, the Culture’s service that manages contact with other civilisations and is also its military and intelligence service,” says Paul. “That’s so great to call it ‘Contact’ rather than ministry for defence or war! So humanitarian. So utopian. But as Adam Roberts says, utopias are difficult to write as they become boring, just as Gurgeh has become bored by his life. The Culture’s challenge is to spread their utopianism to other cultures by essentially subtly interfering in their societies.”

Some of our members have been digging into what it would imply to stay in a utopia. “Gurgeh is an individualist living in a utopia of individualists where the collective work is mostly done by Minds and drones and sentient spaceships,” ponders Paul. “Gurgeh never seems to work in a team of other humans.”

Niall factors out that Gurgeh is perhaps “odious”, however he’s a product of his anarchist society, and Banks is out to look at “the boundary between individualist anarchism and collectivist anarchism”.

“Gurgeh’s clearly an individualist, and I reject individualist anarchist philosophies in part because they’re an excuse for behaving like Gurgeh,” says Niall. “One of the Culture’s problems is that there’s nothing to engage its human people. It’s also static, which doesn’t help, and the consequence is a predictable ennui. It’s perhaps worth flagging up that this book was written before Octavia Butler placed the importance of change in a utopia at the forefront of her thinking, but it’s been thought about at least since H. G. Wells.”

For Matthew Campbell, it is just the Culture ambassador to Azad, Shohobohaum Za, who appears “to be really vitally alive and enjoying life”. “In contrast, Gurgeh and the Azadians are each stuck in their own small worlds, each in their own way,” he says. “The confrontation between [Azadian emperor] Nicosar and Gurgeh towards the end sums it up (and presciently echoes political debates today – sorry not sorry if you are a MAGA conservative) – one angrily passionate about his empire but seeing it only from a very narrow selfish perspective, and knowing that it is all doomed; the other having no strongly articulated beliefs at all, unable to muster a defence of his utopia, he’s never had to think about it.”

There’s much more we might all say concerning the Culture and The Player of Games, and if you wish to proceed the dialogue, do be a part of members over on Facebook.

It’s time, in the meantime, to maneuver onto our first learn of 2026: January’s guide membership decide and winner of the Arthur C. Clarke award for science fiction in 2025, Sierra Greer’s Annie Bot. This is instructed from the attitude of Annie, who’s a intercourse robotic. She is owned by a not-very-nice man, and this novel does go to some darkish locations. But as chair of judges for the Clarke award, Andrew Butler, mentioned when asserting its win, it’s “a tightly-focused first person account of a robot designed to be the perfect companion who struggles to become free”. You can attempt a taster with an extract from the opening right here and a chunk by Sierra Greer on what it was like to write down from the attitude of a intercourse robotic right here. And right here’s Emily H. Wilson’s evaluate – she actually appreciated it.

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